Jim Harbaugh presented Warde Manuel with a jersey. pic.twitter.com/FhYCUdNNtL
— Eric Upchurch (@EUpchurchPhoto) January 29, 2016
By all accounts, Warde Manuel won his opening press conference in a blowout. This is usually the way of opening pressers, full as they are of hope and barren as they are of data. There have been hopeful pressers for men so doomed that a nine-foot-tall skeleton with a scythe asked the first question. "HOW EXCITED ARE YOU TO BE HERE?" it intoned in the general direction of Paul Pasqualoni, "AND ISN'T IT ALL ABOUT THE KIDS?"
We've learned over the past five years that winning the press conference has an extremely low correlation with success. Jim Hackett deployed awkward MBA jargon; Dave Brandon sold me a vacuum with no return policy. We have also learned that hiring qualified people has a high correlation with success. Brady Hoke had one good year at BGSU; Jim Harbaugh has built program after program into towering Schembechlerian things.
Warde Manuel is mercifully, finally, obviously qualified. He has run athletic departments at Buffalo and UConn. Before that he spent years working his way up the ranks of Michigan's athletic department. At Buffalo he hired Turner Gill, the only guy to make Buffalo football even vaguely passable. At UConn he was presented Kevin Ollie and didn't screw that up. He hired ND defensive coordinator Bob Diaco to replace Pasqualoni, that after making a run at Pat Narduzzi*. He spearheaded a move to Hockey East for UConn hockey. Everything he's done in the public eye makes sense.
Incredibly, he is the first sitting athletic director to ever get the AD job at Michigan. That aversion to experience was common sense in Don Canham's time when the job of Michigan athletic director barely resembled AD at, say, Purdue. It was anything but by the early 90s, when Tom Goss bombed the department's finances and erected an infamous eyesore. But Michigan persisted with various businessmen, hitting on one who'd get things more or less right and one who would get everything vastly wrong.
The one who got things right, Bill Martin, erased a major deficit and put Michigan on a path towards long-term financial stability. In the context of the athletic department at that juncture, which needed money and classy architecture more than anything, a real estate magnate who built his company from the groud up was qualified. He was also Michigan, but he was qualified first.
Martin's main issue came where he was not qualified: a football coaching search. That search is not like other searches, and it seemed to veer chaotically from one goofy candidate to the next before landing on Rich Rodriguez. Rodriguez was a superficially excellent candidate submarined by many, many things. One of them was the Michigan football host rejecting an organ transplant from a guy who grew up in the "holler."
Manuel has to undo some damage the guy who got everything wrong inflicted. A chunk of that is financial, as the department collected Executive Vice President types like they were limited edition pogs under Brandon. But thanks to Martin and the ever-rising tide of television fees, Manuel should be free to do the athletic department things he's done so well in his previous stops: hiring good people.
And if he references Fielding Yost and this Michigan of ours along the way, all the better. He's qualified first, Michigan second. Jim Harbaugh is also a combination of these things. The bright future of the football program is about to spread to the rest of the department, because the people in charge of things have reasons to be in charge of them.
*[Don't fret about Pasqualoni. His hire was one of the last acts of the previous AD.]