Scathing article by Michael Spath on program culture
Take it fwiw.
In the August of 2019, first-year offensive coordinator Josh Gattis jokingly references his starting quarterback spending too much time on the golf course during the summer, a comment that carried much more serious undertones behind the scenes. In fact, the players send a message, not electing senior Shea Patterson captain.
"There wasn't a lot we could do because Shea was our starting quarterback, but we wanted to let him and our coaches know we weren't happy with his work in the summer - both Joe [Milton] and Dylan [McCaffrey] outworked him, and then Coach immediately went against our decision and named him a captain," a recent departure shared. "Guys weren't happy."
As a former player noted the beginning of the end for the Brady Hoke regime was when Hoke and his staff began playing favorites and giving leeway to certain players, including Devin Funchess, that they didn't give to the entire team.
"He'd let Funchess get away with stuff in practice and in games ... he wasn't held accountable, and that created a lot of locker room issues," the player shared.
• Within days of the captain announcement, facing speculation in the media and among the fan base of discontent within the ranks, Harbaugh named Patterson and senior safety Josh Metellus alternate captains.
"From the moment Shea arrived, he was treated differently, like he could never do anything wrong," another recent exiting player shared with WolverineDigest.com. "Wilton [Speight], John [O'Korn], Brandon [Peters] would all get chewed out for things that they just looked the other way with when it came to Shea."
January 16th, 2020 at 4:42 PM ^
We'll all be dead soon anyway
January 16th, 2020 at 5:38 PM ^
I plan on getting Raptured. My family and 75% of mgoblog, will be like "damn he was right".
And fuck this article. I met this dude once at a bar. He was a nice guy, but he doesn't know shit and is like ice cream in July.
January 16th, 2020 at 6:21 PM ^
You and Gary Busey eh?
January 16th, 2020 at 7:16 PM ^
Gonna rise in the clouds to meet the lord in the air with all the zombies huh?
This might happen before we beat OSU.
January 16th, 2020 at 9:59 PM ^
Spath is a hack. The guy for years plays himself as someone with access and inside knowledge and probably 98% of what he guesses is wrong
I used to pay for that crap at rival years ago and called him out once about several of his BS claims and lack of really understanding football. He was clueless
January 16th, 2020 at 10:36 PM ^
He got a quote from a former player. How does that make him a hack?
January 16th, 2020 at 10:43 PM ^
Because the content isn’t MGOApproved.
January 17th, 2020 at 9:18 AM ^
If you had read most of what this guy has said over the years you would understand why he is a hack. If you haven’t then you wouldn’t understand
January 17th, 2020 at 10:40 AM ^
He may be a hack, but this article seems dead on. There are cultural issues within the Michigan football program. It is not really even a question at this point. They are visible on its face now. One is free to speculate as to the root of the issues, but no longer to argue that there aren’t any. If you see somebody doing so on here they are literally ignoring reality.
January 17th, 2020 at 1:33 PM ^
Ignoring reality? But we do that sooooo well...
January 17th, 2020 at 5:44 PM ^
He didn’t get a quote he’s using hearsay from what someone else has said or reported. This whole article is basically ripped off from other people and just put together a list of what others have said or obvious things over the last year. This is typical trash from Spath and then plays it off like he knows something
January 17th, 2020 at 8:21 PM ^
I was the source of Spath's quotes.
I never played football, but I did drive around with Dick Dastardly.
January 17th, 2020 at 2:00 PM ^
He plays with himself?
TMI, but probably more accurate than the information in anything he writes.
January 16th, 2020 at 6:24 PM ^
Not yet...not yet
January 16th, 2020 at 9:18 PM ^
Camus will do
but Sartre is smartre.
January 16th, 2020 at 9:55 PM ^
Really annoyed that I upvoted you and the total went from 68 right past 69 to 70. Just know that my heart was in the right place.
January 16th, 2020 at 10:52 PM ^
Nice.
January 17th, 2020 at 10:11 AM ^
SI changing their business model to outsourcing their articles to generic fanboy bloggers is quite upsetting. At least try to vet the people you hire. Deace and Spath are so tiring. Dudes just jump on the latest narrative train and repeat the same shit over and over. This goes without mentioning Deace’s sketchy ass past.
That being said, Spath has quotes from actual players so... doesn’t surprise me that this was going on. When the team does not vote you Captain, you are not worthy. See Connor Cook from MSU.
January 17th, 2020 at 11:46 AM ^
Eat at Arby's.
January 16th, 2020 at 4:43 PM ^
Sheesh
January 16th, 2020 at 6:05 PM ^
SCORCHING HOT takes to follow
January 16th, 2020 at 7:41 PM ^
Yea, clearly he’s a tool...what kind of a pole is that?? Turns out Michigan basketball is representin’ in the NBA
January 16th, 2020 at 9:15 PM ^
Pole?
January 16th, 2020 at 9:46 PM ^
Spathozinski
January 17th, 2020 at 4:20 AM ^
Spath and steve dece are both this way. They play patty cakes with each other, but not the conventional way... they turn about face, drop trow, and bare ass patty cake each other's butt cheeks. It's the new way for straight men to scissor without touching their balls together. They are always up to date on the latest trends.
January 17th, 2020 at 9:47 PM ^
I’m going to file that under “Oddly Specific” ?
January 16th, 2020 at 4:44 PM ^
So, we're supposed to take what, exactly, from this random list of things Spath says are a narrative of some kind?
January 16th, 2020 at 4:49 PM ^
This is absolutely believable though. Absolutely.
January 16th, 2020 at 5:07 PM ^
You can see that there is a disconnect and their is usually more to this story!
January 16th, 2020 at 5:31 PM ^
You can see that there is a disconnect and their is usually more to this story!
January 16th, 2020 at 5:36 PM ^
i had heard a bit of this, particularly about shea, and posted it earlier this year. work ethic not to everyone's pleasing, and some issues with off the field behavior - nothing horrible, just not as much of a team player. so, some of what this guy wrote might be true despite the fact that he is apparently considered the hun around here.
January 16th, 2020 at 5:41 PM ^
Shea was publicly admonished for spending too much time on the golf course by Gattis and Shea didn't seem to fight that claim.
Unfortunately, when you miss multiple wide open receivers 25+ yards down the field almost game in and game out, you open yourself up to criticism that might not have been there if you had been practicing instead of golfing.
January 16th, 2020 at 6:16 PM ^
I hope he could read a green better than he did defensive ends. . .
January 16th, 2020 at 9:51 PM ^
His footballs landed on the green quite often.
January 16th, 2020 at 6:22 PM ^
I also heard a rumor it was online golfing.
January 16th, 2020 at 6:57 PM ^
....ewwwwwwwwwww
January 16th, 2020 at 7:22 PM ^
Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge would make a pretty amazing MMORPG. A veritable Thrill House, if you will.
January 16th, 2020 at 10:09 PM ^
THRILLHO
January 16th, 2020 at 6:06 PM ^
the golf course thing is worrisome. I honestly wonder if McCaffrey would have taken over after Wisci had he not been concussed so badly.
So he keeps talking about Harbaugh trying to weed that out. Does that mean another coach gave Shea the slack? Or that Harbaugh did and realized he wasn’t doing the right thing?
its just so counterintuitive to the guy who was all about competition, but we can all
backslide
January 16th, 2020 at 6:41 PM ^
He was put in rather early; in my opinion, he had a genuine opportunity to win the job, or at least make it a competition going into the next week. Instead, he got a *serious* concussion and that was that.
Harbaugh is responsible for whatever slack Shea may have gotten. He's the head coach. People are kind of taking this a bit far, though--nothing I see suggests that Shea was a worse QB than the guys on the bench, just that they worked harder. If Harbaugh is all about competition, he plays the best guy. Letting the guys who work harder and practice better play over superior players is exactly the sort of thing the fanbase doesn't want to see.
But if Shea was slacking a bit (and Gattis said publicly he was, though I naively assumed it was a joke at the time) that does help explain why he never reached the ceiling he should have had.
January 16th, 2020 at 7:19 PM ^
Valid points.
I hadn’t thought of that. That it can both be true that shea may slack and still be the best in the roster. Disturbing, but true.
At the beginning of the season Harbaugh said Dylan was going to play quite a bit. It was commonly thought to be a way to keep Dylan happy at the time. I wonder if it was a shot across Shea’s now.
January 16th, 2020 at 9:38 PM ^
ALSO, maybe the Gattis offense took longer to click since the Shea spent the off-season on the greens vs. the practice field and this could have cost us the ped state game!!!
January 16th, 2020 at 10:04 PM ^
My one beef with Harbaugh is his loyalty to his starting QB to a fault. I get he doesn’t want the starter to look over his shoulder all the time. However he seems to look past too many mistakes by him and not willing to pull him when it’s needed. It happened with Speight and happened with Patterson also
January 16th, 2020 at 11:07 PM ^
JH's opening the competition at QB when Speight was the returning starter who led the team to 10+ win the year before might have gave him a 2nd thought. Speight looked over his shoulder on JOK and Peters that he regressed as a QB. JH might have learned his lesson that he shouldn't have done that to Speight instead of preparing him as a starting QB in the off-season where Speight can expand on more of the playbook/responsibilities plus getting the fundamentals down.
I guess that's why JH is unwilling to open up the competition at QB for the reasons stated above
January 16th, 2020 at 11:44 PM ^
Harbaugh appears to allow open competition in camp, but once he settles on a starter he's pretty firm in making him the man. This practice is obviously open to some question, since Harbaugh's record of producing QBs at Michigan is inadequate, but I think I understand what he's doing. He wants the best guy and wants there to be a competition to prove who it is, but once that guy is in Harbaugh wants him to be the man, to learn, to get practice reps, to learn from his mistakes.
He's not totally unwilling to pull guys--he brought Peters in against Rutgers and Peters was the starter until he got hurt--but he clearly wants whomever wins the job to know that they have the job. The contrast here is with a guy like Steve Spurrier, who was notorious for yanking his guys around if he wasn't happy with them, at times going as far as rotating his QBs in and out of the game on individual plays.
I don't really mind the way he does things, especially since he has at times shown willingness to allow a backup to win a job when the starter is clearly faltering (Wisconsin this year, Rutgers 2017). But the record of QBs at Michigan speaks for itself, so Harbaugh is going to get criticized for stuff like this and I can't really say that questions shouldn't be asked.
January 17th, 2020 at 10:19 AM ^
The best guy in camp, playing against your teammates while wearing a protected jersey is NOT always the same as the best guy under enemy fire. This needs to be recognized. Shea lacked the courage to stand in and deliver. At the first sign of pressure he bailed. Sometimes basically taking a dive to the turf to avoid being hit. You only see this in games and under fire but once you see it? It’s time to bail on that guy cuz you aren’t going to fix it.
January 16th, 2020 at 10:08 PM ^
I guess I always assumed the Patterson people kept assuming he was destined to be wasn't the guy who'd actually appear. Those Ole Miss years were mostly him beating up on bad competition and struggling against teams that played solid defense. He got incrementally better while at UM but maybe this year was closer to his ceiling than a lot expected. If what's claimed here is true and Patterson really did loaf his way through the offseason (though it's interesting that the next line after that Gattis quote is that Patterson was lights-out in practice and seemed to know the playbook), that's disappointing. But a LOT of highly-rated QBs coming out of HS never turn out to be better than above-average, especially those with some limitations physically and who were in specialized camps and the like forever.
I think Patterson was the best option Michigan had all year, especially when McCaffrey went down. They'll have to find someone to replace him next year, and hopefully that guy plays better. But there were a number of guys on offense who underwhelmed this year and, frankly, I don't see DPJ or Black coming in for criticism beyond the one "I don't think UM will utilize me properly" blind quote that is pretty damning for the WR if he actually said it. Because it ain't UM's fault that he never broke 100 yards receiving in a game once during his career or more than 1 TD beyond SMU.
Spath seems like a bit of an outsider desperately trying to be above that, and at this point what amounts to a fan blog on the husk of SI's Maven-infused site should be treated with that level of credibility.
January 17th, 2020 at 7:21 AM ^
You're saying this year was his ceiling when he was clearly an inferior player this year in comparison to last year?
If Michigan had just gotten the Patterson they got last year but with higher usage, its a different season.
And the WR quotes are perfectly sane when you consider the following:
2017: O'Korn throwing to you for large portions of the season
2018: Throw the ball less than you did in 2015 and 2016
2019: Patterson regresses terribly.
Can't blame any wide receiver for wanting to get out of the situation.