Irrelevant

"My first ever twitter rant.

pic.twitter.com/gweTe7Qd6q"
— Brian Cleary (@BPCleary) October 3, 2014

When this came out on Friday morning, I was mad at this, because I thought it was unnecessary, but now I realize ultimately, it's correct.  My history doesn't matter, neither foes yours.  My opinions don't matter, neither do yours.  Nothing is going to change.  They're not going to fire Brandon, because as long as the big money donors are behind him (and for now, they are) and the current and former student athletes are behind him (and for now, they are), then he can point to that, say he's doing his job, and make some general vague statements about rebuilding his relationships with the students.  He's not getting fired because he will figure out a way to survive this.  So things will not change, because you don't make the choices you have made in the last four years running the department because you think you're not doing a good job.  No one is going to look at the laundry list of offenses as perceived by a group without power and suddenly have a change of heart.  He's going to keep doing what he's been doing because he doesn't believe he's wrong and none of the people in the department who he has hired are going to tell him he's wrong.

Brady Hoke is getting fired because Michigan cannot afford to keep losing like this in football.  He'll get fired, they'll find some way to screw up the coaching search, they'll find someone that they'll try to sell to us as the man to turn it around, he'll look good for a while, and we'll regress to something worse in about four years and start this process all over again.  Whether or not this happens during the season or not, once thought impossible, is now looking like it could happen.  Were it not for whom Michigan faces after the bye week, I would say that he probably gets served his walking papers after Penn State next week, because losing another humiliating game on national television should do the trick.

But we'll keep watching, not because we're stupid, but because we're loyal. Because we're not loyal to a specific coach (well, maybe one), or an athletic director (OK, maybe one, but that's a very few of us), but to an ideal and because of that ideal, we're also loyal to the other people like us who share this belief, no matter how far away it feels from us right now and no matter how well or how vaguely we know them.  It is built on something akin to faith, and during the darkest times, you hold fast to faith and to the faithful because when the world keeps crumbling down, it may feel like all that you have left.

We're mad, sad, frustrated, angry, and generally in a malaise, but we're all we have because, while we're (hopefully) rooting for the players, they're not rooting for us, because we're fickle and demanding.  While we're hoping the athletic department figures this out, we fear that they don't see us as anything more as dollars to leverage out of our wallets.  So we have to hold on to something in this endeavor, however foolish or misplaced others might see it as.  We chose this life.  We ride out the storms together and we fight for better days.