Michigan Needs a Clean Break
A new edition of the College Football Newsletter from Split Zone Duo.
Quick note off the top for subscribers! A few people have told us that their subscriber episodes have not been populating in their feeds. A lot of folks’ annual subscriptions renewed in the past two weeks. If you’ve had issues, there’s a good chance it’s because you changed credit cards or had a card decline. If that’s you, you can fix it in your settings under Subscriptions.
Good afternoon. Alex here, with a mini-column on the week’s big news and a few updates and roundups of what we’ve been up to at Split Zone Duo.
Subscribers got our Michigan emergency episode on Thursday night. Unlike a lot of coach carousel episodes that we call “emergency” shows, this one really did come as a stunner. I appreciate the feedback we’ve gotten on that show, especially from Michigan fans who are appalled at this course of events.
“The next head coach at Michigan cannot even be able to spell ‘Jim Harbaugh,’” Richard told me on that episode. I’ve thought about that and also this line by one of the internet’s O.G. Michigan bloggers, Ace Anbender, quoting me over on Bluesky: “umich’s needed reckoning has nothing to do with decoding some football signals. it’s shocking that sherrone moore was fired and then arrested. it’s not *surprising* that a umich authority figure used their position of power to facilitate misconduct. i’m doing my best to choose my words carefully.”
I think these points get to the crux of the matter at Michigan. The sign-stealing story just does not matter here, except insofar as it’s part of Moore’s path to the head coaching job in the first place. (By replacing Harbaugh so well during his 2023 suspensions, and by Harbaugh having extra incentive to get out of college football after that season, Moore took the big chair.) But there’s been so much other wrongdoing by people that athletic director Warde Manuel either hired or empowered. Is Manuel the kind of guy to fix whatever might be broken? His track record doesn’t point in that direction, and neither does the way he refused to break even slightly with Bo Schembechler’s legacy over the past few years. (This should not have been a hard call, and yet.)
I put some more Michigan thoughts into a column on all of this at Slate:
There’s no direct cause and effect between one football coach’s destructive decision-making and an athletic department and school’s refusal to reckon with decades-old crimes. But leadership either sets a culture where misconduct by powerful people is unacceptable from jump, or it doesn’t. There is no way to argue that Manuel has set that culture at Michigan, no matter what else we learn about Moore’s firing. One other detail came to light on Thursday: “Michigan had been alerted prior to Wednesday that Sherrone Moore was dealing with mental health issues yet Warde Manuel fired him alone with no HR rep and no security present,” Nicole Auerbach reported. Later that day, Moore was in police custody.
I hope you’ll read the whole thing. In the meantime, I wish you a chill weekend and appreciate you listening to our podcasts and reading us all over the internet.
Introducing the SZD 2025 College Football Playoff Preview, presented by Modelo
“Alex, what are all of these 10-minute episodes showing up in my podcast feed? What blessed me with such a bounty of new podcasts??”
So glad you asked. This year, we decided to run a dozen small team preview episodes on all of the teams in the Playoff. These will go up roughly once a day until the Playoff begins, and Richard and I thought they were a fun way to sum up how we’re feeling about all of the teams before toe meets leather. I am excited to discuss a particular class at UGA when we get to the Dawgs. I am also pumped to roll out an analogy for Curt Cignetti that made Richard smirk for 10 seconds as he searched unsuccessfully for a way to argue against me.
More from us this week
With Godfrey, we did a bunch of coach carousel talk, non-Michigan variety
With Rodger, we did a deeper dive into the causes of college football’s late-year calendar logjam. Let’s see if we can fix this, shall we?
I’m realizing as I list out all of these episodes that we are doing a whole lot of podcasts right now. We appreciate you being along for the ride.
Split Zone Duo social fun of the week
We don’t really do trends but could not resist this one:
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I don't understand the big picture here.
Is Michigan trying to avoid the same type of rift that opened at Penn State over the Paterno legacy? Or do they just believe that what happened with Anderson etc is not a big deal?
To me, it doesn't seem like they've ever reckoned with just how valuable a compromised doctor would be to a football coach, or how many different ways that would infect a program/department.