Warde Manuel To Step Down as Michigan AD

We did kind of put a bow on another colossal mess in college sports, and that's Ward Manuel's tenure at the University of Michigan. Again, I said it before, I'll say it again, we will get back to SEC football, I promise. But too many other things that actually happened. Ward Manuel was announced that he's out at Michigan, but not until the end of 2026, and that in and of itself has spurred many more questions. The $12 million investigation of Michigan resulted in a non-public report that was summarized kind of by the school with some results that said that, you know, we couldn't really necessarily say, Ward did this, this, or this, but things were bad and we're getting rid of him. Brian, you wrote about this on Monday. What was your takeaway from Ward Manuel, who lasted from January to July? And again, we'll go all the way through December 31st, but is on the way out at Michigan. Ward, you know, give credit to Ward. Like the man knows how to skate on thin ice. Like, I mean, it seems like that sums up his entire tenure. You know, it seems like he's been out and even going back to last week, you know, I mean, you talk with folks, you expected some sort of resolution on Thursday, and then, you know, lo and behold, 10 minutes into Greg Sankey's speech, announcing the SEC, you know, the state of the SEC there, he's like, here's all this Michigan news. And I guess that just kind of par for the course there in Ann Arbor, given everything that does seem to go on, on their timetable and nobody else's. And I think there's kind of the two sides of Ward at this point. There's certainly the highs. And like, you have to give him a lot of credit. Like he managed the Jim Harbaugh situation that led to the first national title there in football in ages. And like, this was a very underachieving athletic department, I would say on the whole, not just in terms of those big time sports, but like, this is Michigan, you know, like they do print money. Like they have a great talent base there in the Midwest. Like this is one of the big brand names in college football. And they just could not get it out of their way year after year after year, coaching higher after coaching higher. And yes, Ward didn't necessarily, you know, hire Jim Harbaugh, but he obviously inherited him and had to manage a very difficult personality, which he did. Certainly a difficult situation there in COVID in terms of the potential, you know, they could have hired Jim Harbaugh and gotten rid of him, brought him back on a pay cut. Like that was not something that was like, you know, mind blowing at the time at time, you know, just to see them do that. And then it leads to some great success. And also obviously some, quite a few scandals as well, including some NCAA's scandals, the Conor Stallion's thing, like the actual management of things beyond kind of the bigger picture is kind of why Ward is no longer going to have a job at the end of this. Hired Dusty May, you know, as we mentioned before in the show, you know, ahead of Ohio State, ahead of Indiana. Like, I mean, it was a coup to land that. And we saw certainly one of the better hires in terms of the last decade or so in men's basketball, leading to a national title and ending a long drought in that sport. So like, this is just kind of the bifurcation of Ward's tenure there. You know, the highs were high, but in terms of the scandal, it just kind of added up. And there was no necessarily smoking gun from the actual investigation, which was provided orally to a number of board members. Like there was no say, here's why you can get rid of Ward at this point. You know, I think this was kind of just, everybody understood. All right, this has run its natural conclusion. We're going to have a new president soon. It's time to hit reset. And that is going to include, you know, Ward's saying goodbye. And although it's probably sticking around longer than a lot of people expected, you know, in terms of potentially to the end of the year, a lot of that is probably just going to give Michigan time to kind of identify some good candidates for what could be one of the best athletic director jobs out there. Yeah, Brian, you mentioned the possibility of a legal segment with a sponsor. I think that the Chicago law firm of Jenner and Block that just secured $12 million from Michigan to release an outline of the investigation, they've come into some capital. So they might be our first target. If either of you guys have a connect there. I mean, I'm in Chicago. I might go knock door to door and say, hey, just a few, give us 10,000, you know, we'll sponsor a segment, we'll do something, you know. It's just pocket change. It's, no, it's astounding to me, like the price tag for this. And as you guys mentioned, for a non-report that I'm trying to think exactly the wording here, neither the investigation nor the culture review found that misconduct was widespread throughout the department. Okay. Well, the whole Q&A was like full of dichotomies like that. You know, like they were, well, it's not this, but there was a lot of buts in that. There were, Conor Stallions, Matt Weiss, Sharon Moore, Jim Harbaugh, 10 year show cause. I mean, like, what are we talking about if there's not widespread problems there? So their ability to just declare that they're not widespread, oh, but by the way, we are getting rid of the AD, they could have, you could have just simply on the face of things in January said, you know, or there's just been a little too many messes, we're going to make a change. And you could have saved yourself how many million dollars? 12 million minus whatever it costs to buy a ward manual, you would have saved a lot of money if you'd just done that. So the leadership at Michigan has confounded me in many different instances in the last four or five years. And this is clearly another one of those. So we'll see who the new AD is, I still maintain it's a top seven at worst athletic director job. You get a new football coach who could do really well, but if he's not, he's also near the end. I mean, 66 years old, Kyle Whittingham, you get Mike Boynton on a two year contract, which is really a one year contract. If it doesn't go well, you can move on from him for a relatively manageable buyout. So there's a lot to love other than just the intrinsic fact that Michigan's a great job. So the next guy will have a chance to put his own imprint on a Cadillac.