Dear Brady Hoke, When The Price of Tickets Falls to Two Coca-Cola Products, Two More Years Aren’t Going to Help

(Photo: Romain Blanquart, Detroit Free Press)

After the 2010 season, in which Bill Lynch led an Indiana team that should have been better than it was to a 1-7 record in conference play, including an 83-20 loss to Wisconsin, Lynch was fired. At the time, I had heard Brady Hoke’s name thrown out there as a potential replacement. I don’t know how serious that was, but regardless, I thougt he would have been a lousy hire for Indiana.

Then Michigan hired him.

Michigan was coming off a 7-6 season, and frankly, Rich Rodriguez was lucky to get that many wins. The team started out 5-0, but included in that were two games won by last-minute Denard Robinson touchdown runs (Notre Dame and the aforementioned Hoosiers) and a five-point win over FCS Massachusetts.

Then the wheels fell off. Michigan lost to Michigan State, Iowa, and Penn State in a row. Then there was the 67-65 3 OT win over Illinois. Michigan’s final win of the season would come the following week at Purdue. After that was a 20-point loss to Wisconsin, then a 30-point loss in The Game. At that point, anyone who had been paying any attention to Michigan football over the past three years knew that Rich Rodriguez was going to get fired. Athletic Director Dave Brandon, a man who was roughly as qualified to hold that position as I am to perform brain surgery, for whatever reason, waited until after the bowl game, a 52-14 Gator Bowl drubbing by Mississippi State, to fire Rodriguez. There was speculation that Michigan would pursue Jim Harbaugh. They barely did, and Harbaugh became the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. Les Miles also passed on the job. Dave Brandon then hired Brady Hoke, a man I thought would have been a poor hire for the Indiana Hoosiers.

Hoke came to Michigan with a 47-50 career record, that included going 12-1 at Ball State, his alma mater, leaving before the bowl game to take the head coach job at San Diego State, where he turned the Aztecs into a solid program in two years. Guess he didn’t need five to six years there.

Bo Schembechler came to Michigan from a MAC school. But there was reason to believe that that hire would work. The three coaches at Miami (OH) prior to Bo were John Pont, who went on to lead Indiana to their only Rose Bowl appearance in school history, Ara Parseghian, who after eight years of mostly being in the middle of the pack in the Big Ten at Northwestern, led Notre Dame to two national championships, and Woody Hayes, who went on to lead Ohio State to three. Plus, Bo’s record at Miami (OH) was quite good. The three coaches at Ball State prior to Hoke were Bill Lynch, Paul Schudel, and Dwight Wallace. Wallace spent five years at West Virginia’s QB coach after the Cardinals showed him the door. Schudel was OC at Illinois for two years, then OL coach at Virginia for four, before taking the head coach job at FCS Central Connecticut and going 10-21 there over three seasons. He then spent six years as the OL coach at D-III Albion College before heading over to France to become head coach of the Elancourt Templiers for a year. Lynch took the head coach job at D-III DePauw after leaving Ball State, then left there after a year to work as OC and TE coach under Terry Hoeppner at Indiana. After Hoeppner died, Lynch was promoted to head coach, going 7-6 with a loss in the Insight Bowl in his first year, and then a combined 12-24 in his next three before getting fired. He is now entering the third year of his second stint at DePauw. And those résumés are more impressive then his three predecessors at Sand Diego State. Chuch Long went on to spend two years as OC at Kansas. Tom Craft spent 3 years as OC, QB coach, and Associate head coach at Mt. San Antonio community college, and is now entering his sixth year as head coach at Riverside City community college. Ted Tollner spent two years as QB coach of the San Francisco 49ers, then was promoted to OC. He held that position for a year, then the same position for the Detroit Lions for a year, then went back to San Francisco to serve as an assistant for two more years, then got fired and became passing game coordinator at Oakland for two years. There was no reason to think Hoke could be Bo and every reason to believe he could be Glen Mason.

At his introductory press conference, Hoke spoke with a passion about Michigan, saying “This is Michigan, fergodsakes.” I still wasn’t sold on the hire, but I liked the man. I could relate to him, a man who may not have actually attended the University of Michigan, but loved Michigan so much that he was every bit as much a Michigan Man as anyone who had. I decided to give him a chance.

Michigan went 11-2 in the 2011-12 season, ending the season with a win over Ohio State and then a Sugar Bowl victory over Virginia Tech. I thought I was wrong about Hoke. At the time, I was just excited about the great season that Michigan had just had and wasn’t thinking about how they had gotten there. There was the last-second win over Notre Dame. They barely beat Ohio State in Luke Fickell’s only year as head coach. They beat only one ranked team during the regular season. It was fair to say they didn’t deserve the Sugar Bowl berth.

It was all downhill from there.

Michigan went 20-18 the next three seasons, including an 0-2 record in bowl games. Each week it was more apparent that Hoke was in way over his head. The Shane Morris incident was the final nail in the coffin for both him and Brandon.

Brandon was canned first and replaced on an interim basis by Jim Hackett. Hackett fired Hoke after the season and brought Jim Harbaugh home after the 49ers’ season ended. It was a home run hire, and yes, Brady, those exist.

Recently, Hoke has done a great job of reminding everyone why he was fired at Michigan. In a radio interview, he said he was proud of the way he and his staff developed players at Michigan, citing Taylor Lewan, Michael Schofield, and Mike Martin as examples. Hoke recruited none of those guys. Lewan and Schofield had been at Michigan for two years each prior to Hoke taking over. Martin, who originally committed to Lloyd Carr, had been there for three. In that same interview, he said he wasn’t sure if there was such a thing as a “home run hire” when asked if Jim Harbaugh was one. Later, he said that it takes five to six years to build a program. The problem with that statement is that Jim Harbaugh, who was a home run hire for Michigan, took Stanford from being the Vanderbilt of the Pac-10 to a national power in four years. And, as stated earlier, Hoke built San Diego State into a respectable program in two. I have no idea what Hoke thinks he would have built in years five and six at Michigan, but I’ll just leave this here.

And let’s not forget that Hoke wasn’t exactly building this program from scratch. Hoke inherited enough talent to win a BCS bowl game. Regardless of how they got there, they got there and they won it. And then they got worse every year after that. I’m no architect, but I’m pretty sure that when building something, it’s supposed to go up.

After Lynch was fired, Indiana hired Oklahoma OC Kevin Wilson to replace him. The cupboard was completely bare at that point; Wilson deserves 5-6 years to build that program. The MAC coach they eventually hire to replace Wilson will deserve 5-6 years. (It won’t actually matter how long they get though, because Indiana.)

Brady Hoke was an incompetent boob who was in way over his head, couldn’t develop a QB, and then couldn’t even tell when his was concussed. Only a complete imbecile would have given him another year or two.

Good thing Michigan fired Dave Brandon.

Because at the end of the day, that’s who’s responsible here. Pam Beesly put it best:

When a child gets behind the wheel of a car and runs into a tree, you don’t blame the child. He didn’t know any better. You blame the 30-year-old woman who got in the passenger seat and said, “Drive, kid. I trust you.”

Twitter: @KSchroeder2325

E-mail: schroeder.giig@gmail.com