Every time Michigan lose to their big rivals it’s a sad day, especially when it keeps them from going to a bowl game for the third time in the last seven years. Brady Hoke is responsible for the current failure, and yet despite it being quite clear of the awful job he’s been doing, he still hasn’t been fired.
Michigan fans are looking West at Nebraska. A program with the same kind of expectations and some would say history, especially when considering the last 40 years. They went 9-4 or 10-4 each season with Bo Pelini. Michigan fans would embrace a 10-4 season with wide open arms. They’d take quite a few of them. Nebraska head honchos don’t want to settle for good. They want great, championships, excellence. Michigan, for some reason, still haven’t moved on from the man it’s quite clear they won’t achieve it with him.
The rumor suggests that the Wolverines will be going all-in on Jim Harbaugh, but that means waiting until January. Can Michigan afford to wait that long when it costs them recruits, not to mention Harbaugh not even close to a guarantee? The “experts” keep suggesting that Harbaugh isn’t going to stay in San Francisco because of his disagreements with the front office and especially his general manager.
But who is to say he won’t stay in the NFL? Almost every team with an availability will be making a move. There have already been talk of the Raiders and the Jets willing to make a trade for Harbaugh. He hasn’t won a Super Bowl or a national championship in college, but he has taken a team to the Super Bowl, and his rebuilding of the Stanford program has managed to last almost four years after he was gone. This season was the beginning of the decline.
Michigan changed their Athletic Director who managed to piss off the entire fan base, which has a huge say in what goes down in every big program. That same fan base might be a little less aggressive when it comes to Brady Hoke, viewed as less of a negative individual than Dave Brandon, but it seems to everyone that Hoke, even with different bosses, won’t be the man who leads this program into hopefully a better future.
Yet days after the season ended with another failure: Another loss to Ohio State and missing out on a bowl game for the first time in the Hoke era, he still is at the helm of a job he has failed at far too many times. Even though it might not be the “class” move to fire him so soon after the season is over, if the decision to move on from him has already been made, there’s really zero sense in keeping him around.
Hoke is 31-20 as the head coach at Ann Arbor, getting worse with every season that went by. At first he looked like he’d be the one to get the Wolverines out of their Rich Rodriguez slump, but later it turned out that Michigan ruined Rodriguez, not the other way around. Hoke? Maybe there’s hope for him with a different school, but in Michigan, he’s burned all of his bridges, and the sooner he goes, the better it is for the program.