Lloyd Carr approves of Jim Harbaugh
So Harbaugh has that going for him, which is nice.
Carr also thinks that technology has made coaching more difficult and that the P5 will have fewer teams in it going forward.
http://www.mlive.com/sports/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2015/06/former_michigan_football_coach.html
RichRod undermined his own program and you don't need a John U. Bacon book to see how it happened. Lloyd was loyal to his kids to a fault and if you think that was a negative, you need to stop seeing the entire world through maize and blue glasses.
I defended RR to the last, but the idea that his complete inability to field a competant team was on Lloyd Carr is just petty revisionism by the true believers who can't move on.
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I can't really vilify Carr for that given that he wanted to retire after 2006 and Bill Martin talked him out of it.
What is incomprehensible is that Martin somehow was caught off-guard when Carr did retire the next year.
he also stuck on to finish with Hart, Henne, and Long. Really the athletic department should have had a succession plan for over a year. But Martin probably stayed on a year to long as well. As 3 and out stated, if he had left before the coaching hire, he could have gone down as another great Michigan AD. He made a great basketball hire, but should have left the football coaching hire for the next AD. He still was a great AD in my mind, just made a pretty big mistake in HOW the football coaching search went. Not necessarily with who he ended up with.
Martin was a terrible AD that set Michigan football on a course for disaster.
I don't understand why people downgrade a shared title, whether it be conference or national. If you earn a share of a title (as silly as the idea of a shared title sounds), then you clearly deserve it and did enough to get it.
Lloyd loves Michigan and I love that he got us a MNC.
I love Lloyd Carr and will always see him as a boss...
"How was that for the ol' ticker, Urbz?"
I don't know what people wanted from Lloyd as an "exit strategy." What does that even mean? Having his successor on the staff? That's not often done anymore and not really necessary. So many at Michigan freaking out when an outsider came in was Michigan's problem.
The lack of an "exit strategy" should fall on the AD's shoulders. Carr was not the AD like Bo was - he didn't have the sole authority to choose his successor.
Faulting Lloyd on the exit strategy thing is unfair, and frankly we probably didn't want one from him anyway since it almost certainly would have consisted of "promote Mike DeBord".
On the other hand, faulting Lloyd for leaving the program in pretty rocky shape for whoever succeeded him is completely fair.
Because Bo built a coaching tree that yielded Moeller and Carr as well as other head coaches, people held the expectation that Michigan should not need to look outside the program to hire their next coach.
People had to be unrealistic about our assistant salaries, facilities, and other necessary components to getting the next Harbaugh to be your coordinator/head coach in waiting. I'm convinced those conditions were absent, which greatly diminished our ability to have a coach in waiting and I don't blame Carr for that.
I'm also convinced that Carr was overly loyal to assistants who certainly could not lead Michigan as head coaches which further prevented new high potential assistants from getting hired as Malone, DeBoard etc. just kept holding coveted spots. I do blame Carr for that aspect of not having an exit strategy.
So the people who freaked out about outsiders either didn't understand condition 1 above and thus looked arrogant with their "this is Michigan!" Attitude. (I think our new salaries, facilities Etc. have rectified that issue) Others may not have been freaking out about any outsider but may have been freaking out about THIS outsider in which case it's tough to argue with them from the future.
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That's ridiculous. So much hindsight in there. You're blaming Carr for announcing his retirement before his career actually ended? That happens all the time. You can't blame him for the Miles' media fiasco blowing up or Bill Martin being on a boat. From your post, it sounds like Carr was irresponsible for not literally looking into the future.
with this. MSC liked Miles and it seems he could have secured the job if he really wanted it. On the day Herbstreit announced "Miles to UM" and it was plain he was the leading candidate in public perception, he signed a new contract with LSU. All good, but hard to lay that on Carr.
LC had very limited input into the choice of a new coach. His role was circumscribed by giving an internal and external recommendation, and that was pretty much it. I don't believe the external choice was Miles, but he had no authority to tank Miles even if he had wanted to.
Especially the exit strategy part, but Sailboat Bill shares equally in this responsibility as Lloyd wanted to retire before 2007 but Martin talked him into staying..
Then the Horror happened and the writing was on the wall without a suitable replacement lined up... and the rest is history.
Thank God we are on the right track now...
Barnacle Bill FAILS for not having a succession plan in place -- or a short list. Michigan's search was bumbling at best. Regardless of when LC retired, the school should have had some kind of idea who could be on their radar as a replacement.
I would HOPE that even with JH not even yet coaching a down of football, there is a succession plan in place for even him -- what if he gets hit by a bus or something?! That's what big boy organizations do for senior leader positions.
Les Miles, but there was no way Carr was going to let that happen...
Right... and that's one of my main criticisms about LC... that the retired coach has to give his blessing or something. Who the fuck is LC to block any coach?
You don't have to have a ton of experience or training to figure this one out. Common sense dictates that you'll want to anticipate departures of key people and have contingencies ready. Even a ho-hum guy like me would get crucified if I got caught this unprepared, much less a guy heading a huge department like Michigan Athletics.
I'll restate it slightly: "His lack of a properly vetted exit strategy."
I do believe he had an exit strategy in terms of sucession (DeBord or English), but I don't think it was one that was vetted with the AD.
Did I say anything about him being a bad coach or criticize his accomplishments at Michigan???
Or better yet, did you know how big of a hand he played in the Rich Rod?
I love the man... to an extent; but perhaps you should read up a few things that transpired behind the scenes after his exit... And not be so quick to blindly defend him.
"how big of a hand he played in the Rich Rod"? Srsly. First hand, not from a fiction book. Do we? And why are we always looking for someone to blame or defend? We all just want to start winning again....
But I for one don't accept everything JUB says as gospel.
from Carr what his thoughts are I reserve judgement.
If he heard RR's plans to change the system immediately, didn't think Mallet or other players would fit and thought it might be better if they played elsewhere, it could be that he was looking out for the players he made promises too. That's not a bad thing even if Michigan lost some talent that may not work well in the RR system anyway. Maybe it hurt Michigan, but the players should be the main concern.
If it was a total "fuck you" to RR because he didn't like him then I lose a lot of respect for Lloyd Carr but we will likely never hear his side of what happened. Until then, I give him the benefit of the doubt because he did a lot of good for Michigan and I never heard a bad word spoken about him except regarding this issue.
Regardless of what happened, the Harbaugh years may not be happening if all this crap hadn't happened and I'm optimistic enough that we will be one of the top few programs in the country that I'll take the down years we endured to get Harbaugh.
Very well said. Everyone forms their opinion differently about this and I don't think we'll ever get an answer on what actually went down and why. But I think you can read what Bacon presents as fact and not view Carr as a villian for the transfer issues.
Just my opinion, but I feel very in line with the first thought - Carr thought he was doing the "right thing" when he had the meeting saying that he'd let players transfer. And I really believe to this day Carr would still defend that decision beause he cared about his players and felt that was bigger than the (supposed to be) short term hit to Michigan's roster.
I will still criticize Carr for his inability to develop a coaching tree, inability to defend the spread, his end-of-regime recruiting and his lingering legacy affecting the RR era where I think he could have done more in support (even if he didn't actively undermine... who knows). But I have this feeling that Carr truly believed that was the right thing to do - that doing "right" by the kids personally comes before Michigan football being successful.
Of course, on the practical side it was a bigger problem. That coupled with some other issues (lack of cultural fit, stereotyping, lack of AD preparing RR for the position) and some inflation of issues by the media caused a lot of it go south. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy in a sense. Carr was passive during that time, and maybe that was his way of saying it wasn't about him, but I think it ultimately ended up helping to divide the community. Right or wrong, the only thing that would have put a lot of that away was someone like Carr coming up and flying the flag for RR, even if he didn't want to. Carr didn't. I think some of that was passively being upset that it wasn't his guy in there, but also part of that was his personality.
In the end, the results matter, both from Carr and RR, and neither had them in that era.
On to Harbs.
seriously... writer with total access to RichRod, who clearly likes him and becomes personally close to him writes a book that, shockingly, assigns RichRod no blame for the tirefire that the program was under his watch.
Lloyd Carr's "meddling" didn't force RR to run our defense as an afterthought, it didn't force him to neglect OL recruiting, it didn't force him to fuck up his compliance paperwork. At worst, it led to a small number of players who WEREN'T FITS FOR RR'S OFFENSE ANYWAY to leave the program.
Understand the point on the alleged closeness of RR and Bacon. But I also feel its inaccruate to say that Three and Out "assigns RichRod no blame" - hopefully you're just being hyperbolic there, if not, there probably is no point debating because we're not going to agree on how to read what is written in that book.
Besides, Carr being blamed for his wrongs does not mean RR didn't do things wrong either. They are not mutually exclusive, but that always seems to get lost in this debate.
What is the "fiction book" to which you refer?
Though that doesn't mean much these days. Lloyd's in a tough spot. There could be so much fiction in there, but acknowledging it opens him up to questions about it. I'm sure he, like all of us, just want to move on.
please share your superior sources
Lloyd Carr made that happen. He's an all powerful wizard who cast a spell on our defenses. Because everything about this man who clearly hates the spotlight suggests that his sole purpose in life is to be adulated or something equally moronic and not evidence based.
It's what he did off the field and behind the scenes that mucked up the last 7 years, not what he did on the field. He was an underrated coach in his years here.
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Do we really know what he did? I'm wary of condemning a man who served our athletic department for 30 years.
Three and Out gives us RichRod's version of events those three years but not Carr's. That's not necessarily to say RichRod lied, but it's possible that he misunderstood Carr's actions.
It's possible, but I don't think JUBacon would slant a story to fit an agenda/vendetta or something like that. JUB is one of the most trusted voices around Michigan athletics, who made his fame writing for Lloyd's mentor and came up while Lloyd was HC. If he didn't have to believe that Lloyd personally saw that RR failed, I'm sure he would choose not to.
I don't think Bacon wanted to slant the story. I'm not accusing him of anything underhanded. I believe he wrote as complete a story as he could. But his problem as author was that he had only RichRod's version of events and not Carr's, so all he could do was give us RichRod's.
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I think your comments in this thread re: LC are closest to the mark.
Unlike others who write or speculate about that transition, I have actually talked with him and he has read wihat I have written about it, with me asking him to correct anything he thought was error. He declined to tell his side of the story, feeling that it wasn't in UM's interests. However, my impression was that my version of events was "close."
The thing I am certain of is that LC never encouraged any player to transfer and never signed a single transfer paper. Indeed, only two players left and neither was encouraged to leave by LC. I also know that a third player wanted to transfer, but LC was able to talk him into staying.
I seriously doubt a majority of fans literally cried by winning a non-BCS bowl after beating a 9-3 (albeit high profile) team.
I did not cry, but it was one of the happiest times for me as a Michigan fan, mainly because I was so ecstatic about the coach we had just hired.
And I was at the game and watched him leave the field. I sure as hell didn't tear up.
Your definition of minority appears to be vastly different from reality.
if this thread was going to go in the same direction as the MLive comments section, and it's off to a great start so far!
Lloyd isn't very popular over on that site.