Shemy is on HARBAUGH, not Warde.

I know we live in a culture now that the mass isn't happy until someone is thrown into the sun but I don't care about this story anymore. It's over. 

OK Warde, thanks for the insights.

As another who has worked for decades with University administrators, and HR professionals, I can say with some certainty that each hiring scenario is relatively unique. There are norms and usual practices, to be sure, but involvement in hiring decisions varies.  As a result, I see very little value in generalizing in an effort to assign responsibility (blame or credit).  And yes, I realize that message boards like this exist in large part to allow those with limited information to opine on sports-related matters.  But on this one, I’ll respectfully take a pass. And I think that’s just fine.

The kids who grew up with social media are going to see a lot of this type of stuff in the future. I don’t have social media but if I did when I was a kid…hoo boy. I definitely have said idiotic things thinking it was funny or whatever - you know, dumb kid stuff.  But now it’s all recorded for eternity. Just waiting for your employer to mine. 

You blaming Harbs doesn't help anything, right or wrong. Let it go.

Jim made the hire, yes, but Warde as AD has to personally vet someone with the last name "SCHEMBECHLER" given the magnitude of that name in regards to the program right now. If there wasn't a pattern of inaction and incompetency by Warde, then I'd agree, but at some point the buck stops at the top

Shemy debacle hawt takes or “What has Prime been up to.”   Whats your pick for best offseason topic?

Thanks for the thorough review of the typical process.  Makes sense to me.

The good news?  In 72 hours no one will be talking about this hopefully.

Stop it, nobody is telling me I'm wrong when there is a chance to BREAK OUT THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS AND RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE!  FIRE WARDE!  FIRE HARBAUGH!  FIRE SHEMY AGAIN!  FIRE EVERYONE!

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(ps see Ann Arbor Torch & Pitchfork for all your enraged mobbery needs.  Use bonus code RICE for 10% off your first order.)

Whatevs brah.

"quit drinking and go to bed."

Jim Harbaugh is Warde's most expensive and most valuable employee, by a wide margin. And Jim Harbaugh is not a mystery and everyone knows his vulnerability and Warde has to know better. It is part of Warde's job to not letting Jim Harbaugh walk into trouble absent-mindedly or unwittingly, no matter how stupid this sounds. Nobody says that Warde should personally vest everyone Harbaugh hires but he should've had a process in place.  

It's not that big of deal and all of this is getting way too much attention. Twitter is a clown show and getting worked up about likes means you have way too much time on your hands. 

Hindsight is always 20/20.  Nobody goes into a hiring expecting this to happen and it's certainly an exception and not the norm.  Enough of the bullshit finger pointing.  Shit happens.  They handled it and now it's over.  Can't wait for the next novel from a poster who has to share his feelings on the matter. 

Could very well be different in Academia and College athletics.  But everyone we hire starts off on a probationary period.  Ie, everyone is "at will" for their first 6 months.  This allows for being able to more easily dismiss them if new information comes to light about the hiree.  Like information that would have prevented us from hiring them if it had become known earlier.

It’s just so much easier and cost effective to let the general public do social media background checks for you. 

More speculating. No one really knows. We'll never know so who cares. Time to move on. 

The only part I take with issue with is making a huge assumption that Warde didn't know a guy with the last name Schembechler was being hired to work at UM. I can't believe someone didn't run that by him before, or immediately after the hire. I agree with the fact that Harbaugh has some culpability, maybe more than people are giving him, but to say that this would never be on Warde's radar, nor should it be, is a stretch.

Sam on WTKA mentioned many reached out to him as the story broke who said they’ve known about Shemy’s views for years (Ira said he had to unfollow him on FB years ago because of the extreme things he was posting) and that it was an open secret and not a surprise.  Just the smallest amount of digging around and the football program could’ve avoided this mess.

But does there really need to be ANY blame?? It was a mistake, they owned it, they fired him immediately when they found out.  It's not like he was an addict who beat his wife but they kept him on because he was a good recruiter who couldn't actually coach but was the son of an old friend and knew about all the coach's extracurricular activities at the local steakhouse. Hypothetically of course, that would be a worse situation.  UofM athletic department clearly doesn't have a crystal clean track record but this doesn't even move the needle for me. They made an oversight. They took care of it quickly.

A Warde winning post

I don't know the in's and out's of this, and neither does anyone other than 3 or 4 people.  It was an egg on the face moment, they found out about it and he was gone. 

Honestly if I were Harbaugh I would just consider leaving.  They hired a dude, it wasn’t a fit, so they booted him.  Swiftly. People are going PSYCHO about this and it is out of control.

Thank you for being the voice of reason AND experience on this. It never seemed to me like this was Ward's doing at all.

The moment the hire was announced I thought, "that's a bad idea" simply based on Schemy's statements that victims in the Anderson fiasco were lying and how tone deaf it was for Harbaugh to bring him on. It never occurred to me that Ward had a hand in it, as I assume Harbaugh has pretty much carte blanche in hiring his staff. In fact, I doubt Ward even dares to try and mess with that process.

Then the Twitters......and, well.....I thought how awful it will be to have someone who supports those kind of "alternative and diverse" (🙄) opinions (read blatantly racist, homophobic, etc.) representing the team in any way. I assumed it would get swept under the rug like some other recent items (I'm not going to rehash it, but finish the investigation, at least interview the players, and ffs sign the forms this year) and it would go away. By the time I looked, Schemy was already in heavy delete mode on his account and it felt like a fait accompli.

Part of me was thinking "maybe Ward will actually do something about it?" No idea if that occurred, or who the lucky person was that had to go tell Harbaugh "no way" and explain to him that this is "out there" now and every non-white, non-straight, non-whatever recruit and their parents will know about it. I have to think that his coaches/main recruiters were the ones to lay it out for him, or perhaps he saw it himself and corrected it. We'll likely never know, but one thing is for sure......this isn't something you can smear Ward with.

This is good context but I also think there is some hand-waving away of the fact that even if this is the current state of the process, the process keeps fucking up to an extent.  I think Warde gets dragged for a lot of things that aren't quite his responsibility but he also tried to bury the Mel report and then kept arguing to retain him despite ample pressure against it, he wound up having to fire the volleyball coach shortly after giving him a new contract for detrimental conduct, and various other minor transgressions and missteps.  Yes, these assistants are relatively low-level employees to the AD but (a) you should still have processes in place that do more detailed background checks even if it means firing a guy a couple weeks later when something comes out, and (b) need to recognize that whatever may have been appropriate 10-20 years ago in terms of diligence doesn't work anymore with social media and the like.  This was a public-facing role that was going to rely on social media heavily; it took 10 minutes to look into Glenn's public twitter history to see this stuff.  This isn't some junior admin in accounting; this is a recruiting spot that is, by its nature, part of the public face of the University.  Sure, Warde isn't expect to weigh in on every hire but the processes his administration apply to these hires was insufficient.  And if that means allowing Harbaugh to make these types of hires and then fighting with him afterwards to fire the guy because it comes out, that's his job.  It's why he's paid millions of dollars, in part, as the guy who has to have these types of conversations and make these decisions.

Both him and Harbaugh share equal blame in my mind - Glenn's politics were apparently well-known around the school and while a guy shouldn't be barred from employment no matter how stupid and ill-informed they are, if it's going to hurt his ability to do his job then someone higher up has to make that call.  Neither of them did and so they turned a nothing issue into a multi-day one.

Thanks for this information - this is exactly what I mentioned yesterday and got a lot of replies from online ADs who claim Warde should have personally signed off on this hire and it was yet again a failure of his leadership.  Geesh - tell me you've never worked for a large organization without telling me you've never worked at a large organization...

TL;DR

Everyone needs a break here.

Let's talk about the Michigan State Police squad car dash cam video chasing Lester the escaped steer on 1-75 in Oakland County.

Police posted the video of the chase on social media, because, in the state police's words: "if there are no pictures or video it didn’t happen." It shows some cowboy wranglers on Sunday catching a steer that had been on the loose along Interstate 75 for weeks.

Telling people to "relax" and then using the word "fucking" is pure gold...have to love people with sloppy impulse regulation

Why are you YELLING?!

Once again, like with every other shitty thing that’s happened under his watch, we can come up with plausible deniability on Warde’s part.  The problem is that we have too much a pattern of incompetence coming from the athletic department by this point.  
 

Is it Warde’s personal job to check a prospective hire’s social media likes?  No.  Nor is it Jim’s job.  But it should have been someone’s job in the athletic department - but no one did it, even though it could have been done in a half-hour. That we had no one with instruction to check up on this kind of thing, as a routine measure, is embarrassing.  That’s on the AD.

No one will remember this by next week.

Fire Borges!!!