Since the turn of the last century, as I see it the Michigan coaching hires have fallen into 2 buckets: Legacy Hires > under the Michigan Man umbrella, these are guys with playing and/or coaching experience in Ann Arbor before they took over. (And FWIW a lack of outside heading coaching success). Hired Guns > gents with head coaching “success” (let’s call it .550 or better) at other college programs but no previous coaching or playing experience at U-M. Harbaugh is the first hire that really falls on both sides of this divide, having had both college (& NFL for that matter) head coaching success along with U-M ties as a player and alumnus. A breakdown*: * I removed George Little who kinda/sorta coached U-M for one season in 1924 while Yost took a breather, and ok if I moved the Mendoza line for “success” down to .500 Hoke gets a check. A few thoughts: Of the 4 Hired Guns, I think Ivan Maisel of ESPN got it right, comparing this hire to that of Fritz Crisler who won two national titles at Princeton before taking over in Ann Arbor: For one thing, Harbaugh is the most successful head coach Michigan has hired since it swiped Fritz Crisler from Princeton in 1938. All Crisler did in 10 seasons in Ann…
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Seeing and Hearing Willie Heston
Today marks the 110th anniversary of Willie Heston’s final game at Michigan. Heston was Michigan’s first superstar, a two-time All-American, who scored (somewhere around) 72 touchdowns. From 1901 to 1904, Heston’s teams went 43-0-1 and are credited with four national titles. I’ll have more on Heston later this year. Hearing WillieBack in 2012, I posted a short audio clip of Fielding Yost from the 1940 nationwide radio tribute the man titled, ‘A Toast to Yost from Coast to Coast’. Check it out if you missed it. In that post I promised to share a few more clips, and thanks to the Bentley Historical Library for passing these along. The man who introduced Yost to the crowd in attendance and the radio audience was none other than the great Heston. Here are two clips of the great Willie and in the first, we have a surprise. Before offering up his tribute to his old coach, Heston acknowledges that current student-athletes and national icon Tom Harmon is in the audience. Old 98 shares the mic & even has a little back and forth with Heston that is all in all pretty priceless. The second clip has Heston delivering his testimonial to Yost. Enjoy: As an aside, while I’m sure you’ll be hard-pressed to find another audio clip of the Harmon and Heston…
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Sights & Sounds | Michigan 34, Indiana 10 (2014)
Last week I talked about finding the “bottom”, that is, the end of the spiral of crappy things happening to this football team. I don’t know if we’re there, but out there before the game Saturday you felt a weight was lifted and the mood was actually a bit festive.
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TWIMFbH: You Gotta Hand it to Chap (1946)
This Week…heads to back at the battle on a hot October 5, 1946 day at the Big House against the Hawkeyes. That summer we lost Michigan’s Grand Old Man, but returned to us (from World War II) was the great Bob Chappuis. The formula for coach Fritz Crisler was simple so dig it: [display_podcast] You can catch all of the This Week in Michigan Football History clips here….sponsored in 2013 by Ziebart of Yspilanti. Listen to it live tomorrow on the KeyBank Countdown to kick-off on WTKA 1050AM or catch it live inside the Bud Light Victors Lounge. Radio notes!! I’ll be on with The Wolverine guys at 11am – you can catch it here. I’ll live in the WTKA Victors Lounge at around noon talking jug Catch me on the Michigan Tailgate Show on WWJ 950AM at 2:20pm Follow MVictors on Twitter
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The Yost Gap Widens (even more)
The Big Ten released its annual media guide today, including the all-time coaching records. Thanks to scandals at Ohio State (and now Penn State) we know that the recognized W-records of a couple of the big name coaches have been in flux. Some history for context: In 2010 I lobbied the Big Ten to change Yost’s all-time conference record wrong because they had included the years 1907-1916…when Michigan was not a member of the conference. The B1G media brass conferred and then agreed. They made the change and thus bumped Yost’s #1 overall conference record from an .833 winning percentage to .888 (to #2 Tressel’s .828). In 2011, after the Ohio State scandal sent Tressel packing and vacated the entire 2010 season, I put the question out there of how the conference would treat Tressel’s all-time record on the official books given the scandal. I suggested five potential scenarios: Based on today’s media guide (and if they published this previously I haven’t seen it)…we know that they went with option #2 above. Tressel drops to .810: So they simply removed the 2010 wins, kept the Wisconsin loss, dropped the win % to .810 and kept Tressel on the list saying he met the 10-year minimum threshold. Sure, it would have been nice to see him drop off behind Bo or…
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Marooons In Memoriam
From the front page of September 24, 1940 edition of the Michigan Daily, announcing the demise of the once-great University of Chicago football program: So why did one of the original members of the Big Ten, who brought us the heralded Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg (and Fritz Crisler, for that matter), ditch football? This issue of Sports Illustrated from 1954 put it nicely: The University of Chicago abandoned intercollegiate football in 1939 because the game hampered the university’s efforts to become the kind of institution it aspired to be. The university believed that it should devote itself to education, research and scholarship. Intercollegiate football has little to-do with any of these things and an institution that is to do well in them will have to concentrate upon them and rid itself of irrelevancies, no matter how attractive or profitable. Football has no place in the kind of institution Chicago aspires to be. It has been argued that Chicago is different. Perhaps it is and maybe it is just that difference that enabled the university to separate football from education. That’s sweet and all, but methinks the 85-0 beating at the hands of Tom Harmon’s Wolverines in 1939 had a hand in it as well. Here’s one of my favorite all-time photos featuring Tom Harmon cooling off on the sidelines during…
