There’s been a lot said about Michigan wanting a so-called ‘Michigan Man’ as a coach. For the uninitiated, that’s someone who has some sort of tie to the grand old days of Wolverine football, when the maize and blue were legitimate national powers, and when the Big Ten conference was the epicentre of the college football world.
It’s a romantic notion, no doubt, but this is 2014, and the Big Ten has been one of the biggest disappointments not just this year but over the last five or six years. The Wolverines have been a shadow of their former selves through the disastrous Rich Rodriguez era, and through an arguably just as disastrous run under Brady Hoke.
Hoke, who was relieved of his coaching duties earlier today, teased the massive Wolverine fan base by leading his first Michigan team to an 11-2 record including a victory over arch-rival Ohio State and a Sugar Bowl title, proceeded to oversee a degradation of the program. He was a Michigan Man, and the school looked at that before they looked at his mediocre coaching record at San Diego State and Ball State, where he amassed a 47-50 overall record.
That sub-par record didn’t seem to matter to Michigan. They were fixated on Hoke’s apparent affinity with the old days, and hired him pretty much out of left field. As a general rule, if you can’t win consistently at a mid-major school, you’re not likely to be able to win on the big stage, and Brady Hoke has pretty much proven that fact.
Under Hoke’s watch, the Wolverines went 31-20 (18-14 in Big Ten play), and after that stellar 2011 season, fell to 8-5 in 2012, 7-6 in 2013 and this season struggled to a 5-7 record. That means Michigan will miss out on a Bowl game for the first time since 2009. It’s uncharted territory in Ann Arbor, where football excellence is as much a part of life there as is freezing temperatures during the winter.
The fact that Hoke has been fired can be boiled down to five major reasons:
1. He didn’t bring enough star recruits through the door
2. He didn’t beat Michigan State often enough
3. He didn’t beat Ohio State often enough
4. Michigan didn’t win any Big Ten or National championships on his watch
5. Aside from the 2011 Sugar Bowl, Michigan didn’t bring home any major Bowl wins
For all of Hoke’s bluster, his knowledge of Michigan football, his ties to the glory days of the program and referring to Ohio State as, simply, “Ohio”, the fact remains that he wasn’t a particularly good football coach – at least, not good enough to lead a team and a school like Michigan. It’s one thing to know the words to “The Victors” but that hardly matters if you don’t get to sing it very often during your coaching tenure because you’re always losing, and often doing so in an embarrassing manner.
For mine, ‘out of his depth’, is a fair assessment of Hoke’s time at Michigan. Upon accepting the job, Hoke argued at his introductory press conference that Michigan was still an elite job. Four years later, it’s far from that. The Wolverines are at or near the bottom of the Big Ten, and attracting a really good head coach won’t be easy. Not unless it’s a coach who loves a long rebuilding process. There is so much work to be done at Ann Arbor: retooling the offense and stopping the raft of turnovers that plagued and doomed their 2014 campaign.
For their next hire – their third in less than a decade, and, therefore, an incredibly crucial one if the school has any real hope of returning to the top tier of college football – Michigan absolutely must look outside their family in order to have success. Like Alabama did in hiring Nick Saban, like Oklahoma did when hiring Bob Stoops, like USC did when Pete Carroll came on board. Those programs have had success with coaches who had no ties to the program. A fresh approach is often the best. It worked wonders for the Crimson Tide, Sooners and Trojans.
So take a look at someone like Dan Mullen at Mississippi State, Jim McElwain from Colorado State – hurry, before Florida snap him up, as the Gators are rumoured to be doing as I type – for starters, two candidates with SEC experience (which counts for a lot) and resist the urge to hire a less-successful coach with strong ties to Michigan football. I mean, if LSU’s Les Miles or Jim Harbaugh, currently leading the San Francisco 49ers in the NFL, come knocking on your door wanting to coach, by all means bring them in, but the key reason for hiring either of those two men would be that they are, before anything else, proven winners at the sport’s highest level.
Who cares if the next head coach of Michigan can’t recite Bo Schembechler’s career record, the complete history of the Wolverines’ series with Minnesota and doesn’t mind calling Ohio State by their full name? None of that matters. Just as long as they put the Wolverines back in the winner’s column and make them nationally relevant again.
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