Update on Howard/Sanderson Situation, per Brendan Quinn.

I wrote it earlier, but when was the last time you read a positive article/tweet from BQ on Michigan sports? He's a doom troll only when reporting on Leaders & Best. 

Sources have used the words 'unequivocally false' and 'all nonsense' when asked about the rumors surrounding Howard.

Well, one thing is true: Sanderson wasn't there on the bench yesterday, which is very unusual.  

Oh wow, the internet was basically wrong again. How shocking. All college athletics reporting is some combination of clickbait or just parroting what the program wants out in the world as a mouthpiece. There is no serious reporting and no serious journalists operating as insiders

Yeah, that makes sense.  It might also be unrelated; I honestly don't know if Sanderson makes every trip or if sometimes he doesn't.  But yeah, this feels like a nothingburger that got blown up on a slow news night.

I hear he wanted Ron English as the basketball coach. 

You don't want physical violence and you want people to get along, but if people are truly passionate about what they are doing, there should be some disagreements.  

I don’t disagree. What I’m saying is that even if it wasn’t a physical altercation, these stressors could be dangerous given his heart situation 

to be fair, Tom Izzo NEVER gets in arguments

But on the other, other hand, the university does not go through a review process every time coaches get into an argument. That would be absurd. 

It might be that Howard's current supposed  'zero tolerance' policy (or whatever it is) means that he has a shorter leash, but when you factor in Sanderson's game absence, there sure seems to be enough smoke that we can reasonably conclude it wasn't exactly your standard run-of-the-mill disagreement. 

Which means it is yet another thing that the athletic department has to deal with optically. 

I tried to look back through his NBA career and saw just two incidents where he got ejected from a game--one where opposing coaches agreed he had just delivered a hard foul. So--compared to you or I, for example--does he 'have an anger problem'? I don't see that some notion of him being an angry person, or one unable to deal with anger, was ever actually a thing.

If Juwan pre-emptively gets T'd up a lot now because of his rep or because he scares some official, have we begun to manufacture that rep for him? I mean, the one incident that all of this is built on was one where I have a lot of sympathy for his reaction--where someone was threatening UM players, so. . . (There's a difference between justifying Juwan's response and sympathizing with the why of it.)

So much of the reaction last night was so pathetically knee-jerk, based on so painfully little, that I thought the haters were outing themselves; a lot of dumb comments based on zip and less.

But  I do think that the chain of command needs to be clarified now, and soon. And maybe--if Juwan is going to continue--it's time for Phil to move on.

I can only make comparisons to myself and my own behavior, but I've gotten angry a few times in my life, and in sorting it out realized that we're all pretty confused about male behavior. There's a lot of things to get angry ABOUT. In some sports, you can unleash it. It's ironic, in the end, that we're here talking about Juwan today, when Fran has had several incidents of wild anger in recent times. The 'angry Black male' conversation, which I've seen invoked, quickly becomes stilted, and is in fact a complicated one. In Juwan's case, I think that a small part of it might be that he's in fact really friendly and appealing; so people are shocked that he can get angry. It's then that the stereotypes--or at least the kind of behavior that people want to see in a large guy like him--get shattered, and the ugly side comes into play.

And let's face it; Black men aren't allowed to get angry. Or if someone is eager to cry foul at this formulation, let's qualify it--they are often given less latitude to do so.

Come on, man. There was nothing weird about that press conference. We all loved it at the time. Claiming otherwise is just an exercise in revisionist history.

Possibly there are some issues with Sanderson, though.  If he is largely in charge of rehab… is Llewelyn back or ????

It is possible that the dynamic is different than we think.

I think it is the general and not specific that is embarrassing...having a head coach who can't control his emotions to the point that he (definitely) had one physical altercation and (maybe) a second.

It's clear that some form of altercation happened.  After he already assaulted an opposing coach.

If we pay a guy millions per year to lead young men, we need to hold them to a higher standard. Ask yourself if you'd be fired if you punched someone at work. Now ask yourself why a man who gets paid millions of dollars per year to coach a game gets an exception.