Why is your name all wavy, Wade?

Three years ago when Michigan was waddling about gently poking jowly coaches of the Midwest in search of their next head football coach, I relayed a ton of different things that hit my inbox about Kirk Ferentz and Jim Grobe and Greg Schiano and, yes, Brady Hoke. Many of them seemed ludicrous even at the time, like Michigan offering Ferentz a massive paycut to become Michigan's coach or Greg Schiano accepting the job before changing his mind (twice!), but are now part of what passes for the unofficial history of those maniacal three weeks. It was a weird time.

I tried to balance the inherently contradictory reports by relaying the things I'd heard and laying out what I thought based on those things, but from a distance of three years I think I made a mistake in my coverage. That mistake was assuming that all information being passed was a good-faith attempt to help Michigan fans figure out where the search stood at that point. It did not occur to me that while that assumption was probably correct about the people directly emailing me I had no way to judge the sincerity or connectedness of the people passing them information.

So. Any Michigan message board you pick has both shadowy insiders and now moderators throwing out Brady Hoke's name a "very serious" candidate to be Michigan's head coach. I've gotten the rumor myself from someone I trust, citing solid sources within the athletic department. But this is not then. I'm not going to rush to my keyboard and spit out all the reasons Hoke is not a plausible candidate for the Michigan job like I did three years ago.

I would if I thought there was even the slightest chance Hoke would replace Rich Rodriguez in early January, because that would be the most insane coaching switch of all time. This is not going to happen. Brady Hoke is not a serious candidate for the Michigan job. He is not any sort of candidate. If Dave Brandon was willing to hire Hoke to coach Michigan, Rodriguez would already be out the door because there would be a dozen people he'd rather have coaching Michigan than Rodriguez. Unless meteors hit both Jim Harbaugh and Rich Rodriguez, the chance Brady Hoke is Michigan's coach in 2011 is zero point zero percent.

Period.

Yes, single sentence paragraph time.

Do you know how I know this? Because three years ago the rumors about Hoke were heavy enough that I scurried to the keyboard to point out this was a guy with one winning season, that 7-5, at a MAC school. While he's a plausible candidate for the Minnesota job now, back then he wasn't a plausible candidate for the job he was actually at. If Ball State's job was open they wouldn't have hired a coach with Brady Hoke's resume. And yet there were rumblings from within Fort Schembechler that had everyone panicked, just like today.

The obvious conclusion is that there are people who know and like Hoke in the athletic department, who hate everyone else who's ever been rumored for the Michigan job, and there are credulous people willing to relay anything that comes from a person with a job in Schembechler Hall. None of these people are Dave Brandon.

Brady Hoke will not coach Michigan in 2011. You may resume your day-to-day lives.