Warde comments on critics

I do actually doubt the record flips even if those two players end up at UM. Howard had two years of Dickinson flanked by a couple NBA draft picks and proceeded to produce a bubble team and a  NCAA tournament miss with those two teams. 

" The proximate cause of Dusty May's hiring is not the end of the season, it is those two admissions decisions.  "Juwan should know these things and adjust accordingly."  Sure.  You have more knowledge of the admissions ins and outs than the coach that talks to them everyday does."

Well - I know enough to know admissions had absolutely nothing to do with their credits not transferring... in fact - I know they both were accepted by admissions.

...but apparently I know more than Juwan - because I understand you're never transferring in more than 60 credits.

Doesn't matter whether they're from Yale, MIT, or Stanford.

You aren't getting a UM degree without doing half your credits at UM.

I guess Warde is just the unluckiest AD ever. His best coaches just keep on leaving, and apparently there is nothing that any AD could have done to keep any of them.

This entire post is nonsense from start to finish.

That this poster isn't nuanced enough to understand that lots of different people are posting here, and that this board far from marches in lockstep, when he writes, "They tend to be driven almost solely by emotion and without much analysis.  They lurch from sentiment to sentiment.  There is rarely any consistency, any semblance of a through line of rationality."

The thinking above starts with nonsense and never improves.

I, like a whole bunch of people at this site couldn't have disagreed more with the crowd that wanted Harbaugh gone. I think Warde did a piss poor job of fully supporting the single best football coach for this university that we were likely to come across for a very long time, particularly when the program was struggling.

I think we had a shot of a couple more years of Harbaugh had Warde not foolishly jerked him around during the covid season. Maybe not, but he did little or nothing to bolster the football program during that period of time.

I thought that he embarrassed himself and the university both with his demonstrably bullshit "zero tolerance" lie.

I think he screwed the pooch in magnificent fashion with the Sanderson fiasco.

I think he completely mishandled the coaching change in the hockey program.

I don't know enough about baseball or softball to have much of an opinion except, both programs have gone backwards after Warde's hires took over.

Then, this is, for the most part, a site frequented by alumnae of the University of Michigan. I don't always think that the people who come by here every day are all that knowledgeable about football, or basketball, hockey or baseball,  but then again quite a few of us are like me, decent enough athletes to have been able to play pretty well at the high school level and maybe passed up chances to keep playing at the collegiate level to come here and obtain a world class education. Lots of us do know what we are looking at when following a game featuring a ball, or a puck.

Then … again, many, many of the people who come here and graduated have made moves in life that fully qualifies them to evaluate leadership, or in Warde's case, the absence thereof. I have frequent conversations with fellow alums doing law and engineering at the highest levels possible who visit MGoBlog on a daily basis. They have little use for Warde either. So, ignorant, blanket statements like, "There is a cohort of people on here that are so disconnected from how leadership is conducted and decisions are actually made in the real world that they continue to attack without any real basis other than emotion and discontent," don't hold a great deal of water at this particular board.

You like Warde? Fine. But, you’re spouting drivel and nonsense here today.

I don't need to go through the rest of the discussion. You have said everything that's necessary. Excellent work.

I mostly agree. The one thing Warde clearly botched was the Mel Pearson fiasco. Trying to keep him after Wilmer presented their report was indefensible -- and an embarrassing mess after the report inevitably leaked. 

Aside from that, us outsiders really don't know enough to blame Warde for the things he gets blamed for -- or to absolve him. Now, blaming him for Beilein, Bakich, and Harbaugh leaving is just dumb. No coach needs Warde's permission to leave, and all three of those coaches clearly wanted to move on to new challenges and/or jobs they viewed as better. 

This long comment which provides selective criticism of the amorphous “Michigan fan” nails its critique of a straw man. 

I don’t remember Warde getting much heat over Beilein leaving at all. He still has mishandled the hockey stuff and I still think he’s partially responsible for Harbaugh wanting to bolt for the NFL in three straight off seasons. 

His absence during the bulk of the Stallions stuff said more than his last minute statements which allowed national narratives to fly out of hand with no counter strategy other than what anonymous folk were doing on social media. Yeah, I’m not going to forget that.

If you think two players, albeit very good players, flips last season than you have more confidence in Juwan fixing anything than I do, specifically defensively but also because he’s staunchly anti-analytics. Sure, they may have been passable, even watchable, but it would only have extended a doomed tenure.

So what could Warde have done in regard to basketball? He could have stuck by the zero tolerance guidelines he previously set in place when Juwan effectively ran off maybe the nation’s best S&C guy. 
 

While Warde may indeed learn, grow and improve in his role he has quite often been MIA when the programs need him. I don’t really have any issues with his hirings; that seems to be a strength of his.

I hope Warde pivots from that passiveness and he has started to with the basketball moves, crossing my fingers. 

I wouldn't hold your breath. Warde's role model is clearly Paulie from Goodfellas...

I think Warde has done a fine job, save not hiring Muckhalt, and the Howard hire, if true that Cooley was plan B. 

Exactly. Why is this so hard for Warde apologists to understand? Everyone was in Warde’s corner until after the 2016 screw job in Columbus. He didn’t defend Harbaugh when most people outside of Columbus could clearly see that those refs were paid off. All we’re saying is grow a freaking backbone Warde. Look how Tennessee just dealt a major blow to the NCAA on NIL in contrast to Warde bending over to the NCAA over burgergate. 

The fact he let Hutchins leave is enough in my book, fire him!

I don't believe anything would have kept Bakich here ..so be it .. the Pearson thing, he should have hired Muckhalt, if he was gonna promote someone.

 He may not have been passive behind the scenes, but if that's true, then he's terrible at PR, which is also a big part of the AD's job.  Either he's doing a bad job, or he looks like he's doing a bad job, and either one is an indictment on his job performance.

And pivots from Transformational not Transactional to "Transformational not Transactional" (and here's your market value NIL).

Yeah, this whole “it’s not a coincidence” line doesn’t fly for me.

He’s been AD for more than 8 years. Things will change.

Football—Man whose reputation is he can’t stay put (moves around within 4 years) stays for 9 seasons, wins national championship, takes huge pay raise in NFL despite offer to be highest paid college coach, plus the challenge of the NFL which it is widely known is a big pull for the coach

Basketball—Oldish man tires of college game, tries NBA, fails, retires from coaching 

Hockey—old man retires (and then Pearson is its own fiasco but isn’t about his coach leaving him)

Softball—Oldish woman retires

Baseball—The only sport (which the public at large doesn’t really care about) where a coach left for another school.

So the pattern is old people retire and also Harbaugh? Okay.