(12-01-2021 11:28 AM)The Cutter of Bish Wrote: (12-01-2021 08:53 AM)esayem Wrote: (11-30-2021 01:46 PM)PicksUp Wrote: Many fans are happy or glad to see their coaches go.
Yes, even if they were winning.
Right. The ACC board has had multiple ND fans wishing Kelly away over the years even while they’re making playoff runs.
Yeah, over in the Big Ten, hasn’t this followed Ferentz over in Iowa seemingly forever? No playoffs as much as despising a guy who has produced more for that program consistently ever.
You’ve been seeing this in Michigan up until this year. You’ll see it for sure if Harbaugh stumbles in the CCG and falls out of the playoff field. He got a huge monkey off his back this season, but it’ll be back very soon. Of course, don’t look at his record…it’s great. But, it’s that it’s not what has happened for the team that has the guy in potentially hot water.
The Michigan job is a weird job anyway. They haven't been what they think of themselves in 70-80 years (and it was probably mostly good marketing then as well).
Michigan and a handful of other schools continue to claim "national championships" from the days when college football schedules were filled with opponents that were club teams without coaches or alumni teams (again - often without coaches) and occasionally by high school teams. Sometimes they played a team multiple times in their 8-9 game schedule.
The local university team would rack up huge point totals against unorganized opponents, run through their "national schedule", be undefeated against that schedule and the local paper would declare them "national champions" when they often never played an opponent more than a few hours drive from their own campus. The lack of much more than a "state championship" schedule really was no one's fault - transportation wasn't what it is today. But continuing to claim national championships based on pre-TV polling and pre-airplane/national schedules is just disingenuous.
A national polling system didn't really appear until much later - and even then, select local newspaper football writers were given votes but had often never seen anyone else play - so they cast their vote for the local team (and it helped sell papers if the local team was ranked so the local writer had no incentive to consider voting for other schools). In many years we had multiple undefeated schools across the country all with equally weak claims to "national championships". A few of the ones with fragile egos continue to claim that they "won" "national championships" in that era - Michigan is one of them (claiming national titles in 1901, 1902, 1903, 1904 - and then in 1918, 1923, 1932 1933).
NOTE: all but 1 of the national championship claims prior to 1900 were "won" by members of the Ivy League (Lafayette the lone exception - unless you consider Rutgers as a co-champion in the first year of college football).
When you get into the era of national television and conferences that required play against other coached college teams - most of that "tradition" fades into the reality of "it's harder to win all the time on a level playing field". Ignoring the pre-television era of "polling", Michigan probably has earned (and I know that's a loaded term) 3 national championships: 1947, 1948 and the other in 1997. None involved a playoff but at least the voters had seen other teams play.
Fortunately, they play a lot of the other schools with bloated football egos based on pre-national TV coverage: Minnesota (claiming 7 national titles in football- one since the end of WWII), Notre Dame (claiming 11 national title - but at least only 3 were prior to WWII - 1 during WWII), Illinois (claiming 5 national titles - but only one since the Great Depression). Wisconsin has 3 national title claims - but none since 1942. Only 2 of Iowa's 5 national title claims are from the Pre-WWII era, so that isn't as bad as most of the Big 10 history inflation.
Although they don't play Michigan that often, Pitt is another schools whose national title claims are mostly pre-historic (claiming 9 national championships - only one since WWII).
Refreshingly - Ohio State and Penn State (who claim 8 and 2 national titles respectively) claim no national titles prior to WWII (1 for Ohio State during WWII), so that's considerably more legit. Nebraska and Michigan State don't claim any before WWII. Notice that 3 of the 4 schools mentioned here as having more legit national title claims (Penn State, Michigan State, and Nebraska) didn't join the Big 10 before WWII.
Anyway - it's hard to take a job at a school like Michigan and live up to the "history" such as it is (or as people claim that is was). Michigan has had a lot of winning teams/seasons but their history isn't as studded with national significance as their fanbase wants to claim. That fiction makes it hard for a coach to live up to a program's history - because the history is largely "imaginary". A lot of coaches at Michigan suffer from not living up to the standard of Bo Schembechler in the eyes of the Wolverine faithful - but most Michigan's fans probably don't realize that he never won a national championship (and had a lackluster bowl record as well). It's just not how they remember it.
