Michigan football's problem is hiring, not sign-stealing
It's been said, but I thought I'd compile a list:
D.J. Durkin: 2015. Didn't cause trouble at Michigan AFAIK, to be fair, but later got a player killed at Maryland.
Matt Weiss: 2021-22. Computer crimes.
Glenn "Shemy" Schembechler: 2023. Bigot.
Connor Stalions: 2022-23. Conned the program and as a result has given everyone a big headache.
Alex Yood: 20??-2023. Accused of soliciting a minor.
Did I miss someone? I'm nervous that I missed someone. I deliberately left off Bob Shoop (2020), because we really know nothing about his odd disappearance.
Note Stalions is by far the least offensive of the lot. He didn't get anyone killed, he's not being investigated by the FBI, and there's no evidence he's a bigot or a pedophile. Also note the first half of Harbaugh's tenure was nowhere near as eventful as the past several years, and it's really not clear if Michigan knew what Durkin was capable of.
But even all that said, this is a problem! The coaching staff isn't that big so Weiss, Shemy, Stalions, and Yood alone make for a terrible streak. If Harbaugh's to stick around (and frankly this is a track record well worth a raised eyebrow, however well the team's doing), the Athletic Department clearly needs to step in and vet his hires. I'm not buying any argument that Manuel is "too busy" or otherwise unable to do this, for two reasons:
1) When your football coach is causing this much trouble, the question is not whether to intervene, but to what extent.
2) On that, if Manuel would get off his ass, the AD has the revenue and agency to create a position that literally does nothing but vet Harbaugh's hires, and would pay itself back in problems avoided. The entire point of a leadership position is to delegate, so delegate this. Hire a damn firm if you have to. To state the obvious to anyone who's gone through a background check, there are companies that specialize in this.
There is absolutely no way Michigan is helpless here. They can't afford to do nothing, really.
FWIW, fuck the NCAA. Considering the legacy of Robert Anderson to put things in perspective, I couldn't give a flying fuck about signs or coaches' fee-fees. But also considering the legacy of Robert Anderson (which was settled less than a year ago), this is the one thing Michigan cannot afford to fuck up, yet the quality of hires seems to be going in the wrong direction. What's next, and is anyone going to do anything about it?
If anything, all the attention on sign-stealing is distracting from a genuinely serious problem. Stalions is a lunatic, but Michigan's hired worse. That. . . that is. . . our attention should be focused on that.
November 2nd, 2023 at 9:57 PM ^
Even considering the argument that some of these coaches may have caused problems only after joining Michigan's staff, in my experience a person can't hide their true colors everywhere or for very long. That goes tenfold in the era of social media, when one of these coaches' bigotry was out there for the world to see, and another wrote a 600-page manifesto.
The whole point of vetting hires is to answer these questions while they're still questions, not after they've become publicized problems.
November 3rd, 2023 at 1:18 AM ^
Is the manifesto on social media? In all fairness, most organizations don’t run background checks out interview processes with nearly the intensity that went into the C Stalions investigation. I’m not sure that a thorough interview process would have uncovered any of these things.
November 2nd, 2023 at 10:38 PM ^
The assumption here seems to be that Michigan's record of mistaken hires is somehow different than that of college football at large. That assumption appears to be unsupported by any analysis.
In any large organization, there will be mistakes. Before we declare Michigan's problems to be a crisis, let's see how abnormal they are.
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:05 AM ^
"Other people do it" is not and has never been an ethical standard. It's an explicit abandonment of ethical standards.
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:44 AM ^
"Other people do it" in terms of making honest mistakes is very different from "other people do it" in terms of ignoring red flags in the hiring process. Other than Shemy, whose malfeaseance was on Twitter for anyone with an account to see, how confident are you that ANY of the other examples could have been caught in the hiring process? You can't say "Harbaugh shouldn't have hired DJ Durkin in 2015 because he'd later go on to kill a player in 2016 at his next employer." That's not "abandoning ethical standards," it's "existing in linear time." Harbaugh's not a precog, nor should he be asked to be one.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:01 AM ^
I'll say it again: tigers don't change their stripes.
Durkin turned out to be toxic.
Stalions turned out to be a lunatic.
Weiss turned out to be a criminal.
Shemy turned out to be a bigot.
In my experience, these sorts of qualities are not only possible to sniff out, but absurdly easy to do so.
Now, I'll concede a background check wouldn't have found much, because those are useless. I was being sarcastic there. But hiring managers usually can read vibes, whereas Harbaugh clearly can't, and we're hearing stories about how quickly he'll decide on a candidate. Weiss came over from the Ravens and Shemy is a legacy hire, so that says something about the quality of nepotism hires (Jay is more the exception than the rule).
So at the very least, he's being inexcusably reckless. That is something that can change and should. It won't be perfect, but he shouldn't be allowed to, say, hire someone just based on a phone call or a personal referral. It's not rare for a candidate to be screened more formally, by multiple colleagues. Ironically, Stalions (who started as a volunteer) would've been the least likely to get found that way, but again: he's kind of not the problem here.
November 3rd, 2023 at 11:02 AM ^
You expect a team that hired Jim Harbaugh to veto Stalions because he's weird and/or too intense about loving Michigan football?
November 3rd, 2023 at 12:24 PM ^
While I am personally sympathetic to your overall point that Michigan could do a better job of vetting it's football program hires, your anecdotal analysis (we don't know much of anything about Michigan football's hiring process or how those who are hired are performance reviewed and monitored) is marred by hindsight and small sample bias.
Durkin doesn't count bc what he did at Maryland happened later. Couldn't have been foreseen in advance. Weiss and Stallions appear to have acted badly in ways that might have been discovered at the time of their hiring or caught sooner after they were hired. But again, unfortunately, that is speculation based on hindsight.
Schemy is the one that really should have been better vetted and never hired in the first place. No excuses on that one but IMHO it's the one glaring and obvious example, which makes it an outlier.
One other thing: your statement that hiring managers often pick up vibes is a common misconception. Employment interviews are notoriously unreliable predictors of future work performance, let alone bad behavior. People are on their best behavior during the interview and those doing the interviewing can't read minds.
Despite the pervasive mythology around this subject, no one can predict future behavior. The only variable that comes close is past behavior, which is far from a reliable indicator and often only useful in hindsight.
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:55 AM ^
Being "normal" in the world of college football is a problem. We should be better.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:53 AM ^
I appreciate someone seeing things my way but I don't think we're winning this. Apparently the consensus is, "Michigan has resources we can only dream of but the crappy status quo is OK, because no one else is bothering to do better, either."
What an inspiring culture we have in this country.
November 2nd, 2023 at 10:49 PM ^
Obviously there are some checks that need to be standard/automatic. That would have nabbed Shemy and maybe Stalions.
But exactly how do you filter the other guys if they haven't shown their issues yet?
I think you have to allow that in an organization that's big enough, you're going to have some mistakes in hiring.
The real key is what you do when the mistake is revealed. And I think we're doing fine on that front.
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:29 AM ^
I'd hope we're doing social media screening of people after these two. Seems like that would have raised some serious red flags for Shemy and Stalions. Shemy wouldn't have been hired, Stalions hopefully asked some pointed questions about being...a crazy person.
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:57 AM ^
Crazy guy being funded by his family trying to make a career of coaching... is probably a guy you should stay away from.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:59 AM ^
My guess is that describes a decent percentage of successful college coaches in their early years. Our own Jim Harbaugh was oft described as a high-functioning lunatic when he first arrived here.
There's crazy and there's out-of-control. A bit quirky and absent-minded professory can be good. Off the rails can be harder to predict, if my dating life is any indication.
That's not to say we don't need better vetting.
November 3rd, 2023 at 11:22 AM ^
"My guess is that describes a decent percentage of successful college coaches in their early years."
Probably true - and based on my experience, being a young college coach... in and of itself - is a red flag.
November 4th, 2023 at 5:46 PM ^
What on earth does this mean? All coaches are young at some point.
November 2nd, 2023 at 11:18 PM ^
100% correct whether folks here want to be honest with themselves or not. Much as I dislike the way this is playing out and think we are being dragged through the mud by unseemly people themselves, this is totally self-inflicted. When it happens as often as it has recently it’s not a question of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch, it’s a question do why are you picking from rotten trees or at least looking for signs of rot before you pick the spoiled ones. Insofar as what other programs have done, that is beside the point. We are the guys that got caught, or more accurately, targeted for entrapment. Other schools didn’t. Ask yourself why, and when you have an answer seek to mitigate the problem and stop stepping on your own dick.
November 2nd, 2023 at 11:29 PM ^
Weiss worked for John Harbaugh. Stallions was a Marine. I doubt he brought his Michigan Manifesto to the interview. Was Yood on a sex offender list? How much can you really know or anticipate?
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:01 AM ^
When I got hired... as an engineering intern... at a nuclear power plant -
1) I had a significant background check. Like FBI guys called everyone on my reference list, and asked them for references then called them. They talked to friends, family, high school teachers, sports coaches...
2) I had to take multiple psychological evaluations. One was the MMPI, and I don't recall the other.
I was an 19 year old intern making $14/hr programming computer databases... at a plant that did this for hundreds of employees... and didn't involve nearly the money that funnels through Michigan football every year.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:02 AM ^
Nuclear power plant is not equivalent to college football.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:17 AM ^
You're right - Michigan football has WAY more money, and WAY less employees to screen - so should be doing a significantly BETTER vetting job for someone who could seriously damage their $200 million a year business than a nuclear power plant does for hundreds of people who can't even get inside the plant.
November 3rd, 2023 at 11:04 AM ^
A nuclear power plant operating company has WAY more money than UM's athletics department. Further, employee screening is done by law, not because SG&E and company want to do it. Comparing a nuclear power plant to Michigan football is like comparing apples to orkas.
November 3rd, 2023 at 11:29 AM ^
"A nuclear power plant operating company has WAY more money than UM's athletics department."
Yes... they also have 40x as many employees, and significantly less profits.
"Further, employee screening is done by law"
Sure... and irrelevant. Law does not prevent the athletic department from increasing their screening. That is it isn't required doesn't mean you can't choose to do it.
November 3rd, 2023 at 4:07 PM ^
I don't care how much money is thrown around. College football is meaningless Saturday entertainment. A nuclear power plant has the potential to be a national security issue. Not even in the same ballpark.
November 3rd, 2023 at 11:45 AM ^
Going by what we now know about Mr. Stalions, he is his own nuclear power plant.
November 3rd, 2023 at 11:25 AM ^
People really overestimate what you can do with a background check. It's not going to find things that other people haven't seen, or things that the candidate hasn't even done yet. It's also not going to find things that the candidate has successfully concealed from everyone.
I mean, a background check certainly didn't weed out Jack Teixeira, who gave away US military secrets to impress his Discord buddies.
I'm also skeptical of the value of psychological evaluations in hiring. I think they can be a useful tool in some circumstances--but not for somebody who knows they have to lie in order to cover up certain things. Like Alex Yood presumably did.
I definitely reject the idea that a good hiring manager can tell this kind of thing with their gut. Even the best managers hire the wrong person from time to time, and many people are good at concealing who they really are from the rest of the world. I mean, many of the people on this blog thought Dave Brandon was a good AD for at least his first year or two on the job.
Of the people OP mentioned, Shemy is the only one who absolutely should [edit: not! definitely not!] have been hired. The other guys certainly proved to be bad hires, but unless you can show me that people knew about the problems that got them hired in advance this is bullshit.
November 2nd, 2023 at 11:24 PM ^
I didn't realize there was a test one could administer during the interview process to determine if you'd commit a crime years later.
Schemy was an obvious bad hire that any competent background check of social media would highlight, but based on comments made here people at UM knew he was a racist asshole and either agreed with him or didn't care, which I can assume is somewhat common on college football staffs. But sure, that's a bad hire.
Weiss had been a coach at nearly a dozen places for nearly 2 decades, including the NFL, before he came to UM. I didn't realize it was UM who dropped the ball there.
Stalions had been a Marine and worked at Navy seemingly without incident. He had been around the program for years. Again, apparently only UM should have foreseen he'd do something this stupid.
Yood had been a student at UM before joining the staff. Again, if you've got a way to know a guy is an alleged pedophile beforehand please share it with law enforcement.
So yeah, one out of those 4 should have been stopped. That's not good but look across college football and you've got guys with way more red flags getting jobs. Durkin is the DC at A&M. Kendall Briles is the OC at TCU. His brother in law is the OC at Oklahoma and he apparently brought his father in law Art onto the field earlier this year without telling anyone. OU's HC Venables has been accused credibly of stealing signs for years. Hugh Freeze is the HC at Auburn. MSU is trying to hire Urban Meyer.
So no, I reject the premise that this poor hiring practice is so ehow unique to UM. It's probably more apt to say that college football attracts and promotes some awful behaviors if you can win games.
November 3rd, 2023 at 12:14 AM ^
Didn't Stalions do something weird with student data in the Naval Academy?
November 3rd, 2023 at 7:23 AM ^
Not unless you have a reference, no.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:31 AM ^
It came out via the text messages that he claimed he got Cadet demographic data, including SAT and GPA numbers, by name-dropping the HC. There's no evidence beyond that and given his proclivities to lie I wouldn't be shocked if he just made it up. But regardless that's not something you'd know about during the interview process.
November 3rd, 2023 at 8:49 AM ^
Yes, Schemy is the one who could have been most easily vetted and his background uncovered. But, he was Schemy, the son of Bo Schembechler. Do you think that might have been a reason that they didn't go full sleuth mode on him?
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:11 AM ^
He was Schemy, the son of Bo Schembechler which should have been a reason that they knew not to hire him, no investigation needed.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:33 AM ^
The Bo legacy remains one of those shitty things that keeps on giving, but also he had worked in the NFL for some time so my assumption is they also assumed if he was really problematic he'd have been sniffed out.
And let's be honest here - he's not the only guy to hold racist beliefs about people working in college athletics.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:09 AM ^
"I didn't realize there was a test one could administer during the interview process to determine if you'd commit a crime years later. "
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
Paulhus Deception Scales
California Psychological Inventory
Etc.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:38 AM ^
Personality tests are, in fact, not going to tell you if someone is going to commit a crime in the future, unless you honestly believe there is a precise collection of traits and scores that make one into a criminal.
I'll also save a discussion about the often-found racial and social biases built into these tests, but rest assured that if you think flagging people and denying them jobs because they scored in a particular matrix of the CPI is going to eliminate criminal masterminds being in your employ then we've got bigger issues.
November 2nd, 2023 at 11:49 PM ^
Durkin, aside from not having had to leave Michigan in absolute shame, is from 2015. The others are at least all sort of recent.
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:54 AM ^
There's the rub. The folks here pooh-pooh-ing the recent string of bad hires as "typical" are ignoring that this wasn't a thing at all until recently.
November 3rd, 2023 at 12:02 AM ^
Durkin and Weiss are extremely hindsight complaints. As far as we know, there were no similar incidents for either guy that would have given Michigan pause on hiring.
Shemy - yep, dropped the ball.
Yood - Outside of the video that recently came out, what's this dudes personal/online life look like?Look - if everything is true in the video circulating out there it is pretty bad for this guy....but if we're saying that Michigan has a hiring problem, there needs to be some adjacent material floating around out there (and there might be! I just haven't been plugged in enough to know) to say "yep. look, this guy is a perv!" IF that exists, and Michigan hired him anyway, yeah...that is a problem.
Stalions - Seems like the guy is really passionate about Michigan football, and maybe a bit out there. But, to put this as a Michigan hiring issue - how could this behavior have been predicted?
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:21 AM ^
I like that the OP organized the various "bad hires," but in looking at them, I draw a different conclusion. Flub rate = low.
I don't know what the football operations staff is, precisely, but I'm guessing it's 50-150 people; call it ~100. Let's just say that the average tenure is 3 years, so 200 people have been hired over the course of Harbaugh's stay. Coach has hired 200 people and gets 5 flakes? And some of them would have been very difficult to predict?
I see room for improvement, not cause for concern.
November 3rd, 2023 at 12:06 AM ^
Harbaugh’s friend, associate AD Jim Minick was fired for OWI in 2015.
Dan Enos was on staff for a week? Drevno, Pep, McElwain, even that DBs coach before Clink all underachieved to various degrees.
Also, Harbaugh said he hired Gattis after a single phone call. I know Gattis was up for the Broyles here but does anyone really think that was a good hire? Gattis has bombed at his next two stops, dissed the program on his way out, and the offense seems MUCH better without him.
What concerns me is what we know about Harbaugh’s process or lack thereof. Schemy and Gattis were both basically a phone call and done. I’m not aware of a single instance of Harbaugh allowing sufficient vetting of any analyst, staffer, or coach. Harbaugh learns and adapts in a LOT of ways compared to most coaches but hiring seems to be one area where he gets it wrong too often without seeming to change much.
November 3rd, 2023 at 7:16 AM ^
Shemy was a legacy hire, but someone in HR clearly dropped the ball or let it go.
Gattis is a failure of skills/competency, but HR isn't screening for that. They're looking for things like criminal records and such. With that, he's clean.
As for the others - and speaking as someone with an HR background - unless there is documented history of issues (and I'm willing to bet there wasn't for any of the so-called bad hires), no background check will catch what hasn't happened short of deep psychoanalysis and a PI possibly digging through their lives with a fine-toothed comb. And that ain't happening.
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:49 AM ^
I was being sarcastic about the background checks. Those are junk.
I think the point Vote_Crisler_1937 is making wrt Gattis isn't his ethical record so much that in practice the hiring manager is the last line of defense against lunatics, not HR, and in this regard Harbaugh trusts his gut too much. Gattis didn't cause any ethical problems, but he turned out to be a dud, and how he was hired was waaay too gunslinger. It's the recklessness. Candidates need to be screened by multiple people, and if we're trying to prevent the next Stalions, one of those people needs to be someone who can read intentions better than Harbaugh.
In my experience, lunatics really aren't that hard to sniff out. HR doesn't care, but if Harbaugh can't, then he needs help here, and it's Manuel's job to make that help available. The process shouldn't ever be just a single phone call.
November 3rd, 2023 at 7:20 PM ^
You get me Dragon Child. It’s the recklessness despite it not going great in the past. Both HR issues and skill issues with very little adjustment. Harbaugh needs someone to challenge him a bit more in this area.
November 3rd, 2023 at 7:29 AM ^
I posted the same thing in another thread and got downvoted. The last 4 were in the past couple years. I don't know what is going on but something needs to change. I know you aren't going to find many choir boys in the pool of available football coaches/assistants, but you can't continually have problems like this.
November 3rd, 2023 at 8:35 AM ^
Does anyone know for a fact what the vetting process is or how the hiring process works at U of M. Until you know that you cant's just assume that these people didn't go through some sort of background checks. I worked for a company that had a pretty thorough series of background checks and we still ended up with a lot of undesirable employees. Companies are so afraid of getting sued nowadays that it's often hard to get good information about individuals from other sources.
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:27 AM ^
I think we can say with certainty that Shemy wasn't properly vetted. Seeing what someone has liked on Twitter is super-easy to do, and the general public did it after his hiring was announced.
MAYBE that's true of Stallions too; I have a hard time believing a guy with a manifesto didn't throw some obvious weirdo vibes.
November 3rd, 2023 at 9:41 AM ^
I'll cop to being flippant when mentioning background checks; that was snidely directed at jackasses who crop up to apply the cult-of-personality corporate executive worship bullshit to Warde Manuel, wherein everything good that happens is because of his genius and bold vision, and anything bad he is completely helpless to prevent. I was basically joking that he could at least do the minimum.
But OK let's be real; "the minimum" was probably done, and all of the above flew through it, because it's the minimum. Snark aside, I'm well aware that background checks are mostly worthless garbage. Most HRs don't actually care if the hires suck; their mission is to make sure the employer can't be successfully sued, no more, so these screening companies just make a cursory scan of "has this candidate committed a felony" or some such. Hence the common practice is to hire and then discuss ethics. (So if the argument here is "Michigan isn't alone", I will point out yet again that the "common" practice is really biting them in the butt right now, so maybe that method isn't working out for them. I suppose everyone should be sitting down for this, but it's okay to do better than the lowest common denominator.)
So beyond the completely useless minimum, in most places the responsibility to make sure the candidate isn't a lunatic falls on the hiring manager. . . which would be Jim Harbaugh. Who obviously isn't cut out for measuring someone's character, despite caring far more than most about these things. Hence an institutional change is needed here, is what I'm saying. It's not rare for a candidate to be interviewed by several different people. But even if your standard is the bottom-of-the-barrel, "well Michigan at least can't get sued", bad hires are, well, bad. At best they're unproductive and at worst they cause you serious PR problems. So there's a non-ethical incentive to get this right. I do expect 90% of any interview to still be about "can the person do the work", but tigers don't change their stripes, so IME you ask someone just a few questions about how they'd handle certain situations, you can usually sniff out a propensity to commit offenses with ridiculous ease.
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:01 AM ^
Serious question: have you conducted interviews as a hiring manager before? And then continued to be the supervisor for that person that you hired?
November 3rd, 2023 at 10:22 AM ^
I'm not a manager but I have been involved in the hiring process.
One of the things I found odd was that I was often the only person involved with any interest in the candidate's character. Everyone wants to know if they can do the work, but I considered it common sense to find out if they had any sense of accountability. I keep telling everyone, who cares how qualified they are if I can't trust them?
I suppose that makes me a weirdo? Does no one else actually ask about these things?
November 3rd, 2023 at 11:57 AM ^
I don't think it's unusual to care about a candidate's character, but it is incredibly difficult to judge from an interview. About 50% of the questions I ask in an interview are behavioral and the other 50% are technical. The problem is that anyone can say over the course of a few hours that they're trustworthy, that they're a team player, and all that. Anyone can tell stories that give that impression. Lots of people are great first dates.
But in my experience, you only get a TRUE sense of character from a person after working with them for a few weeks. Interviewing is a fuzzy art at best, just because you get limited time with the person. The most foolproof method I know of is hiring college interns; you get them over the summer for 8-12 weeks and you know their character and competence very well halfway through.
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