Hoke is a good hire for Meech. There, I said it.

2 Things.

1) Expectations have been dropped to all-time lows thanks to the talent level coming in, the recruiting class, and the inability to land a big time coach. This should take some pressure off Hoke.

2) This is all a PR nightmare, something people thought Dave Brandon would be better at. Can’t deny that. It seems like, if Hoke was your guy all along, hire him in December, end of story. Only saying he is your guy now sounds disingenuous. But maybe Dave Brandon really did think that everyone he interviewed would be humble and excited to lead Mich and when this wasn’t true, Hoke was an obvious choice? Mmm I dunno.

but we all know that Jim Harbaugh or Les Miles would be the Michigan coach if they wanted the job. It is fairly common to contact a potential replacement, and say “Hypothetically what would you think of coaching at ____________?” When they decline or show very little interest, you move on until you find the guy who says “I WANT THE JOB!!!” Then you offer the job to him, and you have now hired your “first choice”. This ain’t rocket science, people.

I don’t see how anyone can think for a moment that Dave Brandon would rather have Hoke than Harbaugh or Miles.

that Hoke is not chopped liver. He may be the right guy at the right time and everyone lives happily everafter, but he was not Brandon’s first choice, as the article seems to say.

Brandon didn’t officially offer Milese because he would have turned him down. Fitzgerald and Pinkel wouldn’t even talk to Brandon. Hoke was, at best, the fifth choice.

They just need to start playing tackle football again, display a little class on and off the field so their massive community starts funneling and securing the talent as in the past (that’s already started), and stop making excuses for not putting a defense on the field that knows its assignments and hits and tackles. It’s pathetic to read the miles of comments over the past three years about how Michigan can’t play defense because Lloyd was a meanie and there are just too many injuries. Michigan cannot assemble with recruited scholarship players a top-100 defense that tackles, after three years? Does Iowa really have an innate recruiting advantage over Michigan that explains why they are a top 10 or 20 D every year, and Michigan is 120th? This is funny. Their performance was by design, it was a bad design, what’s Josh Groban got to do with it?

Bill Snyder, perhaps a man who did more with less than any coach in the last 50 years, had a much poorer resume than Hoke. Famously, his second principle is “Be where you are.” Hoke already is, RR never was. Maybe Hoke’s ceiling next year is a top-80 defense, to go with the best running QB in the country. If so, Michigan goes to 8-9 wins; more if they really find a way to support Denard and get other people involved in the offense. I think the BS is finally over, Hoke will do just fine (his resume, I should say has many attributes Tressel’s did not; it has attributes Ferentz’ did not), the Big Ten with Hoke and Kill and Nebraska is about to become a kind of gray, industrial/agro valley of pain.

I do believe the angst about RR (emanating from his supporters) is the angst of people who don’t know very much about football, and know less about leadership and organizational behavior. If there was anything that I learned watching the post-season it was that the good teams have gotten the memo on playing assignment football again on D; and the spread teams have not gotten the memo that they have ceded the field to those defenses that comprehend staying in their lanes, staying home and being more physical. These qualities have the virtue of being verities, but they make for dull blogging, I guess. Dull unless you understand what football is about, and dull unless you know how hard they are to achieve. RR’s cutesy offense degraded to the point that in MissState game they were running QB ISOs as though they couldn’t remember if they had any other plays. Michigan made more stupid mistakes in that game, in all phases, than you would normally see from an average high school team in its first game of the year. Given that, it has always mystified me, all this talk about how fast Denard was, and how sick the offensive statistics became. I thought the objective function of football was to win the statistical battle of “most points.”

I wouldn’t have fired RR once Harbaugh declined the job, I guess, but perhaps Brandon concluded RR lacked the interest or ability to restructure his staff, schemes, and culture sufficient to make more progress next year. Each of those changes were required, in order to make progress.

I’m excited to watch Michigan football again and excited as well to see if Hoke brings in a young assistant or two with ideas of his own, to add to the conservative mix of his existing loyalists. I think he has the organizational mentality to do that (i.e., the humility) but we will see. I will only make one prediction, and that is that Michigan will tackle people again while brutalizing opponents at the line of scrimmage. That alone gets them two more wins next year.

…35th in total scoring defense with a 67th ranked SOS. His first couple years at BS and SDSU were bad, bringing down the average, but honestly I’m more concerned with what he built up to. If he continues to improve, that means he knows how to coach. And depite how bad UM is right now as a team defense, there is talent there. Dare I say, probably more raw talent than he had at SDSU…but then again, the competition is tougher now, so he will need every body he gets.