What about this do you think can be saved? [Glanzman]
Ace: There's a very good chance this is moot after a beatdown this weekend, so it's now or never for this question. If you ran the athletic department, is there anything Brady Hoke could do the rest of this season that would convince you to keep him around for another year? If so, what would he have to accomplish over the rest of the year?
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BiSB: There is absolutely room for Brady Hoke to save his job. And it absolutely won't happen.
People get WAY too caught up in wins and losses. Devin Funchess was right: wins are just a statistic. Any time a coach is on the "hot seat," the offseason features constant and breathless blathering about "how many wins Coach X needs to keep his job," as if win totals by themselves tell us everything. Hoke's problem isn't that Michigan is 3-4. The problem isn't that Michigan has lost 10 of its last 15. The problem is that Michigan has been bad at football. The records are merely a symptom of being bad at football. You look at the guy trailing by 10 meters at the halfway point of a 100 meter dash, you don't say to yourself "he's going to lose because he has too much ground to make up." You say "he's going to lose because he isn't as fast as the other guys."
And that is why Brady Hoke will not keep his job. The football team he has assembled is not good, and has shown no signs of improvement over the last four years. Some people got excited last week because "a win is a win," and ignored the fact that Michigan displayed plenty of the same crippling weaknesses that have led it here. At some point, as they say, "you are who you are." The flaws with this team are not small, technical issues. They have deep, fundamental, systematic problems. They can't block. They can't get open. They flat-out can't play the coverage scheme they have been trying to play. They can't... uh... score points. Their special teams, as a whole, are bad. Michigan is just bad.
You don't throw away a coach who is moving in the right direction because he took momentary detour into Derpville. If Hoke can turn this team into the kind of team that can beat Michigan State and Ohio State and (sigh) Maryland, then sure, why not keep him. But if he could do that, we probably would have seen evidence of it by now.
[After the jump: votes of confidence?]
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Brian: There's nothing Hoke could do, because I wouldn't give him the opportunity to save his job with an OSU win.
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| It would take a statue-worthy coaching job to turn this team around. [Fuller] |
I mean, okay, yes, in the event that Michigan makes an unprecedented in-season turnaround, beats Michigan State without an all-time sixty-minute Sparty No facilitating it, rips through Maryland and Indiana and Northwestern and enters OSU 7-4 then he would be coaching for his job.
In a world where previous events can be used to project into the future—which I still think is the case despite the Blake Countess counterpoint—there is no scenario where he gets to the OSU game better than 6-5, and at that point I'm giving him the Earle Bruce and moving on. Unless the next few weeks radically reshape the way this team plays the narrative of his four year tenure at Michigan is luck and Denard saving his ass until he could screw it all up, and I'm not putting Michigan in a spot where an all-time luck explosion forces me to retain a guy who is in so far over his head that he needs a periscope to see hell.
Hoke's recruiting is permanently damaged after the Morris thing; you can't extend him; you can't let him coach a lame-duck season; scenarios in which retaining him is even vaguely spinnable as plausible are 1% things now. He gone.
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Seth: Speculating whether Hoke can upset a rival on the march to the inevitable is like asking what if Dave Brandon's contempt for fans hadn't made a disaster out of the concussion incident, or if Romeo and Juliet would have made a nice couple if their families weren't trying to kill each other. They are all symptoms of THE inherent flaw. Barring a string of extraordinarily fortuitous bounces, Brady isn't going to defeat Mark's or Urban's football teams, because those guys are that much better at building and coaching football teams.
(football gods PLEASE bring a string of extraordinarily fortuitous bounces anyway.)
In case 31-0 to Notre Dame, Wanking in the Rain, Playing Shane, and Mattison's Bad Game left any reasonable doubt, consider the new judge.
I've yet to see it evidenced, but those who talk hot seats like to mention that a new AD is death to a coach on the fence. We don't have to look very far for examples: Brandon got rid of Rodriguez after about 350 days. Ellerbe lasted exactly a year after Martin took over. Roberson accepted Moeller's resignation a few months after assuming office. Goss fired Steve Fisher at the barest whiff of implication in the Martin scandal. Frieder couldn't even leave to take the ASU job without Bo canning him first. And Canham didn't fire Bump in 1968, but he did go down to his office to say "Do you really wanna do this still?" (Strack retired into the athletic department the same year, but certainly of his own volition).
In counter-examples, Bo Pelini survived a new boss after last year, though his hot seat was always overblown. Kyle Flood still has a job (and GOT EXTENDED!) despite not being a Herman hire, but all Rutgers precedent should be considered inadmissible on grounds that we'd rather keep Dave than be Rutgers.
I am wary that the things we see in our little bloggersphere are not the things people in charge see. What I see: in four years with the guy, Hoke's most innovative use of Devin Gardner was to leave him in during blowouts to create the appearance that Michigan wasn't giving up on games they'd given up on. Hoke was granted that fourth-year-with-a-new-coordinator that Rodriguez was begging for, and then the whole team got worse. This year's Minnesota game was the 2010 Penn State moment of the Hoke regime, except instead of launching a parade of tight ends at Ray Vinopal's head, the panic move was to let irresponsible Minnesota DEs run at Shane Morris's. These are all pretty specific things that not everybody noticed or talked about. Most people talk about how they can't run the ball or "do anything right."
But then most people want him gone. Hoke's biggest supporters aren't on the team; they're the guys who saw him coach DL in the late 1990s and early 'aughts, when Michigan's roster actually was experienced and talented enough to win by doing hard things better than their opponents could do easier things. That faction reached the zenith of its influence when Michigan hired Hoke; since then it hasn't grown its ranks or furthered its cause. You'll note that Hagerup's 'When the fall is all that is, it matters'letter to his teammates said nothing about their coaches. The Hoke people got their wish and it didn't work out for exactly the reasons the rest of us feared it wouldn't. Hearing the States' evidence now is just asking for more pain.
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| Can you spot all the things wrong with this picture? [Fuller] |
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Adam: I'm still giving Hoke the opportunity to coach for his job. The problem for him is that seeing what I would need to for him to be around next fall is about as likely as Michigan getting a defensive touchdown with three seconds left in the first half against Penn State. In other words, things aren't looking very good.
At this point winning is necessary but not sufficient. Michigan has to beat at least Michigan State or Ohio State and run the table otherwise. Beyond that, though, they have to show some kind of progress in their in-game strategy. That means no more sloppy mistakes (e.g. 10 men on the field for special teams situations) and no more poor decision-making from on high (e.g. the kind of timeout management you'd expect if Chris Webber was the head coach).
I like Brady Hoke as a person. When he's not in front of the camera he drops his deer-in-the-headlights act and he's charismatic. I can see why his former players are so supportive of him, but being a nice person or a "Michigan Man" won't save him anymore. Michigan's general disorganization and game theory blunders fall on Hoke, and they can't continue. The obvious problem is that there's no evidence that would lead me to believe they won't.
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| A lame duck situation only freezes that program in place while its rivals continue to build. [Fuller] |
If this thing gets turned around mid-season and Michigan suddenly looks competent then I'll happily deploy the "Brady Hoke poops magic" tag in my posts that probably hasn't been used since 2011. Right now, though, it's almost certain I'll be using the "coaching changes" tag.
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Ace: Since everyone else has covered the "no realistic way in hell" aspect of this, I'll approach it from a recruiting perspective. If Michigan decided to keep Hoke on for another year, it'd be disastrous in that regard. Michigan is already hemorrhaging commits as ugly play reigns on the field and uncertainty off it.
In this 2015 class, at least, M has few enough spots that a reasonably timed coaching change should allow the program to piece together a serviceable group of incoming freshmen—and depending on the hire, potentially a very good one. Keep Hoke around, though, and it's tough to see how his staff even goes about recruiting; these prospects—as well as their families and their coaches—know the situation, and at this point few could take Hoke seriously when he says he expects to remain the coach here. That's going to make it extremely tough to retain enough pieces of the current class while finding interested players with Michigan-level talent.
If Hoke is then allowed to assemble the 2016 class, Michigan could face the type of gap in depth/talent we pointed to when his offensive line stopped functioning. Hoke has made his recruiting hay early in the cycle, for the most part, but in a hypothetical '16 class that'd be the time when he'd be considered the coach on the hottest seat in the country—not exactly an ideal recruiting environment. Then the athletic department would have to trust that Hoke would win enough games during the season to lift any uncertainty and make up for lost time on the recruiting trail. That doesn't sound like a setup for success.
Recruiting is one of the last reasons Hoke should be let go, of course, but with how far the program has fallen he's managed to take a once-unassailable strength and turn it into a potential weakness.
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Mathlete: To Ace's point, the recruiting stakes will be very high. The 2015 class is one of the smallest in available spots possible under current scholarship rules. With only 13-15 spots possible to be filled, taking a hit this year is going to have far less downside than going into 2015 with a coach on a hot seat and probably 20+ spots to fill. A start to next year with Hoke at the helm that in any way resembles the start to this year, will potentially leave the 2016 class barren. The current struggles have already slowed the start to the 2016 class.
As to what it would take on the field, to echo everyone above, it's not just wins and losses, the narrative has to change. Michigan doesn't look anywhere near the level of the top of the Big 10. What could we see that would make this team look like they deserved to be in the same conversation as OSU and MSU? There haven't been the impression that this team was potentially elite since last year's Notre Dame game.
The other piece that concerns me is that 2015 will feature a new, unproven quarterback. It's hard to look at an offense that hasn't seemed to be on the cusp of greatness and add in a raw QB and expect things to take a big step forward. 2015 will be a critical year with recruiting momentum stalled and hopes pinned on a new quarterback. Any AD that would stake his name by Brady Hoke has either seen something we haven't on the field, will see something in the coming weeks that has defied the prior 3+ years or is just seeing things.
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BiSB: So... no? I feel like we're going with "no" here.
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All: No.