insiderz

Joe Bolden hype comes in both unapproved and approved forms.

We had the fortune to get a practice report from a deeply anonymous person who wormed their way Inside The Fort, and here is what he or she or it reported, in my words:

Jabrill Peppers is mostly a nickel back but they are giving him a few experimental snaps at safety. While it seems like they are going to start him out there, as the season develops he may get more playing time when Michigan has four DBs on the field by taking that SS spot. Delano Hill's absence complicates things. He was leading at SS before he injured his jaw.

The alarming O-Line lineup tweeted out was at least temporarily a real thing. FWIW, that was Cole-Magnuson-Miller-Dawson/Glasgow-Braden. Kalis was not repping much with the first team. The slash-Dawson in that line above should be taken with a grain of salt—he looked another year or two away in one-on-ones.

That unit was not looking great even by early fall practice standards, so maybe they switch it up. Hoke told the assembled horde at Media Day that they hoped to settle on a top five by next week. They're still in experiment mode.

Jeremy Clark is your leader at SS with Hill sidelined. Brandon Watson is apparently #3 there until Hill gets back. Thomas did not get a mention.

Sigh… Joe Bolden seems to be for real. This is not bad for Michigan in general. It is bad for me because if Bolden starts the opener over a healthy Desmond Morgan I eat a lemon on the internet. But he's continued to get more time than Morgan. Jenkins-Stone is also getting a lot of time, but for whatever reason Ross was held out of this practice so that may be more about his absence than anything else.

Jourdan Lewis may be your best corner. He will push Taylor heavily; they're already splitting reps down the middle and Lewis is outperforming not only him but Countess.

Norfleet looked "f---ing great" and is the #1 slot. No, the insider is not me. I swear. Canteen is practicing both inside and out as they try to figure out their best configuration.

DeVeon Smith is the #1 back. Green and Hayes seemed running neck and neck for #2, with Drake Johnson the last serious competitor behind them. Hoke announced at media day that Johnson was 1b to Smith's 1a, so maybe they're seeing subtler things. Or Green is still on the motivation train.

While Ty Isaac looked pretty good, they're mostly running him with/against scrubs. That seems like an indicator they don't expect to get a waiver for him.

There is some zone read. FWIW. They ran zone read drills under Borges, too.

The defense is "crazy aggressive." They are serious about it, deploying a ton of press—just like the spring game—and using Peppers as a freelance sower of destruction on blitzes. Linemen are shifting frequently, giving the offensive line issues with pickups.

The defensive line should have good depth. Hurst and Wormley were both mentioned as seeming like starter-quality players, and the just-returned Pipkins was praised for his agility. He dominated one-on-one sessions and made some spin moves that seemed "impossible" for a guy his size. OL caveats apply.

Expect a lot of screens. Screens are the way you deal with a wobbly OL.

Why is your name all wavy, Wade?

Three years ago when Michigan was waddling about gently poking jowly coaches of the Midwest in search of their next head football coach, I relayed a ton of different things that hit my inbox about Kirk Ferentz and Jim Grobe and Greg Schiano and, yes, Brady Hoke. Many of them seemed ludicrous even at the time, like Michigan offering Ferentz a massive paycut to become Michigan's coach or Greg Schiano accepting the job before changing his mind (twice!), but are now part of what passes for the unofficial history of those maniacal three weeks. It was a weird time.

I tried to balance the inherently contradictory reports by relaying the things I'd heard and laying out what I thought based on those things, but from a distance of three years I think I made a mistake in my coverage. That mistake was assuming that all information being passed was a good-faith attempt to help Michigan fans figure out where the search stood at that point. It did not occur to me that while that assumption was probably correct about the people directly emailing me I had no way to judge the sincerity or connectedness of the people passing them information.

So. Any Michigan message board you pick has both shadowy insiders and now moderators throwing out Brady Hoke's name a "very serious" candidate to be Michigan's head coach. I've gotten the rumor myself from someone I trust, citing solid sources within the athletic department. But this is not then. I'm not going to rush to my keyboard and spit out all the reasons Hoke is not a plausible candidate for the Michigan job like I did three years ago.

I would if I thought there was even the slightest chance Hoke would replace Rich Rodriguez in early January, because that would be the most insane coaching switch of all time. This is not going to happen. Brady Hoke is not a serious candidate for the Michigan job. He is not any sort of candidate. If Dave Brandon was willing to hire Hoke to coach Michigan, Rodriguez would already be out the door because there would be a dozen people he'd rather have coaching Michigan than Rodriguez. Unless meteors hit both Jim Harbaugh and Rich Rodriguez, the chance Brady Hoke is Michigan's coach in 2011 is zero point zero percent.

Period.

Yes, single sentence paragraph time.

Do you know how I know this? Because three years ago the rumors about Hoke were heavy enough that I scurried to the keyboard to point out this was a guy with one winning season, that 7-5, at a MAC school. While he's a plausible candidate for the Minnesota job now, back then he wasn't a plausible candidate for the job he was actually at. If Ball State's job was open they wouldn't have hired a coach with Brady Hoke's resume. And yet there were rumblings from within Fort Schembechler that had everyone panicked, just like today.

The obvious conclusion is that there are people who know and like Hoke in the athletic department, who hate everyone else who's ever been rumored for the Michigan job, and there are credulous people willing to relay anything that comes from a person with a job in Schembechler Hall. None of these people are Dave Brandon.

Brady Hoke will not coach Michigan in 2011. You may resume your day-to-day lives.