warde manuel has been informed

[Bryan Fuller]
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208

Exit Harbaugh: The Takes
Brian • January 25, 2024 • 12:46pm

Well: Jim Harbaugh decided to go out on top, at least as far as college goes. As you have no doubt already heard, he's taken the Chargers job. Michigan is already in the process of hiring Sherrone Moore and will have a press conference announcing it as soon as they can. Technically they're supposed to post the job for a week before they can hire anyone, but IIRC that's some sort of Department of Education diversity initiative and Sherrone Moore is about to be the first black head coach in program history, so they're applying for a waiver.

Let's get some h2 tags up in here.

 

This was probably inevitable

Harbaugh had flirted with the NFL the past two offseason and just culminated a nine-year career with three Big Ten titles and Michigan's first national title since 1997. He checked one of the items on his bucket list (a term popularized by the 2007 film Bucket List) and there are only two left: win a Super Bowl and beat Kathy Lee Gifford in an arm-wrestling contest. He cannot do the former at Michigan.

I don't think money really matters to Harbaugh, nor do I think he "needed to feel loved." He has more money than he knows what to do with. He mows his own lawn and one day I went into Home Depot and literally the first person I saw was Harbaugh, no doubt there to do some errand 99.999% of multi-millionaires delegate. And if the man wanted to feel loved and appreciated he would not be leaving a Michigan fanbase still in the outer stratosphere for an NFL team that almost literally has no fans.

I think the thought process went like this: can I win the Super Bowl here? Will they hire the GM I want? Will I have full control otherwise? The answer to the first is "yes, I am Jim Harbaugh." Once the answers to the latter two were also yes, Michigan could have given Harbaugh a fully guaranteed 16 million dollars a year and a rider that he gets to pull out every hair in Tony Petitti's eyebrows and it wouldn't have mattered.

This does not happen to other college coaches who win titles because the transition from one to the other almost never works. In the past 20 years there has been one coach who had an extended, successful college tenure after a successful NFL one. His name is Jim Harbaugh. Pete Carroll is the only other guy in the picture, and Carroll had a 33-31 NFL record before taking the Seahawks job. Is the NFL going to hire Dabo? In a word, lol. I remember what being an NFL coach did to Nick friggin' Saban. I would pay money to see Dabo coach an NFL team.

[AFTER THE JUMP: keep Herbert, keep Herbert, keep Herbert]

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67

MGoPodcast 14.17: Ojabo the Program
Seth • January 23, 2023 • 7:00am

​1 hour and 17 minutes

The Sponsors

Thank you to Underground Printing for making this all possible. Rishi and Ryan have been our biggest supporters from the beginning. Check out their wide selection of officially licensed Michigan fan gear at their 3 store locations in Ann Arbor or learn about their custom apparel business at undergroundshirts.com.

Our associate sponsors are: Peak Wealth Management, HomeSure Lending, Ann Arbor Elder Law, Michigan Law Grad, Human Element, The Phil Klein Insurance Group, Venue by 4M where we recorded this, TicketIQ! and The Nose Bleeds, which is the Sklars Bros’ reboot of Cheap Seats on UFC Fight Pass.

1. Basketball Post-Minnesota

starts at 1:00

How did we get to a throwaway year? We got fool's gold five-stars who weren't great college players, Frankie bolted for insane reasons, Llewellin got hurt, Michigan own-goaled themselves on Terrance Shannon, Hunter doesn't have the same motivation. Next year? Recruits aren't going to change things but could get everybody back. Year it's like: 2006, except we're not going to have a linebacker covering the slot...unless it's Moten?

[The rest of the writeup and the player after THE JUMP]

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[Patrick Barron]
Comment Count

95

Unverified Voracity Has Notified Person
Brian • January 18, 2023 • 11:28am

A sponsor note of a different variety. The long-term sponsor of this post, Richard Hoeg, is a good guy and and excellent lawyer who we've had on our podcast a couple times. He also recently suffered a stroke. His family has a gofundme up as he embarks on his recovery.

It's already done quite well because Richard had spent years building his own online community, which you may know if you leaked over from here to there. If Richard was important to you in some way I encourage you to donate.

I have informed the guy whose job it is to do the thing I just did. Harbaugh back, hooray, but also this is a pretty weird way to go about informing the world:

Ono tweets a lot about the stuff he's doing but as of yet I haven't detected a tendency to self-aggrandize. They're mostly anodyne boilerplate things. The Harbaugh's back tweet stands out, and has caused the conspiracy-minded sections of the internet to wonder if this is fallout from a frosty relationship between Warde Manuel and some combination of Ono and/or Harbaugh. Harbaugh's quote on the matter mentions Ono but not Manuel:

This kind of thing usually doesn't happen even if there is some tension between the parties. I'd caution against reading too much into it; on the other hand "I have communicated the news to our athletic director" is indicative of a process that the athletic director did not accomplish himself.

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