Herbert gone

You can love a place and also move on when the infrastructure you work within is impacted daily by people who are incompetent or actively negating your efforts. 

Thanks Warde, et al. 

I worked for a company I truly believed in.  I put in a ton of hours and took abuse from the CEO, because I thought the mission and the business was the right business.  After constantly being questioned on my designs, we ultimately always ended up on my design choices.  

I was layed off without warning right before Christmas.  Plenty of people kept their jobs who hadn't done anything for the company.  The only explanation I got was that it was not a performance based decision. I say, take care of you and your true family.

Brandon broke a lot of the trust that Michigan is a special place to work by firing people who had sacrificed better jobs to stay at Michigan. His hit list Fridays or whatever really showed that despite Michigan being special, it is still run like a business. I don't think less of anyone who makes a better choice for themselves.  If Michigan can't bring in the best, that is on Michigan. 

Focus on bringing in strong people and recognizing and keeping people is key.  

Yeah, Orr left after he saw the offer his assistant got.

I posted a variation on this comment after the podcast summary, and I know it will be downvoted. (Some people can't respond with reasons, only downvotes and snark.)

I totally understand bitching at Warde for this fault or that one. And I totally understand disappointment that things aren't sorting themselves out the way we'd hoped when Harbaugh left, like keeping Jay or Herbert

But there's so much negativity, even anger, that it tugs at the enjoyment. It's almost as if we'd lost all those meaningful games. 

You are highlighting some of the positive aspects of JH.  And, as I clearly said, he has that. 

But you are simply in denial about the other side of the JH coin.  He really does have some serious flaws, and to a level that is atypical.  Why not just admit the obvious?  Many in the fanbase have called him 'weird Jimmy' for good reason.  He is weird.  He has huge upside, but also huge flaws.

I am not really taking this personally. Rather I am looking at it dispassionately, like a person who is not a Michigan fan would.  Same with my analysis of Warde Manuel. 

People who follow CFB intensely, but are not Michigan fans, have seen the Harbaugh flaws.  And if they had any knowledge of Warde Manuel, and more generally how the Michigan AD has been run for decades, they would come to the same conclusions that I have: 'Wow, they really are their own worst enemies over there.'

It's been the case forever in college football that coaches treat what they do as a business. If you look at the history of the most prominent in coaches in CFB history, the amount of hopping around they do, especially early in their careers, is eye-opening. The vast majority of them are out the door immediately when they get what they think is a better offer, whether it's from a power conference program or an NFL franchise. Obviously, that is their right.

And this professional job-hopping by coaches today is always accompanied by gigantic sums of money being thrown at them. No coach voluntarily leaves one job for another without a substantial increase in salary, even if they'd just signed a five-year contract that made them the highest-paid coach in that staff niche in the entire country.

It's also the case that for whatever amount of time they're at a school, they sing the unique and particular advantages and virtues of that school—football tradition and success, football staff, academic strengths, location and campus life, fan loyalty and alumni support, etc etc—and all for the goal of persuading high school players to commit for (ideally) four years, if not five, to play at that school. If necessary, they'll bash other competing programs as inferior in one way or another.

The language is revealing—high school players don't *agree* to play for a school, they commit to it—and it's long been treated by coaches and fans alike as though they're taking a solemn, duty-bound oath to remain at that school for the entirety of the collegiate careers. Recruits who de-commit are routinely scorned by disappointed fanbases for the perfidy of not remaining loyal to the program they initially committed to.

It's not unusual for coaches to get almost teary-eyed when pushing the virtues of the school they happen to be coaching at, especially if it happens to be their alma mater. Words like "love" and "culture" and "tradition" and "commitment" are regularly trotted out not only for prospective recruits and their families, but for the players already in the program as well.

That loyalty-and-tradition-soaked word cloud dissipates into thin air when a coach gets the offer he was hoping for. Now the operative phrases are "pursuing lifelong goals" and "going to the next level" and "bigger and better things." 

Given all this, it's no wonder that players have gradually come to see the game for what it is—for coaches, college football has always been a cold, hard business where looking out for #1 is the main priority. The vast majority of the stuff the coaches utter during recruiting visits and radio interviews for eager fans is performative marketing baloney that can easily be repurposed for another program or opportunity with a bit of selective editing. The coaches can easily leave the campuses behind, while the players who committed to them have been expected to stay.

At least that's the way it used to be, until the advent of NIL, the portal, and quick eligibility of transfers. As we've seen recently, the havoc that player movement is wreaking on programs even extends to dominant powers like Alabama, and it's understandable that head coaches are frustrated by it.

However, the coaches only have themselves to blame—they've always been the biggest mercenaries in the collegiate football business, and now the players are beginning to assert their interests. I don't think it's good for college football in a variety of ways, but I cannot begrudge the players the desire to even things up, given the reality of the landscape. You can't justify decisions coaches make on the basis of "it's just business" and then be angry that players want to exercise that same right too.

It's pretty obvious it was all just platitudes Harbaugh didn't actually believe.