Michigan's nonsense statement sending Warde Manuel out the door won't fix its culture problem
According to the University of Michigan, an independent investigation of its athletic department, including interviews with 300 witnesses, turned up no widespread misconduct related to the handling of former football coach Sherrone Moore or any other aspect of the school's day-to-day operations.
But athletic director Warde Manuel has to go anyway.
Huh?
Michigan reportedly paid $11 million to high-powered law firm Jenner & Block for this investigation, only to conclude that Manuel generally did a good job running the athletic department. But as a result of that investigation, which the school won't publicly release, Manuel will step down at the end of the year for reasons it won't outline explicitly.
Given all the success Manuel oversaw as Michigan's AD — including the extremely rare feat of winning national championships in football and men's basketball within the last four years — doesn't Michigan owe its fans a little better explanation of exactly what happened?
Though Michigan's president Domenico Grasso said in Monday's announcement that Manuel "told me that he would like to step down," we know that's not the full story. Manuel, who would be owed more than $7 million if he was fired without cause, spent last week doing a series of interviews in which he pushed back on reports he was on the verge of being dismissed.
So what happened?
Here's the reality: Though there was no smoking gun that would allow the school to get rid of Manuel without paying him, the buildup of 10 years running a place as complicated as Michigan added up until it reached a critical mass.
As Michigan's release noted Monday: "The culture review found that weaknesses in accountability, organizational structure, oversight and reporting created conditions in which misconduct was not always addressed consistently, promptly, or in accordance with University expectations."
In other words, they just got tired of the guy.
Sure, there were missteps. Manuel's decision in 2019 to hire Rhonda Faehn as a consultant for women's gymnastics after the Larry Nassar abuse revelations marred her time overseeing USA Gymnastics was a predictable mistake he had to quickly undo. Replacing legendary hockey coach Red Berenson with Mel Pearson blew up in his face when an investigation revealed embarrassing conclusions about the culture of that program. Juwan Howard didn't work out as men's basketball coach. The NCAA investigation into recruiting violations under Jim Harbaugh, assistant coach Matt Weiss hacking into computers and the Connor Stalions scandal made Michigan football look like a rogue outfit.
And then came the Moore debacle.
Maybe, when Harbaugh left for the NFL after winning the national title in early 2024, Manuel should have had a better plan than promoting the relatively unknown and untested 38-year-old offensive coordinator to one of the most prominent jobs in college sports. It's certainly plausible that there was enough innuendo around Moore's extramarital relationship with his executive assistant, Paige Shiver, that Manuel could have acted more directly than he did before it all blew up so publicly last December.
At the same time, Michigan did attempt to investigate those rumors. Both Moore and Shiver denied that they were involved in a relationship at that time. Regardless of what Manuel suspected, how can a school take action against its football coach when there's no hard evidence of wrongdoing and both parties deny it?
As Michigan acknowledged Monday, "Outside investigators did not identify any current University employee with direct, contemporaneous evidence of the relationship."
If Michigan had reason to believe that Manuel was in any way covering up for his football coach, it should have fired him last December along with Moore and let him sue for the buyout money. But that's not the route Michigan took because it wasn't a reasonable conclusion.
It was simply the last straw.
So instead of getting rid of its AD the normal way, Michigan allowed a power struggle to fester for six months and hired a white shoe law firm to come up with a meandering, mild "culture" critique that could probably be applied to 80 percent of power conference programs.
As the report itself states: "The football program's prominence and organizational structure created unique oversight challenges."
Uh, yeah. That's only been the case across college football for, what, 50 or 60 years? Maybe longer?
This isn't meant as a defense of Manuel's tenure. But anyone who spends five years at UConn and a decade at Michigan is bound to collect some dirt on their coattails. Managing high-profile programs with prominent coaches is a complicated dance between huge egos, ungovernable boosters and crazy expectations.
As the stakes get higher in these jobs and the complications pile up with the evolution of college sports, few will survive as long as Manuel did. If the primary job is to win, it's hard to argue with the results.
Even Manuel's missteps were not far outside the realm of what's normal or even expected in organizations like athletic departments. It's impossible to have a finger on the pulse of everything that goes on every day. It just got to the point where enough issues popped up under Manuel's watch that became divisive and ultimately a liability for the school's key stakeholders.
That's business. And it would be nice if Michigan acknowledged it rather than trying to be the hero of its own morality play.
"The culture review identified a series of structural, policy, and operational recommendations designed to strengthen accountability and organizational effectiveness within the Department of Athletics," Michigan said.
Despite the corporate speak, nothing substantive about the culture of Michigan athletics will change in the wake of this report. The next AD will have the same challenges and same vulnerabilities running a $300 million business whose success depends on 18-to-22-year-olds playing sports.
Maybe the next AD will make fewer bad decisions than Manuel. But it's highly doubtful they'll make as many good ones.
