Why Michigan should look outside for its next leader
· Yahoo Sports
The University of Michigan will be in search of a new athletic director, with Warde Manuel stepping down at the end of the year. That gives the maize and blue some time to find the next option to lead the charge of intercollegiate athletics for perhaps a decade or more. But who will it be and what will they bring to the table? After all, college athletics have changed greatly, even from the time Manuel took over the reins in 2016 to now.
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One thing that enigmatic CFB media personality Josh Pate believes is that Michigan shouldn't be thinking too inside the box as the program has tended to. After all, the Wolverines haven't had an AD without a Michigan degree since Jack Weidenbach, who served from 1991-93, and was preceded by Bo Schembechler, who went to Miami (Ohio) and Ohio State before ending up in Ann Arbor as coach and then athletic director.
Pate appeared on The Rich Eisen Show on Tuesday and shared how, much like the maize and blue may have fallen upward going from Sherrone Moore to Kyle Whittingham, such could be the case now if the university is smart about it.
"Here's what I hope for Michigan: what I appreciate about Michigan that's in short supply elsewhere in college football is they really, really appreciate their tradition," Pate said. "They really cling to it. Again, I don't blame them for it. I actually credit them for that. The one downside is when you cling to that tradition too much, you can almost close yourself off from the world, and you can make your athletic department, you can make your football program feel more like pond water than a lake that's got tributaries and streams coming into it, and you got new hires from outside with fresh ideas. Instead, it's just all Michigan all the time. And there's some good to that and there's some bad to that.
"And one of the bads is when it comes time to hire a coach or an AD in this case, is it let's go find the best candidate out there or let's go find the best candidate that is Michigan because that greatly dilutes your pool of candidates. And so if there's a lesson to be learned from this, well, as it relates to the future, if there's a lesson to be learned from it, I hope it's that Michigan understands it's not the worst thing in the world to open the gate sometimes. Don't break the gate down, but open it sometimes. Because sometimes there are people who are very, very tailor-made to lead your program, athletic department, et cetera, that they may reside in Boise, Idaho. They may reside in Tucson, Arizona. Bama learned that, and they went and hired Nick Saban. I think it took Alabama going through some really tough times to do that. I think Penn State had to go through some really tough times before they finally looked external, and it paid off for them.
"And so, look, this may end up being that you and I are talking five years from now and we're saying, oh, some of that sucked, but it ended up being such a blessing in disguise for Michigan because look what we got here now. Look who we got here now. Would we ever have gone down this road if our hand wasn't forced? And so that's the great, remains-to-be-seen part here."
Manuel will be on until the end of the year, as noted. His ousting comes in the aftermath of the Jenner & Block investigation, one that Michigan essentially summarized but didn't detail specifics. His ability to remain in the role for the next five months indicates that there's no 'smoking gun' that led to his dismissal, as much as it was a series of missteps that ultimately did him in.
This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: Why Michigan should look outside for its next leader