For taking the Michigan football program and making it look worse each year. For the embarrassing start to the 2014 season. For the way he handled and maybe lied about the Shane Morris concussion. Brady Hoke isn’t a good fit, and at some point very soon, the men making the decisions for the university will realize that and act on it.
For now, it seems like the school president is feeling that his message about cleaning up their act is sufficient. One rally against the Dave Brandon and Brady Hoke isn’t going to get them fired right away. Most of the decision makes are aware to what is going on online in regards to this developing mess but tend not to follow to sometimes the rash calls for taking heads and rolling them for all the people in the town’s square to see. But there will be a point where that ignoring tactic won’t work anymore.
What will it take for Michigan to drop the bomb and fire Hoke in the middle of the season? Michigan are 2-3, including losses at home to Utah and Minnesota, which means also 0-1 in the Big Ten. Brady Hoke said he still believes the conference is winnable. In theory, he’s right. One conference loss is never the end of the world, and there isn’t a powerhouse in the Big Ten that makes it impossible to beat them.
But Hoke is forgetting the most important thing: His team is terrible, or at least has looked that way for the most part. They find it difficult to score points, he has shattered the confidence of his original starting quarterback while Shane Morris, with or without the hits he took against the Golden Gophers, doesn’t seem to be in any kind of shape or form to be the man who leads the Wolverines out of this mess.
There’s Rutgers on the road, a 4-1 team that lost to Penn State by three points and also picked up a road win against Washington State, followed by playing at home against Penn State, who looked impressive until their loss at home to Northwestern of all teams. Doable, until October 25, when Michigan have to play in East Lansing against Michigan State. For a program in turmoil and a head coach who is clutching at straws to make it seem like he’s worthy of keeping his job, that might be too difficult of a challenge to overcome.
Both the AD and the school president admitted, more or less, that there was a concussion and it was ignored or misdiagnosed by the people on the sidelines. Brady Hoke took offense that his integrity by sending a kid with a concussion back onto the field was challenged by questions from the media. But everything we’ve learned from the day after the game until now leads to one conclusion: Hoke didn’t just mess up his footballing decisions that day; he also put a young man in needless risk, and then tried worming his way out of it through words.
Michigan aren’t just proud of their football success in the past. This is a university that takes pride in other achievements and reputations. Hoke might be a ‘Michigan man’ but he isn’t doing anything positive for the brand name. He isn’t alone in dragging it through the mud, on purpose or not, but he’s one of the faces of this deterioration that’s been going on for too long. Even if it’s not ‘classy’ to fire a head coach midseason, there’s no point dancing around it until things reach the absolute bottom.