osu

[Patrick Barron]

A sponsor note of a different variety. The long-term sponsor of this post, Richard Hoeg, is a good guy and and excellent lawyer who we've had on our podcast a couple times. He also recently suffered a stroke. His family has a gofundme up as he embarks on his recovery.

It's already done quite well because Richard had spent years building his own online community, which you may know if you leaked over from here to there. If Richard was important to you in some way I encourage you to donate.

I have informed the guy whose job it is to do the thing I just did. Harbaugh back, hooray, but also this is a pretty weird way to go about informing the world:

Ono tweets a lot about the stuff he's doing but as of yet I haven't detected a tendency to self-aggrandize. They're mostly anodyne boilerplate things. The Harbaugh's back tweet stands out, and has caused the conspiracy-minded sections of the internet to wonder if this is fallout from a frosty relationship between Warde Manuel and some combination of Ono and/or Harbaugh. Harbaugh's quote on the matter mentions Ono but not Manuel:

This kind of thing usually doesn't happen even if there is some tension between the parties. I'd caution against reading too much into it; on the other hand "I have communicated the news to our athletic director" is indicative of a process that the athletic director did not accomplish himself.