Juwan Howard Fired As Michigan Men's Basketball Coach
2.5 years ago, your author wrote a brief post about the news that Juwan Howard had been extended as Michigan Men's Basketball Head Coach. In the intervening time since being given that five-year extension, Howard's Wolverines went 43-55 and today, just two days after finishing 8-24 in the 2023-24 season (Michigan's worst record in four decades), Howard has been fired. Statement:
Michigan AD Warde Manuel:
— Alejandro Zúñiga (@ByAZuniga) March 15, 2024
“Despite his love of his alma mater and the positive experience that our student-athletes had under his leadership, it was clear to me that the program was not living up to our expectations and not trending in the right direction.” https://t.co/uwT7s6FXxi
Juwan Howard was hired May 22, 2019, after former coach John Beilein exited for the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers. Michigan's coaching search was muddled due to a lack of quality candidates, with the search coming a few months after most coaching vacancies were filled nationally. Howard was the consensus option, a program icon as a player from the Fab Five days who embarked on a long and successful professional playing career. After his playing days, he had been an assistant coach in Miami under esteemed NBA coach Erik Spolestra. Howard had no NCAA coaching experience, or head coaching experience of any kind, but was regarded as a talented up-and-coming coach.
Howard's first season was rocky, finishing 19-12 after getting off to an illustrious start. Michigan was only 10-10 in conference play but were headed for (roughly) a 6 seed in the NCAA Tournament, thanks to the B1G being loaded in 2019-20. The NCAA Tournament never happened due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was an okay opening. Howard followed it up with a magical 23-5 season that earned him the extension, winning the B1G Regular Season Championship and a #1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. The team made it to the Elite Eight but fell just short to a Cinderella UCLA team.
Howard brought in an elite recruiting class for 2021-22 and signed the extension shortly into the next season, then holding a 2-0 record. Things got murky after that, the team alternating wins and losses before just barely slipping into the NCAA Tournament as an 11-seed, with a 17-14 record. Along the way, Howard was suspended for five games for slapping a Wisconsin assistant coach during an infamous altercation following a loss to the Badgers in Madison. In the NCAA Tournament, the Wolverines moved past Colorado State and then upset Tennessee, making the Sweet 16 and seeming to salvage an otherwise frustrating year. The team got blown out by Villanova in the next round and the season came to an end.
[Marc-Gregor Campredon]
The wheels came off over the next two seasons leading to the present. Howard's 2022-23 team endured a series of baffling late-game collapses that submarined their season, narrowly missing the NCAA Tournament and then getting bounced from the NIT after another meltdown against Vanderbilt. The offseason saw star Hunter Dickinson transfer out of the program, while Kobe Bufkin and Juwan's son Jett Howard declared for the NBA Draft.
Michigan struggled to fill those holes, as they battled continued problems with the transfer portal. Howard also underwent a serious heart procedure in the offseason, leaving him unable to coach the beginning of the 2023-24 season. The season that unfolded was a catastrophe, starting reasonably well but coming apart by December before losing 19 of 21 games in calendar 2024 to end the year. Along the way another incident unfolded, an altercation with strength coach Jon Sanderson, leading to Sanderson's exit from the program and recent hiring by Illinois. Michigan finished last in the B1G for the first time in over 55 years and were easily bounced on Wednesday night from the Big Ten Tournament by Penn State, ending their season.
Despite frequent discussion of whether Howard would return, from a bird's eye view Michigan had no choice. The conditions of the program had deteriorated so severely that only one choice could be made here, coming on the same morning that The Athletic published a piece about cultural problems in the Michigan program. The candidates to replace Howard are not yet obvious and the next few days will see people, including AD Warde Manuel, assemble a list of targets. We will have coverage on that in the near future but for today, the news is simply that a long-needed change has been made.
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For a successor- How about Mark Byington, present head coach at James Madison, his career has a nice progression curve to it. I know that pick wouldn't be sexy enough for some, But a hardworking under the radar coach might be appealing.
Would Creighton to Michigan even be considered upward trajectory after the past couple seasons?
McDermott is my 1st choice 🤷♂️
I like that choice.
Yes, it would be.
In the past week, Greg McDermott signed a long-term contract extension with Creighton.
It wouldn't surprise me to see Fred Hoiberg get an interview, especially with the events in Nebraska this past week.
Greg McDermott signed a long-term contract extension with Creighton.
Events like this are often cited as deterrents to coaching hires. But all it takes to get out of a contract is paying the buyout. People have blamed Warde for not getting Harbaugh signed earlier as if it would have prevented him from going to the NFL. It wouldn’t, the Chargers would have gladly paid that buyout. Similar to Bama paying DeBoer’s $10 million buyout with Washington.
Creighton is a private school, so they don’t have to disclose the salary of their coaches but Wikipedia says his salary is $1.4 million (likely before the extension). So it isn’t like he’s being paid an obscene amount of money and I can’t imagine it’s some outlandish buyout that Michigan wouldn’t easily be able to pay.
Whether McDermott would be interested is another issue entirely. But McDermott (or any other potential candidate) signing a recent extension isn’t a major hurdle.
Warde should have assembled his top three weeks, if not months, ago. You don’t wait until after the firing. Succession plans should always be in place for when coaches leave and you didn’t anticipate it. That should be a basic function of the AD. If not then shame on Warde.
Edit: I would assume he has as well. I was responding to the OP which suggests he would start now making a list
True- maybe he has.
If there is one thing that should come from today's news, it's that Warde doesn't have a NY Times-style needle telling the public 'there is an 82% chance I an firing Juwan Howard next week, and a 56% chance I will replace him with Mark Pope.' Nor should there be.
How do you know his top three list isn't in there somewhere???
I am literally cleaning out my filing cabinet now and I want to know when they broke into my house.
The Warde hate here has gotten ridiculous. I just find it hard to believe Warde hasn't even entertained the notion of what coach he may want to hire.
Sure, but is anyone commenting here confident in any list Warde drew up?
I think any 5 suggestions posted here are likely as good or better than any list he has. So I'm open to that discussion!
I'm assuming the verbiage over starting to put a list together just now is just journalistic pablum given any competent administrator would have done all this long ago.
I dislike Manuel as much as most of us who know nothing about his job other than he tends to exhibit traits most of us have learned to associate with do-nothing administrator types.
It's a shame. I wish him the best. I hope he gets a chance to critically examine his experience and actions here before seeking coaching work again.
That came off as the smarmiest way of saying "good riddance" I may have ever seen!
First I felt a little relief and then felt sad. The Fab 5 was the first thing I remember being emotionally invested in regarding any Michigan sport. Earlier in the season I would have been fine with keeping Juwan and letting him blow things up and start over, but they were just so freaking bad. Historically bad. Yes, he had heart surgery, but this has been consistently trending this way since he got hired.
My take is that Warde waited until the end of the season in deference to a well-loved former player who loves his alma mater and who had a serious heart procedure prior to the season that required months of recovery. I think there’s a certain amount of humanity that is required in that situation. If it meant a lost season, then so be it. If there was an opportunity to fire Juwan in season, it was last season, after the Wisconsin game. But he was given a second chance. If you want to debate a decision, it should be that one, not why he wasn’t let go in the middle of this season.
You make that all sound good but Juwan Howard is a very rich man with a long professional career who was given every chance to right his own ship.
The players lost their season. They only have a few years as college players. They lost a significant percentage of their time as Michigan Wolverines, so Juwan Howard could. . . what, have some dignity while the door was smacking his ass?
I wanted it to work out. I heartily endorsed his hire. Kept hoping he could turn it around. But the priorities here are badly misplaced. This season was NOT Manuel's or Howard's to "sacrifice" so some well-off old men could save some fucking face. It was taken from the players.
At the end of last season Howard had two tourney bids (and a third cut because of COVID), a conference crown, one E8 and one S16 appearance. He had missed the tournament with a very young team that dealt with injuries and a tough schedule but still had a winning record overall and in conference. It would have been insane to fire him last year because of performance. If you wanted to fire him for the Wisconsin incident that's fine, but even this blog argued that was an overreaction to what was an ugly but mutually-incited incident.
The revisionist history here drives me insane. Howard should have been fired last year because this year they were terrible is the argument being made, and that is objectively impossible for anyone to do. These guys weren't robbed of a season; they competed at a high level and were part of a bad year but unless we're playing time travel chess it's hard to see how anyone could have foreseen such a turn. And while I don't blame them for all of the team's struggles, at some point not boxing out for a rebound or understanding basic basketball fundamentals on defense is on the players. I do believe Howard when he said his stuff should work because he's calling basic defenses out there and guys simply didn't execute. Or they threw the ball away, or didn't protect the ball in the post, or whatever.
It sucks for everyone involved but Howard got a shorter leash than a lot of coaches have over the years and while this season's calamitous turn necessitated a firing it wasn't remotely predictable.
As long as you're ranting against revisionist history, we're on the same side, but I think that includes conversations as well: I wasn't in favor of firing him after the Wisconsin incident. In fact I was vocally in favor of giving him a second chance.
Would firing him mid-season have salvaged it? Unlikely. But the team was clearly lost, and when it's the head coach dragging things down, you don't make any decision that benefits that guy. At the very least it would've then been the players' season to lose. But instead they had to be "sacrificed" for. . . reasons.
As if anyone here can pretend to be in favor of toiling under a bad boss to make the boss look good.
I just don't think there was some major loss here. The team made the tournament that year (it was 2021-2022, not last season). So again, you aren't firing him before last year, and then he had one bad year with, again, a very young team with a tough schedule. These players weren't forced to go down with some obvious sinking ship at the time, though in hindsight you saw some cracks.
There’s something bigger than the basketball culture and that’s Michigan’s culture. We’re not the kind of school that fires coaches mid-season for performance reasons. It’s unseemly in the Michigan sphere. Bo’s firing of Frieder wasn’t performance based; Frieder was at that point employed by someone else. So firing Howard mid-season would’ve appeased the rabid fans and probably no one else. Likely not the players, whose season wouldn’t have been salvaged.
He should’ve been fired after the Sanderson incident. He was on a zero tolerance policy supposedly yet got away with another incident where he tried to get into a physical altercation. The other stuff mentioned in Quinn’s article just show that Juwan had a bullet proof vest while he was here.
It's funny how all of a sudden a dubiously-sourced Athletic article is now treated as gospel because this fanbase likes the outcome as opposed to when they had dubiously-sourced articles about the football team.
Howard got into a yelling match with Sanderson because both of them, to varying degrees, acted like assholes. That's it - there was no physical altercation and "tried to get into one" is based largely on Sanderson's portrayal via his attorney. Maybe there was murderous intent in his eyes, or maybe Howard got mad at Sanderson yelling at Jace and saying the culture of the team sucked and nobody wanted to coach them, stuff that was mentioned at the time of the incident but apparently has slipped everyone's mind.
So much of this continues to read like weird fan-fic, where Warde and UM's AD is both incredibly incompetent 1.5 months ago but now are very deliberate and thoughtful in their actions now. UM's HR department investigated the matter and didn't find Sanderson's portrayal full accurate because they didn't fire Howard for that but then fired him a couple months later, basically as soon as the season ended. It makes little sense that they'd not take the easy out then, and despite some people (including at this blog) believing that Warde has some massive hard-on for Howard and would never hold him accountable for anything because *reasons*, the most likely scenario was the incident was just a shouting match between two guys and didn't rise to the level of a fireable offense (which likely would have saved UM millions) and then UM's AD looked at the state of the team and fired Howard now because that's what a competent AD does.
March 15th, 2024 at 10:19 PM ^
Given what we know about the histories of the two individuals involved, I’m inclined to believe Sandersons account is pretty close to the truth. Sanderson has never been had any other issues that we know of, while Juwan has gotten into multiple altercations with multiple different people. It’s kinda hard to mistake a guy charging at you and needing to be held back as anything but a guy looking for a fight. That should’ve been the last straw for Juwan given his other previous incidents.
I think Warde made a business decision here. He saw that ticket sales were plummeting and there was likely no chance things would get better with Juwan at the helm. But the notion that this firing couldn’t have justifiably been made sooner is false.
March 15th, 2024 at 10:30 PM ^
And to be clear, I never doubted the veracity of what The Athletic reported in regards to Stalions gate. The issue I, and I'm guessing many others, take is in media outlets like The Athletic and others making it out to be the scandal of the century when in reality it's a minor offense even per the NCAA's own rulebook. So I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of what Quinn reported. Him threatening to slap his son and creating a culture of fear should've resulted in him being shown the door sooner. I know Michigan State lets Izzo get away with whatever he wants but we should strive to be better than places like that.
ive seen short term concern for looking cold hearted doom many a managerial decision for firing someone. Juwan wasnt just suffering but actively causing trouble and embarrassing the program for millions per year.
Things took a regrettable and insurmountable turn for the worst once Juwan stopped wearing suits.
also when he didnt show up till midway through the season
Program reset needed. Was really concerned about AD's comments on effort after last game, given the lack thereof. But this was the right, albeit tough, decision given Howard is a Michigan legend. Hated it didn't work out, but it didn't, so you move on. Would have liked for that to have been before we lost Sanderson to a rival program, but is what it is.
Excited once again for the future of the program. In an NIL world with our success and brand, we should have an advantage.
Will always love that 1 seed team, the excitement that was bringing him back and fact that Howard got the Fab Five back in the building. Good luck to him in the future.
I mean... It was immediately after the game when Warde Manuel made those comments with Juwan standing right next to him. A politically correct non statement is exactly what you should say in that moment.
What most people miss on this board is that Warde is a gentleman.
Agree. I love how proud we all are of the "culture" of support and trust that supposedly exemplifies the football program, but we want Warde to turn on his coaches in a split-second if they start to struggle.
Fuck that. If Michigan has a culture of giving every player — and every coach — a full chance to succeed, rather than jumping ship at the first opportunity ... even if it means sometimes letting them go a bit longer than other schools would ... I'm ok with that. You can't have it both ways.
Now that the necessary firing has happened and it's time to look forward, I think that it's not just important to get the new hire "right." In my opinion the program needs not just a new coach but a hard reset.
The powers that be need to decide if and how we're going to adapt to the new era of NIL and open transfers/free agency and communicate that clearly during interviews. Otherwise there's a substantial risk of hiring a good coach who's approach doesn't match how Michigan plans to support its basketball program.
So I guess that's a "no" on hanging the banners?
Was hoping he could turn it around, but it looks like he's just not made for college head coaching.
Not that I’m calling for him, but had Beilein stayed, the potential 2021 roster could’ve been (had he kept his recruits):
Isaiah Livers, Eli Brooks, Austin Davis, Brandon John’s, David DeJulius, Collin Castleton, Zeb Jackson, Franz Wagner, Cole Bajema, and Jalen Wilson. That roster would have been his best IMO and honestly looking back explains Howard’s 1 year success. Castleton was all SEC, Wilson was a key cog in Kansas winning it all and a draft pick, Wagner a lotto pick, Livers a draft pick, and Davis and Brooks were perfect program guys you need for a locker room and depth. That roster is 10 deep easy!
I don't think that roster is anywhere near what he had in 2013.
Trey Breezy's Naismith year and Stauskas's B1GPOY team were both kinda ridiculous.
Sad but necessary. Love watching the Fab Five reruns on YouTube, especially the Elite Eight win over Ohio (they were a 1 seed) in 1992. And the FF4 wins over Cincy and Kentucky.
We need a guy who has followed a Beilein type path, at least developed programs at two schools (JB had even more than that). A lot of choices out there and we have the money. Even McCasland (age 47) at TTU is a solid candidate. He's only in his 1st year at TTU but did well at N Texas and other schools before that.
Just get us back to NIT level next year while rebuilding and then onto NCAA.
You missed never having been an assistant. We all have seen where THAT got us.
Good luck to Juwan in his next endeavor. It's a shame that this did not work our both for him and for U of M in the long run. Unlike some firings, I'm not glad to see him go other than because it was necessary for the program to turn things around.
I gotta say. I'm not happy. To some, this is a needed day. To me, it's a sad day. When we don't have an effective program to help cultivate one of our own, then I have little hope for this program going forward.
I am just sad because of my totally profound, deep and abiding loyalty to anything Chicago even in the face of wanton statistical evidence to the contrary.
I have spent time with Juwan and know him to be of exceptional character. I feel sad today.
Sad.
I hate that we won't be a part of next week/weekend. But this sucks for everyone. Godspeed Juwan. Efforts appreciated.
What I expected, and also makes the constant hand wringing by people for Warde to "Do Something!" look premature. Oh, also "insiders" like Bacon yet again showing how little they know
Bacon has egg on his face, no donut about it.
Does anybody else find it strange that Alex refers to himself as "your author"?
Juwan needed to go. Warde did the right thing. It would have been administrative malpractice to do anything else given the circumstances. Too bad they couldn't have kept Sanderson within the program.
No. It's a more polished way of writing than inserting e.g. "I think", "in my opinion", etc..
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