Interesting article....
EVEN THOUGH THE OUTCOME WAS A HOLTMANN HOME RUN, OHIO STATE FANS GOT TO SEE THE UGLY SIDE OF A COACHING SEARCH THIS WEEK
Chris Holtmann is the new head coach of the Ohio State men's basketball team. That is cool and good, because Holtmann seems cool and good, and if everything goes well Ohio State fans will forget that the first half of this coaching search, the one in which we spent the middle of this week furious that the decidedly uncool Greg McDermott from Creighton might become the next head coach.
Which caused us to spend several hours Wednesday night griping on Twitter about something that didn't end up happening. It was dumb and ridiculous and you would really hope that in the two months that Gene Smith had to think about this, he would've come up with a better plan than "let's wing it!" It seems to have all worked out in the end, but in more of a Wacky Races kind of way instead of a Mission: Impossible kind of way.
Which is exactly my point.
A decade ago, then-Michigan athletic director Bill Martin was chilling on a boat in the Atlantic ocean as the city of Ann Arbor was about to burn to the ground in a righteous fury because the AD of one of the most important collegiate institutions in America was seemingly unconcerned that because Lloyd Carr had recently left, he was without a head football coach for a damn month. I'll let The BIG HOUSE Blog (yes, that's how they prefer to write it) summarize:
I am deep in the middle of reading John Bacon's 3 and Out, which clearly details how Sailboat Bill completely screwed up the coaching search, which alienated pretty much every group associated with the University including; Alumni, former players, President Mary Sue Coleman, the media, and all Michigan fans. If you think about it, being able to piss off so many people was quite an accomplishment.
The Sailboat weekend pretty much went as we thought.
- Les Miles wants the job and tries to contact Bill.
- Bill doesn't return the messages and takes off for a long weekend (side note: when you are in the middle of the most important thing you do in your job, it's probably not the best time to take a long weekend)
- Bill gets a new cell phone and doesn't know how to use it. Really? How do you not know how to answer a phone?
- Herbie breaks the Miles to Michigan story
- All hell breaks loose and Bill is on his sailboat and listening to a Kansas CD.
- Bill doesn't realize what has happen until he gets home from Florida.
- Complete disaster
You can read a less bullet-pointy version of this narrative from MLive.com, but the ultimate result of this is that Les Miles was never going to become the head coach of the Michigan Wolverines. In part because there are a lot of old angry boosters who hate Les Miles for some reason, but also in part because Bill Martin completely borked one of the most important responsibilities of his career.
To commemorate Michigan screwing this up so unbelievably badly, I made a really excellent photoshop that I'm very proud of to this day. Michigan fans have commemorated it by editing Bill Martin's Wikipedia page.
The thing is though, even after all of this, (most reasonable) Michigan fans didn't think the search was a failure. After all, their eventual hire of Rich Rodriguez meant that they were bringing in one of the hottest young coaching talents in the country on to campus. Hiring Rich Rod was the equivalent of Texas going out and getting Tom Herman; the excitement was real and justified. And then, as Rodriguez failed to produce anything resembling a competent football team, it all kind of blew up in their faces.
The whole cycle then repeats itself with Brady Hoke, who has one good year followed by increasingly bad years, and then the manna that is Jim Harbaugh falls from the heavens somehow and all is okay. For now.
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really don't forget that you could always be a Butler fan, sitting back and wondering just what the hell just happened.
Entire article:
http://www.elevenwarriors.com/colle...ball-coaching-search-by-the-skin-of-its-teeth