All Those Yesterdays

My god! That--that's Brady Hoke's music! Hokeamania!


Someone stop the damn match! Aw, come on! That's not right!

Note: please consider reading my Top 50 songs of 2010. It took a long time to compile the list, and I would like hearing from folks who either have good Drake jokes or want to explain why Young Money is teh omg awesome. OK, now, let's do this...

Yesterday, my sister called to catch up with me and I couldn't do it. I answered the phone, vacantly said "Hello," and then all but drooled. My sister asked what was wrong, and I rattled off a list of trifling complications (jury duty, flat tire, snow), but I led with and returned to one thing: Brady Hoke. He had paralyzed me. I couldn't summon a coherent thought as my conversation with my sister, with whom I am in constant communication, stalled out. She hung up and I stared at a blank white wall in my apartment.

The Buckets had caught me at a bad moment. TheWolverine.com had posted an initial list of Brady Hoke's prospective assistant coaches, and a day of denial and forced optimism came crashing down, hurting inside.

I found out that Michigan had hired Brady Hoke while sitting in a jury box. Later, I rifled off a few skeptical and disappointed texts during lunch as I caught up on the internets invective being hurled at Michigan Athletic Director David Brandon. I didn't particularly want Brady Hoke as Michigan's next football coach, but I didn't think he was destined for the absolute failure others were predicting. I knew that he lacked Jim Harbaugh's magnetism and Les Miles's resume, but I didn't think Hoke was an intrinsically bad coach. Maybe it would be OK; Tressel worked out well for Ohio State, right? Hoke did frighten me, though, because of his coaching lineage. Brady Hoke really wasn't the problem; it was what he stood for.

As many have noted, a 47-50 coach from mid-tier programs would not normally have viable aspirations of succeeding Bo, Mo, Lloyd, and Rodriguez. Not with luxury boxes to sell, a competitive conference to survive, Alabama on the horizon, and a three-year depression to cure. Not when he had never served as a coordinator at any level of football, not when he was relatively anonymous, and not when fan perception was already hovering between disdain and skepticism. That's not the profile of a Michigan football coach. And yet, that's Brady Hoke, and here we are.



How we got here is troubling. The coaching search proved two things about David Brandon: he is incredibly arrogant, and he is incredibly unprepared. Since September, Brandon said that his evaluation process would run its own course, immune from outside pressure, industry conventions, and internal sabotage. He would go on to explain that people not named David Brandon operated with only five percent of the information he was calculating, and that his plan was unfolding precisely as he intended it. (And wizards are never late.) The implication was always on the tip of his tongue: he is smarter than you, with the role of "you" played by everyone else, including even other athletic directors. Brandon would not budge.

And he didn't. Not when it was clear that Rich Rodriguez's 2011 recruiting class would be relatively awful due to his ongoing job insecurity; not when Michigan lost to Penn State and made clear that this year's team had failed to make any material improvement; not when Michigan was embarrassed by Wisconsin and Ohio State to end another ugly, unacceptable season.

He then held firm through December and early January, as Jim Harbaugh--whom, by all accounts, had secretly committed to Michigan only to later recant and go pro--slipped away, as Rich Rodriguez suffered another embarrassing beatdown, and even as Brandon first met with Rodriguez to fire him. Don't let the two-day firing odyssey become an obscure historical footnote: David Brandon's sacrosanct process was so smart that he did in two days what most people could have done in an hour. Don't suggest, either, that it would have behooved Michigan to fire Rodriguez in November, to seek a commitment from Harbaugh within the week (while no one else but Stanford could realistically compete), or else pursue other attractive candidates when they were available in the heart of coaching carousel season. Don't say those things because you only betray your ignorance. The process said otherwise, and David Brandon devised it.

He also devised the awesome Les Miles subterfuge, during which he condescended toward fans by making a show of interviewing their presumptive preferred candidate only so that he could allow the deal to fall through. Flying to Baton Rouge, lying about the meeting date--it all gave Brandon cover. He could tell the idiot fans and their five percent that he tried to hire Miles, but all the while he never actually had to deviate from what now seems like his true post-Harbaugh intention. He could sign Hoke, deny having offered the job to anyone else, and tout his process as a brilliant success, the kind that only someone as smart as David Brandon could plan and then execute. You hire a Brady Hoke on January 11 even if you could have done so a full month earlier, no matter what the recruiting costs. Don't let athletic directors like Jeremy Foley, DeLoss Dodd, or anyone else quibble with this paradigm of athletics administration. They're just not as smart as Brandon. I am sure he will confirm this.

(Some other takes on this mess, in general, are here, here, here.)


A Bud Light Domino's Real Man of Genius. You probably wouldn't get it.

Why we got here is equally troubling. Brady Hoke doesn't have the resume to be the head coach at Michigan. The same could be said about national champion Gene Chizik and Auburn, but Chizik had been a celebrated defensive coordinator before working as a head coach at a BCS-conference school. That's not Hokeamania. Brady Hoke only had this troubling trump card: he coached at Michigan under Lloyd Carr. That's why I was incapacitated on the phone.

Brady Hoke has this job because the Michigan athletics administration appears to value cronyism as much as it values maize and blue. After a failed departure from the Schembechler Era left the program bruised and its constituencies warring with each other, Michigan panicked and overreacted. Mary Sue Coleman, David Brandon, and whomever they trust misinterpreted Rodriguez's incompetence as validation of Carr's approach. While the rest of the football world understands that Carr's Michigan was a program in steady decline for a number of years, the Michigan brain trust has idealized it as a halcyon brand of football meriting revival. As a bonus, embracing Carr's legacy by hiring one of his assistants would assuage the loud former players who railed against Rodriguez from jump street. Shamefully, it's a classic Michigan football attitude. No one else gets it because we're just that special, and we need one of our own to bring it back. However, the "it" might as well be any one of timidity, arrogance, or myopia. Not coincidentally, those were hallmarks under Carr.

So an acolyte from the Carr coaching tree has been summoned to Ann Arbor and assigned the task of reviving Michigan football in the style of its old, faltering self. Instead of again seeking elusive new heights, the program is seemingly settling for the old, lower ones. Instead of conducting a truly national search, Brandon scoured a small network, loudly championing "Michigan men" and quietly idealizing a Carr crony. Instead of making it his mission to find the man who could properly lead Michigan forward--perhaps a promising coordinator, perhaps an established head coach with at least a winning record--Brandon sought out someone who would proudly look backward as Braylon Edwards and Dhani Jones cheered him on. Hoke arrives underneath a shower of rhetoric about Michigan values and returning to Michigan football, but all I can hear is celebration of 9-3. I'm unimpressed.

To be fair, this isn't Hoke's fault. He didn't design David Brandon's process (who else could?), he isn't the obstinate former coach who has long agitated to select a successor, he didn't make Jim Harbaugh lie to Michigan, he didn't encourage the Detroit Free Press and Desmond Howard to hound Rodriguez into exile. For that matter, he isn't guilty of Rodriguez's many sins. He just wants to coach at a school he loves. Further, he may be a wonderful coach whose time building up Ball State and San Diego State as college football evolved imparted lessons that will make Michigan better. I really hope this is the case, because I will always root for my alma mater, and I will always give its coach a chance.

But I ran into deep dismay and a broken spirit when I saw the prospective assistant names. There were no ascendant coordinators, unassailable experts, and acknowledged recruiting champions. Instead, there were some of Hoke's seemingly unremarkable incumbents, a few names with fading stars (such as Al Borges), pedestrian bit players from Illinois, and a bevy of Carr-era retreads, including the wildly overrated Fred Jackson and people like Scot Loeffler, who helped Michigan reliably underachieve the first time around. Just a week ago, David Brandon assured that the days of underpaying assistants were over, and yet nothing from the first wave of rumored assistants suggests that Michigan will spend enough to truly be a leader or best.

What an inauspicious plunge into the future, then. The trip may get better. TheWolverine.com gets plenty wrong, after all. Help from the best sources might be on the way. Still, the feeling of a sustained doom is hard to shake, and not just because it has become a fixture in Ann Arbor. A Carr guy has returned to reconvene the band in some form and play the same old songs. The Harbaugh opportunity was missed. And now, the athletic department is asking fans to get excited about Brady Hoke primarily because he used to help Michigan leave us wanting more.


I see this, and all I think is "fat, sweaty Lou Ferrigno." Bad start.

P.S. Does the pointing look familiar?