Is the success Brady Hoke enjoying due to his skills in football or management?

This is a very thoughtful post about Hoke as a manager. Thanks, mgrowold. Lots of good points. However, I'm tired of hearing about how Hoke is supposedly deficient in his knowledge of football and schemes. How did that idea come about? We really have nothing on which to base it.

My only supposition is that it's the collective compromise to the "we didn't really want Hoke" mindset that originally predominated the board. He said and did (and hired) all the right things after, so we decided he wasn't the greatest at coaching football, to support our original ideas, but he's a master at delegation so we love him and he'll be successful. The other rational I can come up with is his overall head coaching record of 47-50 before Michigan, which may be due to taking years to turn around truly horrible programs.

I think it's quite possible he actually is extremely talented at coaching football and he's wise enough to know to surround himself with the best and trust them to do their jobs. Certainly, he could be both. Again, time will tell all. But I think the idea that he's not a great football mind should die until otherwise brought to life.

I'm very interested to see how he handles the aging of his veteran coordinators. I don't see Mattison coaching more than another 5 or 6 years and I'm very interested to see of we can restart another good coaching tree so transitions are less gut wrenching.