kevin warren

Mooch'd. Shemy Schembechler came, and then he went. Warde Manuel:

"Effective this afternoon, Shemy Schembechler has resigned his position with Michigan Football. We are aware of some comments and likes on social media that have caused concern and pain for individuals in our community. Michigan Athletics is fully committed to a place where our coaches, staff and student-athletes feel welcome and where we fully support the University's and Athletic Department's commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion."

Schembechler got booted for his twitter account, which had dozens and dozens of likes on posts ranging between debatably racist and obviously racist. The ESPN story linked about asserts that "a source with knowledge of the situation told ESPN that Schembechler went through a thorough background check during the hiring process," which uh no he did not. When your background check misses publicly available information it was not thorough. Or even a "check," really.

Add it to the "What The Hell Is Warde Manuel Doing?" files. This is currently an athletic department that's winning the most important game on the schedule and doing very little else right. At this point the number of unforced PR errors that the department is stumbling into like so many rakes in front of Sideshow Bob is, dare I say it, Brandonesque. Articles are rolling in with titles like "Michigan leadership continues to embarrass itself" from places like The Athletic—not exactly the RCMB.

Shemy released a statement repudiating his hundreds of endorsements of racist right wing tweets, for what little that's worth.

[After the JUMP: anonymous quotes article woo]

As the Harbaugh turns. UPDATE

We are in full support of Coach Harbaugh’s statement of support of President Ono’s comments supporting Coach Harbaugh and the Michigan Football Team and look forward to continuing to support Coach Harbaugh who is in full support of President Ono’s support of Coach Harbaugh and https://t.co/jOHBu6h1vc

— Shapiro Undergraduate Library (@UMichUGLI) January 13, 2023

More seriously, John U Bacon asserted yesterday that the chances he stays are "growing by the hour" after Santa Ono got directly involved. I do not buy for one second that Pete Thamel report that Michigan might not be able to get Harbaugh signed for "weeks" because of the NCAA whatever. It's 2023 and the president of the university appears to have an idea of how the world works.

Yes, please. There's been some rumbling about changes to Signing Day coming up. I find myself in a somewhat unusual position of feverishly agreeing with the SEC commissioner:

"We're crushing coaches in December," Sankey told The Athletic. "We're going to add playoff games (in December). We have to change early signing."

Sankey elaborated on the issue during a gathering with reporters on Sunday in Los Angeles, noting that with coaches voicing their concerns about the overload of activity in December, conferences "have a responsibility to take another look at it."

"From a remedy standpoint, I don't think you can go back to just the first Wednesday in February," Sankey said.

December Signing Day is dumb from a media standpoint—February was a much bigger deal—and it is now very dumb because nobody has any idea who's going to be on their roster. I get concerns that committed players keep getting recruited when they have no interest in being recruited, so let's resurrect an idea this site has promoted previously:

• Players can sign a non-binding LOI basically whenever, but let's say starting a year before a restored February signing day.
• Players in the LOI database cannot take official visits to other schools.
• Coaches from other schools cannot contact players in the database.
• The LOIs become binding on the first week in February.

This does a lot to cut down on useless attempts to get guys to flip, benefiting both players who don't want to be hassled and coaches who might like to see their kids faces, without locking either school or player in until most of the portal madness has settled.

As was rumored for weeks, the Big Ten has signed a landmark new rights deal with FOX, CBS, and NBC. Let's break out the bullets.

Money. The full deal takes a little bit to kick in, and the numbers are somewhat fuzzy because some people appear to be talking about just the money coming from the three networks mentioned above and some people are including CFP, NCAA tournament, and other rights. This is the discrepancy between 75 million (deal-related money) and 100 million (expected per-school conference distribution in a few years).

This is a lot of money. Please do not accept any requests for understanding when and if the school serves up another nonconference schedule like this one.

Oh God, the commercials. There was a time way back in the long ago when this site was enthused about exploding rights fees. It's hard to remember why, but it was probably some combination of tribalism and hilariously naïve beliefs that some of this money would result in positive changes for anyone other than the people drawing salaries from the athletic department.

After years of bludgeoning in the courts of public opinion and, you know, actual courts, the NCAA has budged on some things—cost of living stipends, free food—but these athlete-supporting changes are peripheral. The money is still going to the coaching/administrator class. I see no reason that would change, so the main takeaway here for people who watch the sports is to prepare for an even heavier inundation of ads. I would expect the powers that be to push for more NFL style rules to reduce the number of plays, literally replacing football with ads.