Semi-OT: Congrats to Brady Hoke and SDSU

I thought Brady's loyalty to his assistants is what did him in at Michigan. The inability to let some of them go for underperforming is a serious flaw for a coach. It's not one for a human being though and it has always been easy to like Hoke and root for him elsewhere.

I've always been a fan of Hoke.  I used to sit close to where he coached our d line and could always tell he had the respect of the players.  It just wasn't the right fit as head coach here.  I hope her stays at SDSU and becomes a legend there.

100% agree that Brady was a really good guy put into a tough situation, and I blame his goofball boss at the time more than Brady.

For the Big Ten Championship, we unknowingly stayed at the Iowa hotel.  The morning of the game we ran into Jerry Montgomery and his beautiful family at breakfast.  Jerry was on Brady's defensive line staff for 2 years. He was a 4 year starter for the Hawkeyes and his son Jayden just signed with Iowa as a LB which is of course why they were there.

We asked Jerry what he thought of Brady.  He said that he was the salt of the earth and would be happy to work for him again.  Currently, Jerry is a defensive line coach for the Packers.

Glad to see Brady's success at SDSU and wish him all the best!

G5 is where he seems to fit best and San Diego is a beautiful place to live. I'm not him, but if I was I think I'd stay at SDSU as long as they'd have me. 

His salary certainly could be a lot higher at a P5, but $1M/year (even in San Diego) ain't a bad number. Then again, if he's gonna drink every beer in San Diego, he may need a raise!

Brady Hoke is 63 years old.  He's already achieved his dream of being head coach at Michigan.  He's made millions from his U-M contract.  After being unemployed for a year (2015), cycling through Oregon (2016), Tennessee (2017), and Carolina (2018) before returning to SDSU in 2019, he would be foolish to leave.  Brady is a millionaire living in paradise. 

Like others have said, he's 63 years old, has a career record of 94-78 (.547), and has 0 Conference Championships in 14 full years as a head coach.

If you were a P5 Athletic Director, how would you sell that hire to your fanbase?

Yep....glad to see him have some success.  He was just over his head at this scale of a program.  I could see him getting a lower level P5 job at a bad team and making them mediocre.  But really, why leave SDSU at this point?  He's got a great thing going, great town, ideal level for him, they are coming off a historic season.  Seems perfect.

People make mistakes, sometimes big ones.  Others have made reference that this program was a more than Hoke could handle.  That encompasses the concussion disaster.  In balance it seems like he was a good human being who handled something rather badly.  I liked the guy as a person, not so much as our football coach.

On the sidelines of the game last night he looked really happy. I'm happy for him.

I wouldn't call it a love affair.  No one on this board is defending his performance here, defending the fact that he was hired on the first place, suggesting his on field performance was adequate, that he shouldn't have been fired, or that he wasn't at fault for that.  

In my opinion, his handling of that situation was a direct result of him being way over his head for managing a program of this scale and the chaos that was happening at that time.  He didn't set up a structure of support to handle that, to coach a competent team, or manage even the most basic aspects of the job.  I do not think he did that because he was malicious or a dinosaur "rub some dirt on it" guy. 

This I wish him success and hope he learned from that experience....even if I also don't want him on our sidelines again..

There's no "love affair." That's just hyperbole and petty.

It's simple for some of us. The '97 team was iconic. Coach Hoke was the DL coach. The '97 DL was an elite unit, and it was integral to our National Championship (See chapter entitled, "Judgment Day"). Coach Hoke was a significant reason we won. That appreciation remains, despite his head coaching failures. The fact that he's almost universally beloved by his former players and fellow coaches reinforces everything.

Those are the kinds of decisions that get made in a toxic culture like DB created. Hoke went along with it and owns the decisions he made, but as the saying goes, every system is perfectly designed to get the results that it gets. Whoever put the incentives in place -whether formal or informal- to encourage those kinds of decisions also bears responsibility.

The AD bungled the fallout, remember a middle of the night press release that was basically a lie. 

Lack of communication on the sideline put Morris in a bad spot, ultimately Hoke was responsible for that.

Not sure why jimmyjoeharbaugh is getting negged so much. It's a fact that Morris took a helmet to the chin then, staggered and wobbled around and looked dazed. Multiple other Michigan players signaled to the sideline that he needed medical attention.  Hoke kept him in the game. There's a lot I liked about Hoke, but that incident was unacceptable for a Michigan coach.   

No love affair here. Rational people understand that this job was too much for him, Sugar Bowl win notwithstanding, and that he especially handled the Shane Morris situation terribly. For myself, I would never want him to be head coach here again, but I of course wish him well. He gave this job his all, and I'm sure he did his best.

Oh please. He did no such thing. Nobody saw the late hit to the head as they were watching the pass. They saw the stumble after but Shane said it was his ankle and that it was fine. This led to having someone who's job it is to sit in the press box and look for concussions so it doesn't happen again. This is 0% Hoke's fault.

He wears his headset at SDSU... he learned his lesson.

I'll never forget "This is Michigan for God's sake."

And although his offensive recruiting was poor at best, he did bring in Devin Gardner and his defenses were loaded.

Also good point on the assistant coaches but with Dave Brandon having so much control over every aspect of everything athletic, I have to wonder how much meddling he did there as well.