Hoke Came Off Well, Brandon Not So Much

Yea that was pretty bad. I get what he was going for, but for better or worse on the field, RR was a good ambassador for the program as a person. He deserves more respect than that.

So we can expect that kind of thing to continue for a while.  Whether we like it or not, the athletic department and our former Carr players were all looking for the anti-RR and so that is what we got. 

Hope he does well, and that this works.  Coaches are sometimes a crap shoot, as we have found out.  Let's see how he does before we either raise him to sainthood or start burying him.

Yeah, there was one particular instance when he seemed to be taking a silent jab at RR when he was saying that he was looking for a coach who could adapt to the roster at hand and not be narrowminded in terms of thinking their way to do things is the only way to do things.

The only jabs I saw were pointed squarely at Bill Martin.

Agree with controversialidea 100%. 

A lot of what DB said at the beginning... he came off as, well, a DB.

Seemed like he was taking thinly veiled cheap shots at Rodriguez for not being a "Michigan Man" and that he was placating the media and the Carr-folk saying, "Look, I went out and got you what you wanted."

At one point in the introductory comments at the beginning, he even mentioned that Hoke knows his way around Ann Arbor already....  as if that's somehow a positive asset we should have been looking for in our football coach....  which caused me to scream, "What the fuck does that have to do with anything!?" at my computer screen and made me want to throw things.

I was willing to give Brandon the benefit of the doubt until today, but, the press conference in my mind clearly demonstrated that he was looking at all the wrong criteria in his hiring decision, and, pandering to the media and former players in getting someone from the "Michigan Man" club took precedence over who will be the coach that will put us in the best position to win.  

As others have said, it seems like this hire indicates we've resigned ourselves to aiming at being a regional power at best (underscored by all the emphasis on B10 championships instead of Natoinal Championships) and that is sad.

With the RR hire, it may have been a swing and a miss, but at least we were swinging for the fences.

Now it seems like we're not even trying.  

All that said, maybe Hoke will work out great here and be the right guy to take us to the promised land.  I hope that's the case and I hope he succeeds beyond all of our wildest expectations.

But, DB's reasons for hiring him seem horribly misguided to me.

Cosigned.

Agreed.

The guy obviously looked fatigued. Until the very end, I think he held it together pretty well.

Sleep-depraved != sleep-deprived.  Though now I'm curious what sleep-depraved is...

In the age of the internets.  He is going to get a good night's sleep and regret this press conference in the morning.

It was getting a little wierd.

Didn't Jim say he had offers on the table from Stanford and Michigan at his press conference with the Niners?

he had an offer at the ready? I don't. Exploraory interviews are part of good due diligence IMHO.

David Brandon is a businessman first and an athletic director second.  The rhetoric about increasing the profitability of the AD and this phantom coaching search has me convinced that he's committed to building the "brand" over all other priorities.  How do you build a football brand?  Restore the NFL pipeline.  How do you restore the pipeline?  Hire a coach your NFL bully-boys will rally around and fawn over in the media.  Done and done.

Of course, as a non-football player, I'm vulnerable to "you don't know the game, get off my lawn"-type arguments, but that's what the politics looks like to me.

even closely resembles Bo with the exception of employment at University of Michigan.....

I would complain if I was getting hung with anything other than toliet paper.  Strange analogy but you get a +1 anyway.

Is it poor form to have a Papa John's advertisement on the left side of this page as I am writing this?  Just curious.

that he hasn't gotten much sleep lately, but I'm waiting for my several anonymous sources to confirm this.

But I still think he spoke with others only as a formality. I think it's been Hokemania for a while.

Even if you assume that Brandon had decided on Hoke last week, six weeks ago, or even six months ago, do you really think Brandon would have been stupid enough to simply fire Rodriguez last week and immediately hire Hoke? How well do you think that would have been received compared to the way things actually played out?

There were two other, higher-profile, Michigan-connected candidates out there. Brandon couldn't ignore them, the way that Bill Martin ignored Miles last time. The way Martin handled the last search undermined Rodriguez from day one.

I think it's possible that Harbaugh had a chance at the job first, but he essentially eliminated himself by choosing to the NFL. I don't believe Brandon was ever going to offer Miles the job, and I don't think Miles even wanted it this time around (he clearly did want it last time). I think Brandon and Miles basically conspired to make it appear that Miles had been offered the job and turned it down. Miles thus eliminated himself as well.

Brandon had to go through this process in order to--publicly--eliminate the other candidates, so that no one within the Michigan "family" (former players/coaches and fans) has a reason to be pining for Harbaugh or Miles or a reason to do or say anything to undermine Hoke.

And, in my opinion, Brandon was very smart to have handled the search in this way, and I for one couldn't be happier with the outcome.

the 40 former players? I heard a handful of names mentioned at the press conference. I believe most if not all are local to Ann Arbor. Not being a smartass.. I truly have not heard about 40 former players being there. Where did you see this?