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.

Is There an Adult I Can Talk To?

This morning, David Brandon and the athletic department issued a well-written, cogent statement that addressed almost everything people reasonably expected to know in the aftermath of the Shane Morris incident while simultaneously taking an appropriate tone. We messed up, we can't let this happen again, and we're updating our procedures to address this issue.

However, the statement comes about 24 hours too late. If that statement is issued at 12:52 AM on Monday morning, there's grumbling and some side-eye. At 12:52 AM on Tuesday morning, everything has changed. Michigan has been put under the microscope on not just ESPN, but has crossed all the way over to Good Morning America. You've promised the media a "medical statement" that never really showed up, unless this is it. And you've sent your head football coach up to his press conference to stand there and look like someone's idiot cousin you wouldn't trust to run a doughnut shop, let alone a multi-million-dollar football program where young men risk their health and safety on a daily basis.

To be fair, this may be the case. Brandon's statement says that Morris was diagnosed with a concussion on Sunday. Brady Hoke didn't get in touch with his injured quarterback to ask how he's doing? Or Shane Morris didn't know he has a concussion? Neither of these seem reasonable, and one is more plausible than the other.

At the moment, I'm choosing not to believe that Hoke knew about the concussion and failed to disclose it. For some reason I'm more comfortable believing him to be incompetent than mendacious.

The whole situation has been bungled, from the initial incident through everything after. You have commentators worrying about Morris's safety BEFORE he takes a killshot to the head, then you send the kid back into the huddle for one more play, and even when he's removed no one hides his helmet and tells the coaches he's out. And after all this has happened, nobody thinks "This is going to be a major problem for us. We have to get to the bottom of this and fix what is wrong."

Even if it's somebody thinking only of the bad PR that's certain to come from it, Michigan had a small window to get in front of this. I don't expect more than window dressing from the athletic department, but when I don't even get that I just sputter with anger. How dumb do they think I am? How out of touch are they to not understand that this is a Big Deal? Concussions have been a major flashpoint for *years*. The NFL is on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the settlement is still derided as insufficient. Whatever intern they have on Twitter had to have noted the explosion of rage when Morris was left in, and that has to be kicked up the food chain to someone with real authority.

At that point, it's all hands on deck. Who saw the hit? Who saw the aftermath? Was this communicated to anyone? Why or why not? Why was Morris allowed to re-enter the game? Who made that decision? How do we make sure this never happens again? Has he been diagnosed with a concussion? Do we have his permission to release his condition?

It takes a while to get answers to all these questions, to process them, and to respond to the additional questions they raise. It doesn't take 55+ hours, and you don't let your statement drop in the middle of the night. Now we're convinced you're hiding something.

We expect smoke, mirrors, and obfuscation when you talk about who's practicing well, how the team is looking, how much respect you have for your next opponent, and even run-of-the-mill player injuries. Someone's got a boo-boo, another guy has a "lower body injury." This is different. This is about ethics, not a player's condition. Craig is right; it's more akin to the dissembling about Gibbons than questions about when Funchess will be back up to speed.

Fort Schembechler is Fort Schembechler, but whether the team is any good will always be settled on Saturday. This is about governance and that nebulous thing that Fielding Yost called the "Spirit of Michigan." One of the better things about the Spirit of Michigan is that it evolves over the years and we expect an ever higher standard of the people who represent us. Yost himself was an old unreconstructed racist* and an anti-Catholic, and we certainly expect better of our leaders today.

The University of Michigan has again been named the top public university in the US, as we were reminded by the video board on Saturday. We expect to be treated like adults, at the bare minimum. We raised ticket prices because we want more money to pay higher salaries and build more buildings. We expect Michigan to compete for Big Ten championships, and we aren't playing like that kind of team. Shane Morris got hit in the head and he should have been removed from the game immediately.

This is not hard. Hard is setting regular ticket prices at the maximum level where fans still feel like more than a revenue stream. Hard is setting a price on student tickets where you get a good amount of value back while giving students an incentive to use their tickets *and* make Michigan football a habit that lasts for life. Hard is sorting through all the available candidates to find a John Beilein and to get a succession plan together when Red Berenson finally decides to hang it up. And if you bungle the easy tasks, we don't trust you with the hard ones.

*At least until Willis Ward joined the team. Yost, of course, still sat Ward against Georgia Tech. Improvement is not always continuous.

End Game

Khalid Hill has a great barber.  (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

I loved the shutout streak.  Drew Hallett and I bonded on Twitter over tracking it.  It was the last thread that connected most of my life of Michigan football, from Bo to Mo to Lloyd to Rich Rod to Hoke.  Michigan may not always win, but dammit, they at least scored points.

When Wile missed the second field goal, I started to worry about the streak.  Slowly, but surely, other people on Twitter began to realize that the streak was in jeopardy!  So when Michigan went four it on fourth down and was stopped, that was it.  The streak, 365 games, nearly 30 years old, was over.  Notre Dame had just stomped Michigan 31-0 and all I could think about was the streak ending.  I was ready to be wistful about the end of the Michigan / Notre Dame series, about how I had hazy memories of Rocket Ismail ruining my day in 1989, about Desmond, about Remy, about the 97 defense, about 09-10-11 and the era of miracles, and Under the Lights.  But with the Streak ending, it's like the fall of a symbolic era, looking shambolic and lost when faced with a talented team.

Part of that was because today felt all too familiar.  As the storms began to pop up on radar Friday night, I thought about Devin Gardner.  I read John U. Bacon's Wall Street Journal piece about Gardner last night while waiting for pizza and my thought was "Man, I hope Devin Gardner doesn't become John Navarre 2.0"  But after last night's performance, it's going to be clear that Gardner will be a lightning rod for criticism of this team.  He probably deserves some of the criticism, but not all of it.  But he's the quarterback, he's wearing Tom Harmon's 98, he's going to get the scorching hot takes launched upon him.

I really don't have anything else here.  I'm tired, I'm sad, I'm frustrated, and I'm hoping against hope.  Maybe when you don't have anything else to say, you just stop talking.  So until next week, we'll just try to move forward together.  We fight for better days.