The Michigan football program is not what it used to be- but you already knew that. With just one national title since 1948, Michigan football lives in the past as much as anyone in college football.
That’s not why the Maize and Blue coaching search has so many obstacles though. Yes, Michigan football strives to find an identity again after decades of mediocrity, and that is a hindrance to finding the right guy. However, there are political, institutional, corporate, structural, internal…let’s just say there are multi-layered issues; of the non-football variety.
Fox Sports Joel Klatt says the Michigan football job is not necessarily an attractive coaching vacancy right now:
“Michigan has to get its own house in order before that’s an attractive job. No coach in America wants to go get hired by someone that’s not going to be their long-term athletic director. The attractive candidates are going to go other places. There are some good jobs open, and right now, Michigan is not necessarily one of them.”
Michigan has kept its football head coaching search relatively low-key so far, but reportedly the program had one offer turned down- by Duke coach David Cutcliffe. Although Duke denies that actually happened. So who knows if there’s any truth to that initial report or not.
Then came the Les Miles report. The Michigan football program supposedly reached out to him, to gauge his interest.
Obviously, nothing happened and most believe that the window of opportunity for that to happen simply passed.
Fox’s Charles Davis believes Michigan football is in a precarious situation as it searches for its next head coach:
“If you’re a big-time coach, and you have a school president that has come out and said, ‘I don’t know anything about athletics,’ and you have an interim athletic director, good luck because you can’t just roll out that nice Michigan helmet and say, ‘This is going to solve everything.’ It doesn’t happen at any program anymore.”
Today, the school finally released a statement with an update on the Michigan football coaching search, FINALLY.
However it didn’t actually say much. It just confirmed what outside search firm is doing it:
“We have identified and executed an agreement with Korn Ferry to facilitate our search for the 20th football coach in school history. We will compensate Korn Ferry a minimum of $80,000 for their services during this process, with the agreement potentially reaching a maximum of $250,000.”
You can understand why this process has been so slow moving. UM really needs to get this one right. Especially since the last two hires worked out so poorly. Also the process isn’t moving as slow as you think it is. It just seems that way because this Michigan football coaching search is being done in the Twitter era; where everyone has social media level attention spans.
So back to our list of candidates; and holding out for Jim Harbaugh. Or Bob Stoops, which the Michigan football search engines seem to like the best of all the candidates.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net ,which is partners with Fox Sports. Read his feature stories in the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. Listen to him on KOZN 1620 The Zone. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks). His work has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including The Washington Post and ESPN 2