On Warde

Can I tell you my very hottest take about Michigan athletics? It's not about Jim or Juwan, or Braylon or Bo. No, my very hottest take about Michigan is what I feel to be an honest look at one of the least-liked figures in the history of the athletic department:

All things considered, Dave Brandon was good at hiring coaches.

I know, I know, you're saying "but he's the guy who set a fire in the athletic department and then emailed fans about how it's their fault that it wasn't put out." And he is, and I'll get there, but let's take a look at the record first.

Dave Brandon hired ten head coaches in his time as athletic director. One was Brady Hoke, and for good reason that will always be the hire that is his public legacy at Michigan. Among the rest, Kim Barnes Arico is the undisputed GOAT Michigan women's basketball coach. Jan Dowling is trending in that direction in women's golf. Florida men's tennis was just two years removed from a national championship when last year their coaching search landed on Brandon-hire Adam Steinberg. You're probably already familiar with Erik Bakich, now at Clemson baseball.

The only Brandon hires that straight up didn't work out are the two original lacrosse coaches (I won't hold either against him, especially John Paul who had very obviously earned the first shot when the men went varsity), and water polo coach Marcelo Leonardi, who was fired for performance in 2022. I'll give Brandon half-credit for the best and worst of Chaka Daley (men's soccer), at this point if you're still around its at least partly to Warde's credit/fault.

Of course, Dave Brandon had to be fired. I don't need to go deep into why in this space, but his ego was incompatible with being the athletic director at the University of Michigan. Despite the defense of him I lodged above, there is no part of me that remembers him fondly or believes he should have been retained. He deserves whatever derision you harbor towards him, and probably some more.

I do not intend to draw an unfavorable comparison between Brandon and current Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel. I am setting a baseline, looking at what a widely-disliked guy might have achieved anyways, so we have a place to start talking about Manuel's Michigan tenure. No, I am not trying to argue Manuel is worse than Brandon.

What I am trying to argue is that Warde Manuel is replacement-level.

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When Warde Manuel was hired in 2016, he was the obvious choice. He played for Bo Schembechler before joining the athletic department and working his way up to associate athletic director. He took on a tough job as the AD for Buffalo, before going to UConn in 2012. Early in his UConn tenure, he retained Kevin Ollie, elevating Ollie from assistant to head men's basketball coach upon the retirement of Jim Calhoun. His faith would pay off almost immediately, with Ollie's Huskies winning the national championship in 2013.

Manuel extended Ollie at the end of the 2014 season, more or less cementing his legacy as a Good Athletic Director for UConn. When post-Brandon interim AD Jim Hackett was not interested in having the interim tag removed, it made sense to bring Warde home, which Michigan did in January 2016.

Michigan needed a steady hand to rebuild goodwill for the department after the Brandon debacle. They needed someone who knew the fanbase, knew the program, knew that really the only sacred cows are "don't put a big fiberglass macaroni in the Big House" and "don't email fans and tell them to quit drinking and go to bed". They needed, and I'm sorry for this, a Michigan Man.

Let's start with the good. I defended Dave Brandon's record, I think I owe Warde the courtesy.

First of all:

How much credit for the three straight Big Ten football titles and a National Championship does Warde Manuel deserve? Doesn't matter! Football is the most important sport to the public, to a very large degree a Michigan athletic director's legacy is defined by football. Football has been very-good-to-great for most of his tenure, therefore he gets some credit, thems the rules.

Like Brandon, Warde Manuel has made many savvy hires in Olympic sports. Hannah Nielsen brought women's lacrosse to three NCAA Tournaments, while Kevin Conry won the school its first Big Ten lacrosse hardware. Sean Bormet guided wrestling to it's first Big Ten Championship in nearly fifty years, and its first two individual national championships since 2012. Jennifer Klein has a Big Ten women's soccer tournament title and several NCAA Tourney appearances. Zach Barlow's men's golfers have won four tournaments in his five years. It took his predecessor eight years to win five.

Elsewhere, he has signed Kim Barnes Arico to a deserved long-term extension. The women's gymnastics team won a national championship in 2021. The Wolverines are the defending football national champions, and Manuel made what most feel to be the natural hire when Jim Harbaugh left.

It may be years before we know if Sherrone Moore was the correct hire, but I was personally completely on board, and remain so despite some hand-wringing about the rest of the coaching staff. Like Brandon and Hoke, Moore's performance will have an outsized impact on Manuel's legacy.

No matter what my qualms with Manuel are, the Wolverines are putting up results, and for many those results are the mark by which his tenure has and will be judged.

On March 10th, 2018, UConn fired Kevin Ollie with cause due to an ongoing NCAA investigation. Ollie would later be served a three-year show-cause penalty, effectively barring him from coaching in the college ranks.

Not unlike the football victories, it's hard to say to what extent Warde Manuel should be considered responsible for Ollie's "failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance," and Manuel was two years into his Michigan tenure when the firing happened. The charges themselves are pretty tame, mostly miscounting hours, but Ollie's severe punishment was due to a lack of cooperation with the NCAA.

In the past six months or so, it has been easy as a Michigan fan to take a position that amounts to "why would you cooperate with the NCAA." However, the Ollie show-cause is a data point in a pattern of mini-scandals at Manuel-led institutions.

When Donovan Edwards retweeted an anti-semitic tweet during the 2022 season, no official public response from the athletic department ever came. Some will point to his Regents Acker and Bernstein's tweets about the situation as if they were an official response, but there was no press release, Edwards was not reprimanded in any public way, no team account tweeted a graphic with an apology.

Reasonable people can disagree on what should have happened via official channels, but I am comfortable in my position that it should have been more than nothing. (I will note here that I am Jewish, this issue is personal to me.) When the team did eventually go on the regent-promised visit to West Bloomfield's Holocaust Center, the official team acknowledgement that this had happened was minimal, with that work being farmed out to the Michigan beat writers.

If I was trying to argue that Warde Manuel is an actively bad athletic director, this whole piece would have just been about his handling of the Mel Pearson scandal. Pearson was eventually fired after spending almost a full season suspended pending an investigation of abuse of both players and hockey staff. Angelique Chengelis reported that Manuel had received the WilmerHale report with the findings of that investigation on May 5th, 2022. Pearson remained suspended until August 5th, when he was fired. The only thing that changed between May and August was daylight, as the Detroit News had acquired the report several days prior to his firing.

Pearson was retained into the off-season, robbing interim (later full) head coach Brandon Naurato of valuable recruiting time. Naurato, for his part, had by May 5th proven himself to be perfectly capable of guiding the team, which had just made a Frozen Four. After his firing Pearson was still a regular fixture at Michigan hockey games, even joining a game broadcast on B1G+ within months of his firing. If a coach is fired with cause for abuse within a program, that should be the end of his time as a face of the program.

In early December, Juwan Howard joined the Michigan men's basketball team on their trip to Iowa. Strength coach John Sanderson did not. It came out later that day that this was due to an altercation between Howard and Sanderson. Sanderson filed an HR complaint, which is mostly notable because Howard was already on thin ice. (As far as I can tell, no public result of said HR complaint has emerged.)

In 2021, Howard had to be restrained from going after Maryland head coach Mark Turgeon, and in 2022 he struck a Wisconsin assistant during a post-game fracas. If the incident with Sanderson happened before the Iowa game, and Juwan Howard was at that time acting as an assistant anyways, AND he is on a "no tolerance policy" based on his previous actions, why was Howard the one in Iowa and not Sanderson?

Just the other day, now that the issues in Howard's tenure are largely focused the team's play and not Howard's extracurriculars, Warde Manuel said "I have not really thought about any changes in in our men’s basketball program at this time." The rest of his answer is perfectly fine, all of the normal in-season platitudes about how Howard is the coach right now and he wants to support him. Additionally, I think despite everything, Michigan owes Juwan Howard the courtesy of not firing him mid-season. This isn't Holtmann and OSU, you do actually need to care about the guy's continued association with Michigan athletics.

But you can't say you haven't thought about it. Thinking about it is the job. Had he delivered the rest of the platitudes without opening with "I haven't thought about it," it would not have come off nearly as clueless about what is happening inside the program.

At the time I wrote the very first draft of this piece before my general fear of putting out "bad vibes" between the regular season and the Rose Bowl got the best of me, Jim Harbaugh was still the head coach of Michigan football. A common line from Warde's biggest detractors looks something like "He ran off Harbaugh, Beilein, and Bakich, the best coaches in their sports in Michigan history." In my opinion, two things can be true at once:

1. There is nothing specific Warde Manuel could have done directly to prevent either John Beilein or Jim Harbaugh from leaving. Beilein saw one final shot at plying his hand in the NBA, and Harbaugh looked at his trophy case and went to chase what was now it's biggest missing piece.
2. When it comes to Jim Harbaugh, the fact that Warde would still be his boss certainly didn't help.

I don't want to belabor the signgate/burgergate stuff, but it's not great when your head football coach is suspended for six games over the course of a season for entirely separate incidents. Here we see the repeating pattern when discussing the issues within the program: It is hard to hold any of this against Warde directly, but the buck has to stop somewhere. It was extremely bizzare that the announcement that Jim Harbaugh would return for 2023 came directly from UM President Santa Ono, and made it clear that Harbaugh had told him directly, not Manuel.

There are persistent message board rumors that Bakich approached Manuel not about his own salary, but about more funding for the baseball program generally. Those rumors assert that Manuel said no, and thus Bakich went to a program where getting those resources was a given. I am not sure if I believe this is true, but I can't argue that it's believable. That said, I think a lot (not all, but a lot) of people who append Bakich to their Beilein/Harbaugh yelling had not watched a Wolverine baseball game before Michigan's run to the College World Series and have not watched one since.

This is an Olympic sports blog, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that volleyball coach Mark Rosen signed a five year extension shortly before his late-2022 firing. It's very easy to argue that it was time to move on from Rosen, whose program had plateaued at "bubble team that usually gets in" and not much more. But based on how it happened, it seems like something weirder happened than a firing for on-court performance. Warde believed he was good enough to get five more years, and then seventy-one days later he did not. Why that is, we will likely never know.

I do not think the Edwards incident is a fireable incident for Manuel. I do not think his handling of Juwan Howard's non-basketball issues is fireable, and it remains to be seen if this offseason he makes an attempt to fix the program's basketball issues. I think chances are whatever happened with Rosen isn't fireable. I do not think anything related to Jim Harbaugh is fireable (just weird). I do think they could (should!) have fired him over mishandling the hockey scandal, but they did not.

All of these are mini-scandals (except hockey). But how many mini-scandals equal one big scandal? How many strikes does it take?

Have you noticed the popcorn got smaller? I remember the exact night I noticed. It was the season finale at Crisler in 2022, Michigan lost a clunker to Iowa. All of the issues with the Howard-era teams showed up at once, the defensive struggles, the bad body language when down. When I went to get a box of "Popped Maize" at the half, I paid my $7 like always, but got a box that was smaller than I was expecting.

It was Fan Appreciation Night.

This is the true legacy of the Brandon Era. Brandon fostered, or to be less charitable to his predecessors, made plain, a culture in the athletic department that no longer viewed Michigan fans as partners. No, Michigan athletics is a product, and we are it's consumers. Nothing more, nothing less. The primary concern is no longer how to maintain whatever intrinsic thing it is that makes Michigan special, but how to squeeze an extra few bucks out of every fan. If you can downsize the popcorn and charge the same, well that's just good business.

This is the harshest charge I will lay directly at Warde Manuel's feet: Michigan being good at football has papered over the fact that this is still the athletic department that Dave Brandon built. Warde Manuel is comfortable with operating in the same milieu that Brandon did, the relationship between fan and department is a consumer relationship.

Now I'm not naive. "Hur dur jay college sports is a business get with the times." I know that. But Michigan is a special place with exceptionally good athletics across all sports, and yet, can you see this happening at Michigan?

Well, jay, Michigan doesn't have a Caitlin Clark. You can't expect Michigan WBB ticket sales to keep pace with a national runner up with a generational player. Maybe that's true. Let's try a one-off that does not require a team to have a Caitlin Clark.

Can you see this happening at Michigan?

In 2022, when Michigan women's basketball was in the midst of the best season it has ever had, I signed up for a bus trip for the away game in East Lansing. $25 for the bus, a couple slices of pizza, and game tickets. The trip was cancelled due to low interest.

Here I will directly quote from the (admittedly kind of catty) email I wrote at the time:

I understand there is a number under which this simply isn't feasible, but ultimately the cost for the athletic department to run a half-empty bus is probably a rounding error on whatever raises Harbaugh's assistants are due under his new contract. As far as I can tell, this has only ever been advertised in-person at Crisler. In the wake of a historic win over Indiana the other night, there does not appear to have been a twitter post advertising the trip, and I cannot find one from any date before that. I don't think I ever saw it on the UMichWBball instagram story. It was hard to find on the ticketing website, and there doesn't seem to be a post about it going on sale in the WBB news archive on MGoBlue.com. Its frustrating to see this trip cancelled, to see the best team Michigan's ever had not get some crucial road support, when even as someone who pays very close attention to WBB news, I only heard about it because I happened to be in my seat at the right time at Crisler the other night.

Michigan could have taken the loss. You know it, and I know it. They could have advertised better, for sure, but they could have looked at the fans that signed up, looked at the players who were about to go on the school's first ever Elite Eight run, and go "the money doesn't make sense, but all of these people deserve this."

Concession prices are the same at every stadium the Wolverines play at. It is $4.50 for a water at the Big House. It is $4.50 for a water at the Canham Natatorium. You can leave everything the exact same at the Big House for all I care, football is a premium experience, but I truly believe that if the athletic department wants to make "non-revenue" sports an accessible experience for more Ann Arbor families, concession prices are a good place to start. (An aside: my dream is that beer sales at stadium continue to be premium priced and they use some of the profits to lower the cost of non-alcohol concessions. A man can dream, anyways.)

I don't want to dwell on this too much as it is worthy of its own 4k word piece, but has Warde Manuel, or really any Big Ten athletic director, ever used Big Ten Plus? Do they have any idea how quickly we've fallen behind the SEC, the Big 12, and some days the MAC and Ivy League on the quality and availability of Olympic sport coverage?

The truth is I'm jealous. I'm jealous when I see the types of crowds that Iowa and Indiana draw for women's basketball games. I'm jealous when I see packed volleyball games. I'm jealous of schools that have a stronger culture of fandom at their Olympic sports.

I am not sure how to fix the attendance problem at Olympic sports. I am, as it turns out, just some guy. I have some ideas and can be reached at allbluedotfans at gmail dot com (I know it's confusing but I believe in you), but I am not actually sure what it is Michigan needs to unlock so that I do not have to be jealous of other fanbases.

The problem is, I don't think Warde Manuel knows either.

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) has become the go-to stat for quickly evaluating a baseball player's contributions to his team. It assigns values to various game events, so that over the course of the season you can try to calculate how many more wins a team had because a given player was in the lineup, rather than a replacement player from AAA or mid-season free agency. In this context, "replacement-level" refers to a player who one does not expect to contribute more than any given minor league call-up might in the same circumstances.

At the time of Warde Manuel's hiring, a replacement-level AD was fine. Michigan needed stability, and that stability came in the form of a guy who had both internal and external credentials that made him a perfect fit. Brandon had negative WAR. A replacement player would be an improvement.

And Warde Manuel has been fine. Football is good and will only continue to make money in the new superconference era. Wrestling got so popular they had to move out of Cliff Keen into Crisler. Attendance records are consistently broken when Women's Gymnastics and Women's Basketball have their annual "Crash Crisler" events, where they put a lot of resources into filling the bowl for one event. I assume he is extremely good at raising money.

I have not used the phrase "Name, Image, and Likeness" in this piece because I am going to be honest, I do not fully understand what Manuel should be doing differently. I agree with the general sentiment that Michigan seems to be falling behind, but since the Championship we can see the embrace in areas such as Champions Circles' participation in the pep rally at Crisler, or in the permanent hiring of of an NIL general manager. Whether Manuel is actually behind these efforts or is being dragged into the future kicking and screaming is unknowable, but perception is important, and once again the perception is that Michigan isn't quite the leader in this space, but things are going fine.

We're past "fine" now. We have a new president who is far more serious about athletics than our previous one. Mark Schlissel wanted an athletic director who wouldn't bother him too much. I believe Santa Ono's charge should be to hire someone with a clearer, articulated vision for what the future of Michigan Athletics looks like. The Big Ten, and by extension Michigan, were willing participants in the fracture of college athletics as we knew it. I think it is time for someone who is willing to lead from the front on how to keep Michigan special in a new era.

I'm sure there are obvious candidates. I'm sure some of the candidates are Michigan Men. I hope that some of the candidates are women, Michigan or otherwise.

Michigan needs a leader who has shown an active interest in exploring what college athletics is about to become. As a blue blood under the suddenly old model of college athletics, Michigan could be content to allow the wind to choose their direction, to continue sailing towards infinite growth. The time has come for someone to captain the ship, to make proactive decisions and be accountable to the public. If Michigan does not make a change, I fear getting swept up in the current.