John U. Bacon BLL Appearance in Grand Rapids

we are just describing parts of the football field right? 

Slows is open and it was great.  Also has a great selection of craft beers on tap.  I highly recommend it.

He also said that, although DB was a big part of the story, he didn't want it to be all about him.  It's much more about Michigan as a whole.  And he also tried to be fair, and not make it a DB bashing (even though that is easy to do), but also point out the positive things that he did as well.

ambitions, whether speculative or not, Bo was supposedly his mentor, and Bo was a Michigan AD and I know Bo advocated the kind of leverage that Canham administered with him, which was simply, to get out of his way while he was coach and attend to the regular duties of his office, not interfering implicitly with athletic performance. 

And, of course, this book could be called Brandon's Lasting Lessons, if only because his hire and administration were the antithesis of what Michigan used to be and what Brandon thought about while remaking the department. I mean, if ain't broke, then break it. 

Bo thought about leadership and ways to communicate strength in people to understand his mode of leadership and earn their respect while becoming passionate players of the team atmosphere he instilled. He didn't do this out of a sense of his own accomplishment, he did it by advocating principles that built the kind of program he knew would succeed in winning over the longterm. 

And there is something else that should be noted about comparing Bo's Lasting Lessons to the Dave Brandon story, and that is this: Bo entered Michigan at a peculiar time in America, the late 60's, when drug use, social unrest over the Viet Nam war was high on campus, and he was an unknown from a MAC school in Ohio. He was a conservative in a liberal town on a campus where Kennedy inaugurated the  Peace Corps, and Johnson unveiled part of his Great Society legislation in a commencement speech. He was a fish out of water at the start. 

You don't strive to become a legend, your legacy of deeds and passionate travails of overcoming hardship and difficulty with class and dignity, gets you there. It's the journey that signals the end, not a roadmap destination point. Brandon never got that, even though Bo lauds him and jimmy Hackett in one of the final paragraphs of his introductory chapter that carves out the pathway of the journey he undertook

Most of the values that Bo espouses for good leadership and organizational strength, Brandon eschewed. 

John doesn't mention it at his talks, I'm certain. But I still believe that one of the reasons for writing his Michigan book series is a follow-up to the Lasting Lessons education he got from working with Bo. 

Bo writes, "Good organizations matter. Good bosses matter. If you want to become a great leader, you need to prepare yourself to become a great leader, and the best way to do that is to study great leaders." Bo coached under three HOF coaches. He played at Miami of Ohio for Woody Hayes and then became an assistant on Woody's staff at Ohio State. He once tipped Bobby Knight not to take a head coaching job at Wisconsin after the coach called him about going there. 

Bo was the greatest leader at Michigan for decades. In the end, he notes that of everything he ever did "these values will outlast everything else I've done." 

Maybe if those values were given more than lip service over recent years, Michigan football  would be in a better place today. This is the real endzone at Michigan, not the Brandon story. 

Do you think it is because many of the current players supported DB?  Just speculation, but many of the student athletes have very positive things to say about Brandon, and obviously the book doesn't paint a pretty picture.  Or perhaps they just don't like thinking that they are part of the the worst stretch of Michigan Football (part of the "fall").  Just a thought.

Already been done, because MGoBlog.