If Hoke and company coach as well as they recruit,may God have mercy on the B10.
I had been "out" the past few days and come back to Hoke&company still pulling in top notch kids. I live in southern Ohio and was out at a bar last night and a buckeye fan I know told me that he believes OSU will win 7-8 more Big 10 titles over the next 10 years and Michigan MAY won 1 lol!! I did have one OSU fan tell me he is very impressed with what Hoke has been doing and believes OSU is getting what they deserve right now. He even went on to say that he admires Michigan stand to try and do things the right way and not fall into the trap OSU did by hiring a known shady coach in Tressel. Anyways thought I'd share the fact that there is ONE buckeye fan that isnt a total tool.
They have been recruiting their pants off; however, lets not lose sight of how tOSU recruits. Even with all these problems, tOSU will still get a top 20 class just from being in tOSU. For us to out recruit them, we need to get a 5 star or two a year.
a former OSU commit?????
offered by tOSU. Can I get a witness on that?...it's hard enough to track our own offers.
Try James "Biggs" Ross.
I agree that being an elite program calls for a 5* or two per year. But Brady is laying a nice foundation with his slew of 4*'s who fit the program. Good times ahead.
Since we are telling cool stories, I was at Buffalo Wild Wings yesterday and sat by Ron Thompson. He was in a Michigan football t shirt and sweats..
Very telling..
I like sharing cool stories..
Emma Watson is transferring from Brown to another "top American University"... My fingers are crossed for Michigan..
But your story is actually pretty cool
Please tell me you're a student and not a 45-60 year old man.
Not a student. 25 year old man. I don't understand what that has to do with it.
I think he was directing that comment at Waggles, implying that he is a dirty old man for (presumably, because he didn't actually say anything to this effect) finding a college-aged woman attractive.
College men attractive.
Just finished my freshman year, don't worry!
Make me proud!
I heard NYU :(
As an undergrad Emma's age, involved in theatre and other such things on campus, I am still holding out hope.....
I saw "wings" and "Ron" and immedaitely assumed "Swanson" rather than "Thompson." Thompson makes a lot more sense, but for a minute there I thought Ron Swanson was in AA eating wings.
I love that show.
I also like cool stories, and so I will tell how I met Mark Huyge's dad at a brewery in Grand Rapids yesterday afternoon.
Classy guy. He saw my M shirt, and pointed to my 10 week old son (yes, I had a 10 week old in a brewery - this is how we roll in GR) and asked if my son was going to be a Wolverine. We then talked about the football team in great detail. Only after several minutes like this did he tell me he was Huyge's dad.
....and we know what the cheer is that other schools use against Brown.......
I don't know. Would you mind sharing?
No Mercy. Only Pain.
Well that is a pretty big "if" there. I sure hope so, but as Clemson has shown, sometimes teams can do a whole lot of nothing with a lot of talent.
See also: LSU. They win with their talent, despite their coaching.
Hoke should have been hired 5 years ago
While it is (almost unanimously now) clear that RR was not the right hire, who is to say that Hoke would have done this well 5 years ago. 5 Years of additional experience could have made all the difference in preparing him for where he is now. Just my 2 cents and something to think about.
I think if Carr had retired after the 2005 season, RR could have been a great hire.
With the way things shook out, Hoke would have been a better hire to get us through the 2008 season transition.
RR was a great hire. It didn't work out well, but it was a great hire. All they needed was for Carr to do for RR what Bump Elliott did for Bo: tell anyone who complained that he didn't want to hear it and that they needed to worry about what they could do to become better Wolverines. Then, they needed David Brandon to follow Bo's mentorship and make sure everyone who complained that RR was going to get his full five years because Bo taught him to do it that way.
Instead, Carr followed his own agenda, sabotaged the program, and got rewarded for it three years later. Brandon ignored Bo's mentorship and went with Carr's agenda. The only things wrong with the RR hire were Carr, David Brandon, and, of course, GERG.
Hoke would have been the wrong hire then. Michigan needed to go outside of their "family reed" for a coach. I just hope that Hoke has been outside of the program enough to not be Lloyd Carr v2; if he is, it will be a disaster in this era. Luckily, Greg Mattison has been to other schools and the NFL, while Borges is an outsider. Hopefully, this is enough for Michigan's coaching staff to not resemble the banjo-playing kid in Deliverance.
dont get me started on this again.
"Instead, Carr followed his own agenda, sabotaged the program, and got rewarded for it three years later. Brandon ignored Bo's mentorship and went with Carr's agenda
What a fucking pile of babbling bullshit. You don't know what the fuck went on during the transistion from Coach Rod to Coach Carr because if you did, you wouldn't post such nonsense.
Things he didn't believe. Yes, he believed coaches rebuilding a program should get "5 years". He also believed, even after all he had accomplished, all it would take for him to be run out of town was losing to OSU 3 years in a row (I'm sure he never even contemplated losing to MSU 3 years in a row along with it). He knew Michigan wasn't a normal position, and the pressures that went with it.
You can't be serious. What a completely idiotic proposition.
"Five years ago," (give or take), Brady Hoke was in the midst of this run at Ball State University.
| 2004 | Ball State | 2–9 | 2–6 | 6th (West) | |||
| 2005 | Ball State | 4–7 | 4–4 | 5th (West) | |||
| 2006 | Ball State | 5–7 | 5–3 | T–3rd (West) |
And "five years ago," Rich Rodriguez was establishing WVU as a national power team to be reckoned with, and he was being (rightly) courted by the likes of Alabama and Michigan.
This truly is the silly season for college football, isn't it? Where anybody can say just about anything...
That fact is, we'll probably not be able to pull in a recruting class, this year, that is better than the one in Columbus. And Columbus has out-recruited us for many years. Not that that is Hoke's fault, nor was it Rodriguez's fault. NCAA investigations, even phony and trumped-up investigations, can hurt recruting, as can coaching changes. And I'm not sure if Michigan has ever been a dominant recruiting power that crushed Notre Dame or OSU every year. I don't think that's ever been the case.
We'll get some good recruits this year, which might be a much better year for State of Michigan high school football production than either of the last two. There's no need to debate the details; the fact is that this year is very much in doubt as to how Michigan might eventually perform. I don't see any particular reason to predict anything vastly different from last year -- we may see a better defense, with older and healthier players. And we may see an offense that lacks the amazing sparkle and ingenuity of the Rodriguez spread.
But the Hoke-love is really reaching some new levels of hysteria.
Let it go...
I'm not "All In," okay? I won't gladly suffer fools who say we should have hired Brady Hoke five years ago. See, I didn't start today's fight. I'm only responding.
Michigan fans who want their fellow Wolverines to forget about Rich Rodriguez have a responsibility, first and foremost, to quit badmouthing Rich Rodriguez. That's how it works. That's how it is going to be.
That's all you need to remember.
that is all that needs to be said
RR has almost become a political topic. There are still those like you that see fit to defend him at every turn even at the expense of the new coach. And there are those that refuse to see any of the positives that he brought with him. I really don't see a problem with "badmouthing" as long as it is a reflection of the truth (which it often is) and is relevant to the topic at hand.
I do agree though, the whole hiring Hoke 5 years ago post was absurd.
It would be very, very rare for me to "defend [Coach Rodriguez] even at the expense of the new coach." There's ordinarily no need to invoke Brady Hoke at all, to defend Rich Rodriguez.
Only in the event of a silly theory like "We should have hired Hoke five years ago," would the two men be invoked together at all.
And then again, the one person upon whom I would count on, today, to say that any bad-mouthing of Rich Rodriguez has got to stop, like, yesterday if not sooner, is... Head Coach Brady Hoke.
I thought that it was disastrous in '09 and '10; and that in '08, it was hard to tell because everything was a kind of a clusterfuck. (Actually, I remember saying in most of the '08 games, "Thank God for our defense.)
You seem to want to focus on "guilt" for "mismanagement." If you want to tell me that Head Coach Rich Rodriguez is "responsible" for a shitty defense, I'd say that you are right. He's the head guy. If you want to argue that the shitty defenses of the last two years were Rodrigeuz's "fault," I'd say you're wrong. He didn't coach the defenses.
I try not to get in the business of agreeing or disagreeing with anybody. I speak for myself alone. All that I have contended is that Rich Rodriguez knew quite well what he wanted to do with our defense; he wanted Jeff Casteel here, to run the same kind of 3-3-5 that looked so great on the field for WVU the last two years. I think Michigan could have and should have made that happen for Coach Rodriguez. If we had doubled Jeff Casteel's WVU salary, it would be less than what we are now paying Mattison.
And, because these days you have to qualify everything, I am not knocking Greg Mattison. I agree with David Brandon that Michigan had failed, basically, in attracting top assistants with competitive slaries, for a very long time.
Casteel wouldn't come is because of money, and not for any other reason. Maybe he just doesn't like Rich. Who knows? But if you want to blame Martin, who you've praised so much, go ahead. But I have to think it makes no logical sense that if Brandon thought the only problem was DC, and he was willing to pay Mattison, he wouldn't pay Casteel if he thought that would fix everything.
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<br>And most people are blamed for what they are responsible for.
Originally. So much for the "They didn't really like each other" theory.
And, we know that Casteel said "No" to Michigan only after it was made clear to him that he'd be more than welcome to stay in Morgantown, in a new Bill Stewart administration. And that what Casteel said was that all things considered, he'd just decided with his wife to stay in Morgantown with his two little girls in school there.
All of that makes perfect sense, if Casteel is making something like $375k a year in Morgantown, and he's being offered $395k a year at Michigan.
At that point (or after the year with Schafer), it becomes incumbent on Michigan to make the offer 500k, or 600k or 700k.
And then, Jeff Casteel might think differently about what's best for his family.
Casteel said "yes" to coming to Michigan in Dec. 2007? Are you sure about this? I seem to recall him turining us down off the bat, not him drawing it out any.
Regardless, RR offered him the job multiple times - in 2007, again after the 2008 season, and possibly again last December. Casteel never bit. At some point, you've got to conclude that Casteel really didn't want to come. Your interpretation - that he was ours if we'd only up the offer by another $100K or whatever, and we refused - is pretty hard to believe given how gigantic our AD's budget is. We recently committed $226 million to renovate the football stadium. I don't think we'd nickel-and-dime on coaching expenses. (Not for football, anyway.)
It is absolutely untrue, I know, that Casteel immediately turned Rodriguez down, and that in and of itself speaks volumes. This is a story that is difficult to document with handy web links, because we're talking about December of 2007. But what happened was that when Rodriguez came to Ann Arbor in December, he announced right away that a few of his coaches (offense guys, as I recall) like Magee and Gibson were joining him. They were automatic.
And at the same time, either the Athletic Department or Rodriguez (I forget which) announced that contract offers were being made to Bruce Tall and to Casteel. And you really can't, or at least you don't, do that (announce offers) unless the people involved have agreed to be "offered." I can't recall right now if there was any requirement that we needed to get permission to make the offers.
In any event, that was the strange period of time in which WVU hadn't yet announced Bill Stewart was staying and taking over. And in the end, Bruce Tall came, but Casteel didn't. And then, I seem to recall Casteel making a press statement of his own (which he had no need to do, if he was never leaving), announcing his love/loyalty/whatever for WVU, which is precisely the kind of thing you do after you've been negotiating to possibly leave. Anyway, that statement by Casteel came only after significant time. I'm not sure if there have been any clear-cut statements by Rodriguez and/or Casteel saying that Casteel "changed his mind." Those kinds of statements are almost nonexistent. I think it is pretty clear what happened. It is not even much of a mystery, or a dispute. Who knows, maybe somebody can search for the old evidence from this site.
Second; money
Check it our for yourself. Casteel's 2007 salary. Shafer's 2008 salary. Robinson's 2009 salary. Casteel's new 2010-11 contract. And then the big kahuna, Greg Mattison's 2010 Ravens contract and his 2011 Michigan contract.
We were cheap. Mattison's contract broke the mold, by about 200-300%.
David Brandon, in his own blog and in his own words:
'SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT' is an item I will be including in my blog when there is an item that I hear is being discussed on the Internet or another media platform that needs some -- we'll call it clarification.
The first item is appropriate to bring up in this blog. Despite my remarks from day one that our compensation packages for football coaches at Michigan were not always as competitive as they could be, and there's a market out there and we need to pay for value and the marketplace dictates what those price tags are, I still hear there are some self-proclaimed experts who maintained we were not going to be competitive when it came to hiring our football coaching staff. Fact: we went after Greg Mattison and we convinced him to leave a highly successful NFL football franchise. An important part of making it happen involved us being prepared to pay for the talent and experience we needed. Fact: I understand the dynamics of the marketplace and we have and will pay for top talent to keep our programs successful.
Because you can't document any of it except for the storyline you've made up in your head. Should me evidence that Casteel said yes to the job, but then turned it down when West Virginia offered more money to show it was know fact, and not one of your conspiracy theories. Otherwise you're talking out of your ass.
...for someone who cares about what you think.
Talking out of their ass. You have nothing to back your claim up, so your only answer is "Whhaaaaaaa". You obviously care what I and a lot if people think, because you can't shut up about it. Someone who doesn't care what others think doesn't write encyclopedias about Rich Rod.
when Third and Long is released in the fall, shall we?
Everything you've claimed is utter bullshit, and you're HOPING the book proves you right? Got it. But even if it does, it's still been shown you have no evidence to back up your claims right now, just assumptions.
5 years ago, while certainly debatable, bad-mouthing Rich Rod? By your own reasoning on why Rich failed you make a BETTER case that it might be true. 1. Witch hunt by the media drawing sanctions hurting recruiting - wouldn't have happened with the anti-Rich bias. 2. Transition difficulties - wouldn't have been as bad going to a similar style, and to an ex-Lloyd assistant. And between 1 & 2 it wouldn't be as bad and we'd be in year 4, not transition 2.
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<br>If you're going to freak out at every turn, and only be "all-in" when it suits you, that's fine (though I guess we can count Rosenberg in that group since he was, then wasn't, and now is again), but don't make the case for the point you're arguing against.