Maize and Brew calls out Brian/MGo

The M&B column is flawed in several ways, but I think he makes some good points.

The way I see it is, criticisms of "The Process" are two-fold:

1) DB knew he was going to fire RR at the end of the Big Ten season but he waited until after the bowl game for reasons unknown.  Therefore, he is clearly an idiot who doesn't understand football or college athletics or basic arithmetic.

2) Either (a) DB knew from the outset that he wanted Hoke without having ever met him, and "The Process" was just a sham meant to appease the fan base; or (b) DB is so incompetent that he just went with a guy whom he knew would take the job, even though said guy has never seen a football before and doesn't know how to coach.

Regarding #1: Perhaps I'm "misremembering" things here, but wasn't Brian still on board-- though wavering-- with Rodriguez getting another year after the OSU game, but after the bowl game he essentially wrote that keeping Rodriguez could no longer be justified?  Is it so hard to believe DB felt the same way?  Some will say that it should have been obvious that RR needed to go after the OSU game.  That's a fair opinion, but I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to have felt otherwise.  Things weren't where they needed to be, obviously, but there had been some positives and I'm sure at that point DB would have preferred to ride it out with RR rather than put the program through another coaching transition if at all possible.  That possiblity pretty much desolved by mid-way through the third quarter of the Gator Bowl.

Regarding #2a: It's possible, I suppose, but I don't think it's plausible.  If Brandon's plan was to broom RR and bring in Hoke from the beginning, he could have easily done so after the OSU game (as many say he should have); the fact that he didn't do this, give that it would have been preferable to what actually happened, belies the assumption that this was his intent.  If you accept that DB was willing to stick it out with RR until the Gator Bowl debacle, but you assume that immediately thereafter he knew Hoke was his one and only, then what you are assuming is that DB had his heart absolutely set on a mid-level head coach with a mediocre record without having ever met him, even at the exclusion (at that time) of Jim Harbaugh.  Again, I don't think that's plausible.  Here you may object that DB himself was told all sorts of glowing things about Hoke by others before he had actually spoken with him; true, but isn't that part of "The Process?"  And if he settled on Hoke in large part because of what his peers said about him, doesn't that belie the charge that "The Process" was a sham?

Regarding #2b: This is probably the most common charge brought against Dave Brandon: he's a moron who couldn't hire a good coach so he hired a crappy one.  But this argument relies on the premise that Hoke is not a good coach, or at least not as good as some other coaches Brandon could have gotten.  There are reasonable arguments to be made here-- perhaps Hoke will fail miserably here, or perhaps he will have marginal success where someone else could have been the next Fielding Yost-- but keep in mind that this, in itself, is not an indictment of "The Process;" it is a criticism of the final outcome.

And I think that's pretty much where most DB critics are at; they don't like the fact that Platonic-Form-of-Football-Coach is not at the helm of their Michigan Wolverines following three disastrous seasons, and someone must be held accountable.  In this, the buck stops with Dave Brandon.  Similarly, Brian made has made it clear for the past three years that he doesn't think Brady Hoke has any business being discussed as a serious candidate for the Michigan job, let alone being the guy they hire.  If we accept that Hoke was not even close to the best choice of all feasible choices, and yet we are faced with the reality that Brady Hoke has been chosen, then we must find some explanation-- hence we get all of these critical theories about how flawed "The Process" was and how incompetent Dave Brandon is.  As much as I love Brian Cook and mgoblog (and seriously, I think Brian is a breath of fresh air in the sports media world, and I am a total mgoaddict), I find the rigidity in his thinking here rather uncharacteristic: Never is there any doubt that he has been 100% dead-on bullseye right in his evaluation of Brady Hoke as a football coach.  Neither is there doubt that the other options he has considered superior on the basis of record and age alone either weren't as feasibly hired as he assumed or simply weren't actually superior when evaluating coaches on a Gestalt basis using several varied criteria.  In other words, Brian assumes he knows more about coaches he has never met, nor whose personal and professional references he has never heard, than a man who has met them and heard those references, or Brian assumes he knows more about what it takes to be a successful head coach than Dave Brandon does.  Heck, maybe he does know more about what it takes to be a successful head coach than DB does, but I think to assume that DB is an incompetent boob at this point is more than a little unfair, and to continue to take petty jabs at him and at Hoke like this is rather immature.  As flawed as the M&B column was, I think that's where it hit the nail on the head-- Stop with the sniping and the moaning already and move on.