open letter to fans

they hurts.

Paragraphs are your friend.

¶

EDIT:  Beat me to it...

Normally I don't bother reading text walls but I decided to this time. Doing so reaffirmed why I don't read text walls.

The people bitching about Hoke, or the people bitching about the people bitching about Hoke.

Listen guy, some aren't going to be happy with this hire, and to be honest thats fine. I'm sure that over time they will come to either like Hoke (if he wins) or continue hating him (if he doesnt) It really doesnt matter as I'm sure that Hoke won't ever see these terrible things written about him.

Sweet an open letter! We don't have nearly enough of these around here.

He probably won't be able to read it due to the formatting failure, but he's a Michigan fan and just told me that he's never heard of Brady Hoke and turned his nose up when I told him. 

P.S.  This #1 with fries and a Coke is outstanding!

Only time will tell to how well Hoke will do here.  I'm willing to give him 100 percent of my support and hope he does well as coach, and helps the team to become a national power once again!  I sure wish the people who were anti-RR would have supported the coach. I believe in giving a coach at least 4 to 5 years!  So, I will support coach Hoke until his first recruiting class are seniors and hopefully there will be progress every year. 

I've held season tickets for over 20 years and have rarely missed a game.  Don't ask/tell me to blindly support anyone or anything.

I'm ashamed and embarrased at the past 3 years. I've heard fans complain that RR wouldn't attend luncheons as Lloyd did, I've watched as countless writers have lied and exaggerated, I witnessed ND at least gave Weis a chance to coach his own juniors/seniors......I've watched as a large part of the whole formed early opinions and began acting on them.  With the  power of the pen and the almighty dollar of those we'll never know, it doesn't matter whether I'm "all in" or not.  It doesn't matter if I support DB, the team, or a new coach or not.  It's an awfully big wheel and it's being turned by someone else.

  Sure, I want wins. Sure I want the athletes to enjoy their time here. Sure I'd like to get back to the championship caliber we once were.....but after seeing just how much loyalty means to the powers that be, I'm not blindly supporting anyone.

The AD, the coachs and the administration are going to have to earn my support from now on....and they're not going to get it by protecting their own asses at the cost of others.

I am not happy about the Hoke hire.  Not because I hate him or anything (I actually know very little about him), but because of the apparent motivations for the hire.  Its not about the sexiness of the hire at all (I actually preferred Hoke to Miles).  I (and I assume many of the other people upset by his hire) feel that: (1) previous ties to the university should not have mattered and unnecessarily limited the field of potential candidates; (2) "loving" michigan does not win games and anyone who comes here to coach is going to "love" it in all the relevant ways anyway; and (3) the new coach should not have been (or maybe, due to the annoyingness of program alumni, should not have had to have been) the guy that simply was most comfortable to old players and coaches and administrators.  I don't think any games were lost against Michigan St. or OSU over the past three years because anyone failed to "get" the rivalries or anything.

All that being said, I am first and foremost a Michigan fan.  I will support and pull for Hoke.  And sometimes the right guy is hired for the wrong reasons; I hope that this is the case (and am even cautiously optimistic it could be).  But -- to those of you who are highly supportive of this hire -- please, please stop trying to force everyone to be immediately and 100% on board with it.  There have been many, many arguments about why is this a good or bad hire, and I won't get into them, but suffice it to say that acting as if this is a perfectly ideal hire is silly (as is acting as if it was the worst possible hire in the history of football).  And being a fan is also about bitching about decisions one sees as wrong or misguided.

Many of us are still getting over the end of the brief era of Michigan football where it appeared the program was breaking out of its traditional mold.  No matter how unsuccessful it may have been, it was exciting for us.  So give us a few weeks, let us vent, and we'll be there in the fall screaming like we always have.  Go blue.

I'm not done bitching about this hire.

To be fair to Hoke, it's not all about him.  He may end up surpassing the expectations of even his greatest supporters.  I certainly hope that he does, but hope does not alleviate the empty feeling at the bottom of my stomach right now.

After three miserable seasons, it's easy to find yourself yearning for the days when winning seasons were a foregone conclusion, but don't let that blind you to the fact that the Michigan brand of football had become stagnant prior to RR.  We won games because we were more talented than our opponent, not because we were more innovative.  However, we did lose games because the inverse was true.

When RR was hired as Carr's replacement, a good portion of the fan base thought that we were getting a much needed shot in the arm.  We were finally progressing.  But the transition turned out to be more painful than we hoped and/or expected.  Whether or not that falls on the coaches is irrelevant.  The RR era is over and, with the hiring of Hoke/Borges, so is the spread option experiment.

So what does this mean for the future of Michigan football?  There will be a point, whether it's 3 years, 10 years, or 20 years down the road, where Michigan football again becomes stagnant.  What then?  Real or perceived, precedents have been set, such as: 

• Radical change (progression?, innovation?) is not going to be accepted with open arms and
• A coach with no ties to the program may never receive full support of the fans and alumni.

You say that you are disgusted about the behavior of our fans.... Well, me too.  I'm disgusted that the elitist mentality may have sabotaged Michigan from becoming nationally relevant in the near future.

I'm wondering where your soap box was when fans were calling radio stations to publicly campaign for RR to be fired or when fans were responding to online newspaper articles that they hoped for Michigan to lose so as to better ensure that a coaching change would happen.  You didn't save all of your disappointment for those of us who are choosing to express our frustrations in the confines of this blog, right?

(i.e. The only two things I have to do.)

Being a fan of this administration or this hire are not on that list.