In the short term, it was also an effect of not knowing who would be coaching the team. Players in the portal, understandably, didn't consider Michigan when the coaching staff was so uncertain.
No, obviously not. That would have to be a 13-9 kind of game. "High floor" would mean extreme turnover avoidance and forcing teams to drive the field against what should be a dominant defense. A very pre-Brian Ferentz Iowa "punting is winning" offense, that you certainly wouldn't feel good about going into Columbus with (or welcoming UT or Oregon for that matter).
Just not sure whether there are any examples of post-spring portal QBs that have any kind of success on good teams.
Are there any examples of successful portal QBs who joined their teams after spring practice? I'm assuming all the recent successful transfer QBs have had spring experience with their new teams, but I'm not fully confident that's the case.
Tuttle's also not currently taking reps and I think we can assume he's the "high floor" option, likely a higher floor than anyone they could get through the portal given his knowledge of the offense.
I think he was ready to be an NBA head coach. The stuff that happened on the court in the first few years, the offensive and defensive sets and OOB plays, was top rate. So was the player development. Those are the main things you deal with as an NBA head coach.
I don't think he was ready at all to be a contemporary college head coach, where roster management and "running a program" are more important job responsibilities than on court strategy.
I really had no idea how serious his heart condition was. An aortic dissection is usually an unsurvivable event, and it sounds like his was caught largely indirectly.
He really should have taken the season off. Very hard, I'm sure, given the lack of success the team had the previous year. And probably hard for him to talk about, given his generally closed nature, but publicizing his condition, and the fact that if you're unexpectedly short of breath, you should get checked out ASAP, could potentially save lives.
The recruits that people have complained most about were Terrence Shannon and Caleb Love, both seniors. Transfers with that standing are just never getting admitted to Michigan with enough transfer credits to qualify for the NCAA's definition of "remains in good academic standing."
The team recruited Shannon thinking he was going to be a grad transfer, but he ended up one class short and Texas Tech didn't have any incentive to help him graduate. I assume they thought the same about Love. The football team has not had trouble getting sophomores admitted (Josiah Stewart) and they even showed they could work with LSA/Admissions to get Miles Hinton admitted. The one notable football issue was with Xavier Worthy, who wanted to enroll early with online credits from a barely accredited charter school. Admissions rightly told him to just finish the year.
The standards are fairly clear and both admissions and LSA have shown they'll work as much as they can to allow transfers to happen, but they're not going to let someone take one class at UM and get a UM degree.
Lots of potential targets there for May, particularly in the backcourt.
With consultation, sophomores shouldn't be a problem for admission, witness Josiah Stewart. The transfers that are difficulty are ones that would potentially be doing less than half their undergrad credits at UM. Absent very unusual circumstances, those are usually a no go.
This is who Ono is. He took on a very visible role in athletics at Cincinnati as well. UBC is obviously an entirely different situation regarding athletics, but he clearly sees involvement with athletics as a significant part of the president's role within the broader university.
I don't think people understand just how dire Northwestern basketball has been historically. Prior to Collins, they hadn't been over 500 in the conference since the Eisenhower administration. He's done it three times.
Northwestern had 7 seasons over 500 in the 30 years before Collins was hired and no tourney bids. He's had 4 winning seasons, which were all the winningest seasons in the past 40 years of Northwestern basketball, and made the tourney 4 times, in a decade of coaching.
He has two things going against him: 1. He went down on all fours and looked like an idiot in one game against Michigan, that picture is posted every year on this blog when Michigan plays NU. 2. He also chased a lot of guys off one year early in his tenure with some shady tactics that don't seem to have been repeated. He is likely often a jerk. But also a very solid coach who is probably gettable.
Totally unrelated to the topic at hand, but Spencer Haywood's fascinating, and somewhat tragic story, plays a central role in Theresa Runstedler's excellent recent book Black Ball, which is about the transformation of the NBA in the 1970s.
At this point, NBA and NCAA basketball may as well be different sports from a coaching standpoint. They're played entirely differently, the players, particularly as shooters, are on an entirely different level, the role of coaches is entirely different (much much less roster management in the NBA). As a result, they require almost entirely different coaching skill-sets.
I think the lesson of both Stackhouse and Howard are that NBA coaching and NCAA coaching may as well be different sports. Those guys were both regarded as very solid assistants well on their way to head coaching positions, but they just fell apart in running college programs (where there's much more emphasis on roster management than with NBA coaching, which is about very specific strategic choices about how to defend the pick and roll and how to manage minutes and egos over a longer season).
Are there any good options for that left, though, with Cousins and Wilson off the board? Maybe they sign a journeyman and have JJ as the starter in waiting.
As a Packers fan, strongly do not want JJ to go to the Vikings with that receiving corps.
The NCAA's treatment of Aaliya's situation is even more messed up when you consider Argentinian inflation. Given that the rate of inflation for the Argentine peso was 185% in 2023, and is estimated to be 250% this year, if the NCAA is asking for this repayment in dollars, they're demanding he repay vastly more money than he received, in order to participate in a sport where players are now regularly being paid significant amounts of money by entities so close to the team that there is no meaningful distinction between athletic department and NIL collective.
Universities are notorious for doing this (waiting until someone has an offer in hand before making retention offers) with current faculty who are being interviewed for jobs elsewhere.
This argument would be more valid even two weeks ago. But with deBoer and Fisch in new jobs, the two candidates who could reasonably be considered potentially worth paying the price of short-term losses to the program (in terms of players, coaches and likely Herbert) in the long term, and plausible hires are off the board. In part, that's why he's the only contender (I think he would have likely been the hire even if deBoer and Fisch were "available").
Yeah, but his injury history has to be part of the calculation. The floor could be another acl and out of the league after his rookie deal because he can’t stay healthy.
Also, he’s not great on the move and seemed to have trouble reading M’s defense (though that is true of every qb M played this year).
Exactly, no longer a lateral move (if it ever was, which I don't agree with given Washington's history) now that Washington's in the Big Ten and Arizona's in the Big 12.
I don’t know if it’s THE moment, but a moment that things totally changed for me was in the immediate aftermath of the 2021 OSU game, suddenly realizing that “we get to watch this team in more games that matter this year!” It was like a surprise gift that I hadn’t realized was coming.
Hoke also had head coaching experience! He had been coach of the year in separate conferences!!! DeBoer has run a program, and has succeeded everywhere he's been, but one that receives far less national attention than Michigan and receives, at best, the 3rd (arguably 4th) most attention in its local market. His recruiting classes have been in the low 20s.
Would he do better at Michigan? Probably. But every head coaching hire is a risk! There's one hire that won't alienate large portions of players and alumni, something that we've seen in very recent memory is a real possibility and can crater the program. If there wasn't an obvious candidate that had been on an upward trajectory for years within the program, by all means, open it up, even if that means you have to blow everything up that's been built over the last 3 years. But that's not the case we're in. Maybe Sherrone is David Shaw, which, in and of itself, is not the worst outcome, and we see plateauing at some level below winning the fucking national championship. Maybe he's Kirby Smart or Lincoln Riley. Regardless, don't break what's working.
C'mon people, put some thought and research into your arguments. Fickell had an entire season as interim head coach and posted one of the two losing seasons in the last 50 years of OSU football (other was Cooper's first year). If Sherrone had been in over his head the way Fickell was, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Hiring anyone is a gamble. But hiring Moore would be a gamble that didn’t immediately piss off the most important stakeholders the program needs in order to be successful. The players clearly respect and follow him. They clearly regard him as a leader. And they put in a lot of work.
Should Harbaugh leave, this is an unprecedented situation. It’s literally a national championship team (damn, that feels good to write) that was coached, at least on game day, for more than 1/4 of the games, including half of the biggest games, by someone who would be the leading candidate for the job. I can’t imagine hiring someone else and it not causing a huge amount of disappointment and anger among the players.
It’s crazy. People are treating it like Hoke went straight from coaching Michigan’s d-line to head coach of Michigan. Hoke had years of head coaching experience. He’s like the case study for why head coaching experience shouldn't be regarded as a prerequisite.
Is someone as likely to come in as “bull in a china shop”/“I need to clean this place out” as Rich Rod did? No, almost certainly not. Would almost every player on the team for the past three years and tons of program alums be incredibly upset that the guy they felt had earned his shot by leading the team against Penn State and Ohio State got passed over? Absolutely. Particularly if it’s the guy coaching the team Michigan just beat for the national championship?
That’s the kind of thing that takes an amazingly talented leader/manager of people to overcome. It has such a higher chance of failure in the immediate term than hiring Sherrone. If you do something like that, you have to believe you have a best coach in a generation type figure, because otherwise, you’ve just destroyed the commitment of whole classes of players and former players.
Rich Rod was the hottest coaching candidate in the country, with tons of coaching experience, with tons of demonstrated ability. The turmoil his hiring created, certainly not entirely all his making, cratered the program for a decade.
And do you really think turning away from a guy who was in charge for 2 of the biggest 4 wins of a national championship year isn’t going to create huge rifts within the program?
Recent Comments
"TJ guy ... has been a guy" sighting
Yeah, I don't think stats in Walt Bell's Indiana offense is a good comp to ... really anything.
In the short term, it was also an effect of not knowing who would be coaching the team. Players in the portal, understandably, didn't consider Michigan when the coaching staff was so uncertain.
No, obviously not. That would have to be a 13-9 kind of game. "High floor" would mean extreme turnover avoidance and forcing teams to drive the field against what should be a dominant defense. A very pre-Brian Ferentz Iowa "punting is winning" offense, that you certainly wouldn't feel good about going into Columbus with (or welcoming UT or Oregon for that matter).
Just not sure whether there are any examples of post-spring portal QBs that have any kind of success on good teams.
Are there any examples of successful portal QBs who joined their teams after spring practice? I'm assuming all the recent successful transfer QBs have had spring experience with their new teams, but I'm not fully confident that's the case.
Tuttle's also not currently taking reps and I think we can assume he's the "high floor" option, likely a higher floor than anyone they could get through the portal given his knowledge of the offense.
I think he was ready to be an NBA head coach. The stuff that happened on the court in the first few years, the offensive and defensive sets and OOB plays, was top rate. So was the player development. Those are the main things you deal with as an NBA head coach.
I don't think he was ready at all to be a contemporary college head coach, where roster management and "running a program" are more important job responsibilities than on court strategy.
I really had no idea how serious his heart condition was. An aortic dissection is usually an unsurvivable event, and it sounds like his was caught largely indirectly.
He really should have taken the season off. Very hard, I'm sure, given the lack of success the team had the previous year. And probably hard for him to talk about, given his generally closed nature, but publicizing his condition, and the fact that if you're unexpectedly short of breath, you should get checked out ASAP, could potentially save lives.
The recruits that people have complained most about were Terrence Shannon and Caleb Love, both seniors. Transfers with that standing are just never getting admitted to Michigan with enough transfer credits to qualify for the NCAA's definition of "remains in good academic standing."
The team recruited Shannon thinking he was going to be a grad transfer, but he ended up one class short and Texas Tech didn't have any incentive to help him graduate. I assume they thought the same about Love. The football team has not had trouble getting sophomores admitted (Josiah Stewart) and they even showed they could work with LSA/Admissions to get Miles Hinton admitted. The one notable football issue was with Xavier Worthy, who wanted to enroll early with online credits from a barely accredited charter school. Admissions rightly told him to just finish the year.
The standards are fairly clear and both admissions and LSA have shown they'll work as much as they can to allow transfers to happen, but they're not going to let someone take one class at UM and get a UM degree.
Lots of potential targets there for May, particularly in the backcourt.
With consultation, sophomores shouldn't be a problem for admission, witness Josiah Stewart. The transfers that are difficulty are ones that would potentially be doing less than half their undergrad credits at UM. Absent very unusual circumstances, those are usually a no go.
This is who Ono is. He took on a very visible role in athletics at Cincinnati as well. UBC is obviously an entirely different situation regarding athletics, but he clearly sees involvement with athletics as a significant part of the president's role within the broader university.
There are a lot of people on here now who are completely ok with this outcome.
It’s always funny to watch mainly nba guys be exposed to college officiating.
I don't think people understand just how dire Northwestern basketball has been historically. Prior to Collins, they hadn't been over 500 in the conference since the Eisenhower administration. He's done it three times.
…
Here's the case for Collins
-The four best seasons by winning percentage at Northwestern since 1958.
-Made tourney three times at a college that had never made it before, that is facing a talent disadvantage in ~75% of its conference games.
-Knows how to manage a basketball program at a place with challenging academic structures.
-Has created decent program stability in the NIL era
Downside:
-Seems a bit of a jerk
-Ran off some players in questionable circumstances early in his tenure
-Has a very embarassing photo of him on all fours in a game against Michigan several years ago.
Is he also able to figure out the admissions challenges for mid-career transfers, because those are not going away, no matter how much fans complain.
Northwestern had 7 seasons over 500 in the 30 years before Collins was hired and no tourney bids. He's had 4 winning seasons, which were all the winningest seasons in the past 40 years of Northwestern basketball, and made the tourney 4 times, in a decade of coaching.
He has two things going against him: 1. He went down on all fours and looked like an idiot in one game against Michigan, that picture is posted every year on this blog when Michigan plays NU. 2. He also chased a lot of guys off one year early in his tenure with some shady tactics that don't seem to have been repeated. He is likely often a jerk. But also a very solid coach who is probably gettable.
Given Northwestern basketball, he's very far above mediocre.
Last 10 seconds if you include the total inability to understand help defense
Jim selling off his vinyl! (lower corner)
Totally unrelated to the topic at hand, but Spencer Haywood's fascinating, and somewhat tragic story, plays a central role in Theresa Runstedler's excellent recent book Black Ball, which is about the transformation of the NBA in the 1970s.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/theresa-runstedtler/black-ball/9781645036951/?lens=bold-type-books
“Have you ever written a manifesto? If so, how many pages is it?”
At this point, NBA and NCAA basketball may as well be different sports from a coaching standpoint. They're played entirely differently, the players, particularly as shooters, are on an entirely different level, the role of coaches is entirely different (much much less roster management in the NBA). As a result, they require almost entirely different coaching skill-sets.
McDermott just signed a contract extension that presumably has a large buyout. He's going to retire at Creighton.
I think the lesson of both Stackhouse and Howard are that NBA coaching and NCAA coaching may as well be different sports. Those guys were both regarded as very solid assistants well on their way to head coaching positions, but they just fell apart in running college programs (where there's much more emphasis on roster management than with NBA coaching, which is about very specific strategic choices about how to defend the pick and roll and how to manage minutes and egos over a longer season).
Are there any good options for that left, though, with Cousins and Wilson off the board? Maybe they sign a journeyman and have JJ as the starter in waiting.
As a Packers fan, strongly do not want JJ to go to the Vikings with that receiving corps.
Except that they apparently first met at summer camp, where they hated each other. Which is even funnier and more touching, in a way.
From college GA to NFL position coach in 2 years seems like a rocket ship trajectory. Very promising hire.
Highly important post. Thanks
Normalize shoving your boss when he's wrong!
The NCAA's treatment of Aaliya's situation is even more messed up when you consider Argentinian inflation. Given that the rate of inflation for the Argentine peso was 185% in 2023, and is estimated to be 250% this year, if the NCAA is asking for this repayment in dollars, they're demanding he repay vastly more money than he received, in order to participate in a sport where players are now regularly being paid significant amounts of money by entities so close to the team that there is no meaningful distinction between athletic department and NIL collective.
Leonard went from dc to analyst because he shived Paul Chryst and no head coach wanted to hire him.
Universities are notorious for doing this (waiting until someone has an offer in hand before making retention offers) with current faculty who are being interviewed for jobs elsewhere.
This argument would be more valid even two weeks ago. But with deBoer and Fisch in new jobs, the two candidates who could reasonably be considered potentially worth paying the price of short-term losses to the program (in terms of players, coaches and likely Herbert) in the long term, and plausible hires are off the board. In part, that's why he's the only contender (I think he would have likely been the hire even if deBoer and Fisch were "available").
Yeah, but his injury history has to be part of the calculation. The floor could be another acl and out of the league after his rookie deal because he can’t stay healthy.
Also, he’s not great on the move and seemed to have trouble reading M’s defense (though that is true of every qb M played this year).
Our national championship winning head coach back to lead our national championship winning team.
I'll take that.
Plus, the University of Arizona has a massive budget shortfall that probably prevents them from matching any offer Fisch would receive.
https://kjzz.org/content/1867904/university-arizonas-budget-crisis-just-got-more-controversial-tucson#:~:text=It%20wasn't%20too%20long,he%20attributed%20to%20financial%20miscalculation.
Exactly, no longer a lateral move (if it ever was, which I don't agree with given Washington's history) now that Washington's in the Big Ten and Arizona's in the Big 12.
Only Brian was ... asked to not do whatever it was he was doing any more. Kirk is still coaching Iowa.
I don’t know if it’s THE moment, but a moment that things totally changed for me was in the immediate aftermath of the 2021 OSU game, suddenly realizing that “we get to watch this team in more games that matter this year!” It was like a surprise gift that I hadn’t realized was coming.
Yes, it’s that exact moment when I finally stopped doubting we were going to win
If Harbaugh leaves and we don't hire Moore, he's 100% gone to be head coach somewhere else.
Hoke also had head coaching experience! He had been coach of the year in separate conferences!!! DeBoer has run a program, and has succeeded everywhere he's been, but one that receives far less national attention than Michigan and receives, at best, the 3rd (arguably 4th) most attention in its local market. His recruiting classes have been in the low 20s.
Would he do better at Michigan? Probably. But every head coaching hire is a risk! There's one hire that won't alienate large portions of players and alumni, something that we've seen in very recent memory is a real possibility and can crater the program. If there wasn't an obvious candidate that had been on an upward trajectory for years within the program, by all means, open it up, even if that means you have to blow everything up that's been built over the last 3 years. But that's not the case we're in. Maybe Sherrone is David Shaw, which, in and of itself, is not the worst outcome, and we see plateauing at some level below winning the fucking national championship. Maybe he's Kirby Smart or Lincoln Riley. Regardless, don't break what's working.
C'mon people, put some thought and research into your arguments. Fickell had an entire season as interim head coach and posted one of the two losing seasons in the last 50 years of OSU football (other was Cooper's first year). If Sherrone had been in over his head the way Fickell was, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Maintaining Stanford at an elite level is degrees of magnitude harder than maintaining Michigan at an elite level.
Hiring anyone is a gamble. But hiring Moore would be a gamble that didn’t immediately piss off the most important stakeholders the program needs in order to be successful. The players clearly respect and follow him. They clearly regard him as a leader. And they put in a lot of work.
Should Harbaugh leave, this is an unprecedented situation. It’s literally a national championship team (damn, that feels good to write) that was coached, at least on game day, for more than 1/4 of the games, including half of the biggest games, by someone who would be the leading candidate for the job. I can’t imagine hiring someone else and it not causing a huge amount of disappointment and anger among the players.
It’s crazy. People are treating it like Hoke went straight from coaching Michigan’s d-line to head coach of Michigan. Hoke had years of head coaching experience. He’s like the case study for why head coaching experience shouldn't be regarded as a prerequisite.
Is someone as likely to come in as “bull in a china shop”/“I need to clean this place out” as Rich Rod did? No, almost certainly not. Would almost every player on the team for the past three years and tons of program alums be incredibly upset that the guy they felt had earned his shot by leading the team against Penn State and Ohio State got passed over? Absolutely. Particularly if it’s the guy coaching the team Michigan just beat for the national championship?
That’s the kind of thing that takes an amazingly talented leader/manager of people to overcome. It has such a higher chance of failure in the immediate term than hiring Sherrone. If you do something like that, you have to believe you have a best coach in a generation type figure, because otherwise, you’ve just destroyed the commitment of whole classes of players and former players.
Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma
Rich Rod was the hottest coaching candidate in the country, with tons of coaching experience, with tons of demonstrated ability. The turmoil his hiring created, certainly not entirely all his making, cratered the program for a decade.
And do you really think turning away from a guy who was in charge for 2 of the biggest 4 wins of a national championship year isn’t going to create huge rifts within the program?