Michigan’s Coaching Search Reflects The Perception Of The Program
By J.P. Scott
The fact that Michigan is still without a football coach is a sign of what the program has become.
Michigan used to mean something. Michigan Football meant wins, championships and success. The program has won more games than any other in history. Michigan has produced 11 national championships and three Heisman Trophy winners. Michigan was once a destination job for coaches.
Right now, Michigan is without a coach.
How can this be? We are talking about Michigan. This is THE blue-blood program in college football. Right?
Well, maybe not so much any more.
Today, in the eyes of the football-watching nation, Michigan is more like a football museum. The Wolverines represent everything the game once was and no longer is — right down to the winged helmets. They play in a museum that they can no longer fill. They just lost a historic rival and can’t seem to beat another.
If I was a high-caliber high school player trying to pick a college, you’d have a pretty tough time convincing me to go to Michigan. The same goes if I were a coach.
Michigan has the money to afford anyone they want to hire. The problem is, you can’t force someone to want to come to Ann Arbor and flip a house. That’s essentially what you’d be hiring someone to do, as the program cannot be called anything else at this moment besides a “fixer-upper.”
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There was a time when, if the Michigan job came open, coaches would be banging down the door to get the job. Nowadays, we are hearing report after report of coaches denying interest in or turning down offers to coach college football’s winningest program. We are quickly learning — across the entire sport — that history and tradition mean nothing.
Think about it. When was the last time Michigan was actually relevant? You’d have to go back to 1997, when they won their last national championship. The sad part is, they’ve even won four conference titles since then, but not a single one of them came without three losses.
Sadly, the fact that Michigan is without a football coach right now is not a surprise. They forced out the only coach to bring them a national title over the past 66 years. They followed that up by firing a hot, young coach who showed improvement in each of his first three seasons. Just a couple of weeks ago, they fired the guy who many thought was the perfect hire just a few years ago.
The bottom line is that Michigan Football has fooled both itself and its fans into thinking it’s something that it hasn’t been since the first half of the 20th Century — a great program. Everything about the program feels old. The results have been mediocre. To put it into perspective, Nebraska just fired a coach who won nine games a year for seven straight seasons because they did not want mediocrity. Michigan has won nine or more games just three times in the past ten seasons.
Forget history, with the current layout of the Big Ten’s divisional structure, whoever the next coach is at Michigan will have to compete for wins and recruits with two of the most successful coaches in the college game in Mark Dantonio and Urban Meyer. He also has to compete with James Franklin, one of the hottest young coaches in the country, at the helm of one of the most storied programs in the game at Penn State. The next Michigan coach has to go through all three of them just to reach the conference championship game.
That’s a tall order and a job for a big-time, experienced coach. The problem is, it doesn’t look like any big-time coaches are clamoring to land the position. Jim Harbaugh — a Michigan man and coach who has success at the college level — seems to be the hot name being thrown around right now. The longer this process goes on, the less of a chance Michigan has to land him. Reports continue to surface about Harbaugh wanting to stay in the NFL.
If I were him, I wouldn’t chance going to Ann Arbor and possibly ruining my own legacy at this point in my career. A failure to win a conference title during his tenure would certainly do that.
The only other big name out there who hasn’t publicly denied interest in the Michigan job is Greg Schiano. Even then, if he was going to be the guy, he would have been hired by now, as he is currently unemployed. Was Schiano offered the job? Did he turn it down? Thanks to modern-day coaching searches being conducted like CIA intelligence operations, we may never know.
The only thing we know now is that Michigan Football is without a coach. Their inability to land a big name –or any name for that matter — thus far speaks volumes about the perception of the program. Like Nebraska, you get the sense that the fans have a flawed image of what the program actually is in 2014. Many expected a big name to fill their coaching void, too. Instead, they hired a coach who finished dead-last in the Pac-12 North this season and sold the hire to the masses as the guy they wanted all along.
I’ll be shocked if a similar situation does not unfold at Michigan. They’ll hire a relative unknown, spin it as a fresh new look and new direction, and hope that the fans buy in and don’t see what the rest of the nation has seen for quite some time now: Michigan football is history.