Is This the End for Brady Hoke?

What happened to Michigan?

Ten years ago, they were a perennial Top-25 team under one of their all-time great coaches, Lloyd Carr. And now, Brady Hoke is scrambling to turn around a 2-3 start and save his job.

And it's been an ugly 2-3. The Wolverines were blanked by Notre Dame 31-0. They were shut out in the second half of a 26-10 loss to Utah. And this past weekend, Hoke’s squad was dominated by Minnesota (the Golden Gophers, not the Vikings) 34-10.

Those two wins? Appalachian State and Miami (OH), who have a combined 1-8 record. Not exactly what you’d call quality wins.

And to make things worse, Brady Hoke might have inadvertently, unnecessarily risked the safety of his starting quarterback, Shane Morris, in that loss to Minnesota.

Since the firestorm of angry Michigan fans, college football observers, and viewers of “Good Morning America” began, thousands have been calling for the removal of Hoke, and even Michigan athletic director, Dave Brandon.

The Wolverine fan base has simply had enough of Hoke’s incompetence. They’re tired of subpar seasons, especially when ten-win seasons were commonplace ten years ago.

It's always tough to see the collapse of one of the nation's better football programs.

Trust me, I know. I'm an Auburn fan, one who happened to be an Auburn student during the disastrous 2012 season.

It’s even sadder to see a coach who appeared to be a great fit for the program in the beginning slowly fade into oblivion amidst the school he loves.

Maybe the Michigan job itself was too big for him. Or perhaps he is, at heart, an assistant coach. Men like Gene Chizik and Ellis Johnson have proven that being a great coordinator doesn’t translate to being a great, or even good, head coach.

After Lloyd Carr retired, following 13 straight winning seasons, the Wolverines were left with the harrowing task of replacing a school legend.

Their first choice should be considered a total failure, at best. Michigan brought in Rich Rodriguez, the man who made West Virginia a nationally competitive football team. But his fast-paced, offensive-oriented scheme did not translate well to Ann Arbor.

The failed experiment resulted in a 15-22 record over three years, including a 52-14 thrashing from Mississippi State in the 2011 Gator Bowl, Rich-Rod’s last game and only bowl game on the Michigan sideline.

The hire seemed doomed to fail from the start. Rodriguez never really fit in Ann Arbor, and not just from a coaching sense. He wasn’t a Michigan man, a factor that carries a surprising weight in the hiring process for the university.

In a lot of ways, his hire was a strange one because it didn’t make much sense.

Brady Hoke’s hire did make sense. He was a Michigan man, one who had made it very well known that the head coaching job in Ann Arbor was his dream job.

He had an impressive track record as a head coach, particularly as one who makes bad teams into nationally ranked contenders, a quality Michigan clearly believed it needed at the time.

In seven seasons, Hoke led Ball State from a team who had never been ranked in the AP Top 25 to a school-best 12-1 mark during his final season. His next stop, at San Diego State, produced the Aztecs’ first nine-win campaign since 1971, during the 2010 season.

He seemed like a natural fit for a Michigan team struggling to find its identity after life with Lloyd Carr. In fact, in his first season, he led the Wolverines to an 11-2 record, including a Sugar Bowl win over Virginia Tech.

And from there began a steady decline. In 2012, he went 8-5 with a bowl loss. Last year, he went 7-6, also with a bowl loss.

The truth is, we should have seen this coming. Yes, he brought an abysmal Ball State football program up onto college football’s national stage, and yes, he gave San Diego State its best season in almost 40 years.

But it’s what he did apart from those two individual seasons that should peak your interest.

In six seasons at Ball State, Hoke only had a winning record twice, both coming in his last seasons with the program. Taking away the 12-1 season his Cardinals posted, Hoke was 22-37 through five seasons.

His first season at San Diego State? 4-8.

His bad seasons outweigh his good seasons. Yes, he made these teams good for one season, but in at least one case, it took him a long time to get there.

And let’s also remember that coaching in the MAC and the MWC is a lot different than coaching a team in one of the Power 5 conferences. There are tougher opponents, higher expectations, and more at stake.

Whether he’s just not cut out to be a head coach at this level of the FBS or not, Brady Hoke has lost control of his team.

I’m not here to question his passion. I believe that he cares about Michigan very much, and that he would have them undefeated and in the playoff discussion if he had his way.

But he can’t have his way right now, and he’ll have to pull off some kind of miracle to dig himself out of this hole.

The truth of the matter is that he got himself into this mess. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Brady Hoke is not a good enough coach to handle such a prominent position like head coach at the University of Michigan.

It’s become clear that Hoke doesn’t have control of his own team. How in the world does he not know whether or not his starting quarterback has been medically cleared to reenter the game?

That would be at the top of my priority list if my team and I were getting our butts handed to us by Minnesota.

He has all but completely lost the trust and respect of the Michigan fan base, who now not only believe him to be an inadequate coach, but a reckless man.

Only a certain few will ever know the truth of whether or not Hoke really knew Morris’s true condition after (what should have been called) an illegal hit, but in the eyes of the fans, he knowingly put a young man with concussion symptoms back into a football game he was losing.

Actual concussion or not, he shouldn’t have let Morris keep playing.

They’re saying that the only injury he suffered was recurring ankle problem, but if he even showed signs of being concussed (i.e., wobbling and staggering over to the huddle), he should have stayed on the sideline for the remainder of a game they were already losing.

This really is sad to see.

Brady Hoke clearly cares a lot about Michigan; he can’t seem to handle to responsibility of such a high-profile job.

Back in 2011, I believe that he was riding the momentum of incredible winning seasons at traditionally mediocre schools, and came into Michigan with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, something the players and fans were looking for after the Rich-Rod disaster.

But after the energy and that high fizzled out, and the rubber met the road, we began to see what kind of coach Hoke really is.

Brady Hoke was the man who seemed destined to lift Michigan back up to the top of college football’s elite. But he hasn’t delivered, revealing a few areas of incompetence along the way.

It turns out that he is a 22-37 coach, not an 11-2 coach.

And it will likely cost him his job.