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Hoke is interim HC at Tenn as Butch Jones fired

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As you can imagine, when Michigan football?s medical staffers saw the press release the next morning, they were not terribly pleased?and that?s putting it mildly.
?I saw it and shook my head,? one of them told me. ?It did exactly what I hoped it wouldn?t: It didn?t tell everything, and it told too much. Once you make the decision to share a patient?s medical history, you might as well tell everything, to clear the air.
?The statement made it appear that we were incompetent, or lying, or both. We love Brady [Hoke], but if he had tried to overrule us [during the game], none of us were going to lie for him.?
 
You're asking for magic and assuming to know what he saw. The trainers thought it was his leg. Why do you expect Hoke to know better than them?

Come on!! The entire world saw that Morris was concussed and wobbly. It was like watching a boxer or a UFC fighter get knocked silly and wobble around. Everyone in the stands saw it. Everyone watching TV saw it...but we're supposed to believe that nobody on the Michigan coaching staff had any idea. No, just no. If that is the case, then it is an even worse situation than what I'm talking about. How could the entire medical and coaching staff be that blind?

Then the follow-up, mashup of the press conference was a total mess, but people want to put that all on David Brandon, because that's easier. Everyone knows Brandon was an asshole, but hey, let's pile all the blame on him. I'm not buying it. Hoke was the head coach! He was in charge of the football team.
 
Come on!! The entire world saw that Morris was concussed and wobbly. It was like watching a boxer or a UFC fighter get knocked silly and wobble around. Everyone in the stands saw it. Everyone watching TV saw it...but we're supposed to believe that nobody on the Michigan coaching staff had any idea. No, just no. If that is the case, then it is an even worse situation than what I'm talking about. How could the entire medical and coaching staff be that blind?

Then the follow-up, mashup of the press conference was a total mess, but people want to put that all on David Brandon, because that's easier. Everyone knows Brandon was an asshole, but hey, let's pile all the blame on him. I'm not buying it. Hoke was the head coach! He was in charge of the football team.

The entire world saw it on TV. Hoke and the trainers weren't watching TV. They were on the ground, where a quarterback can be behind a row of linemen and you can't see them.
 
Come on!! The entire world saw that Morris was concussed and wobbly. It was like watching a boxer or a UFC fighter get knocked silly and wobble around. Everyone in the stands saw it. Everyone watching TV saw it...but we're supposed to believe that nobody on the Michigan coaching staff had any idea. No, just no. If that is the case, then it is an even worse situation than what I'm talking about. How could the entire medical and coaching staff be that blind?

Then the follow-up, mashup of the press conference was a total mess, but people want to put that all on David Brandon, because that's easier. Everyone knows Brandon was an asshole, but hey, let's pile all the blame on him. I'm not buying it. Hoke was the head coach! He was in charge of the football team.

The moment it happened, from the stands and seeing it on the big screen, I stood up and said, "Oh shit ...he's totally faded!"

Having spent years around snowboard parks and half-pipes you see concussions often enough to recognize one and that was one.

All other claims are total bullshit. He got his "bell rung" as Grandpa would have said.
 
Yeah, I'm still not buying it. There was NO one in the coaching box upstairs that paged down to one of the assistants and said, "Someone tell Brady he's knocked the fuck out"? Not one of the players mouthed the words or said to another player, "Grab a coach, this dude can't stand?"

It all falls on Brady. And even IF we believe that the trainers though it was his leg, why would he put him back out??
 
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Maybe someone would've told him, but he wasn't wearing his headset

It's amazing to me how many people still apologize for this guy

Any reasonable person knew or should have known that Morris was concussed on that play. IF he didn't know, then he was an incompetent boob. I mean, he pretty much was anyway.

The guy didn't recruit offensive linemen

He was barely aware of what was going on around him.

He had a $15 million dollar mansion in AA with 8 kitchens because, "I like to eat!!"
 
A coach has world's of info available to him within a millisecond. He's got tons of players and coaches watching the action, specific coaches watching individual players on every single play.

To hear the excuse "his view was blocked" and the trainers were telling him it was his leg is ridiculous.
 
I think you all are crazy. Assuming that everybody was looking at the right player at the right time to see this and they're all terrible people that saw it and put him in anyway and then lied about it (all of them, consistently), but would only lie to a certain extent and not to the degree Dave Brandon pushed them.

That's the reasonable explanation?
 
Hoke was a completely inept head coach that didn't have any awareness of what happened on the field. He was there to be a cheerleader and let everyone else do the work.

Because of that, he had no clue what happened to his starting QB, when it was PAINFULLY obviously to the world what Morris was dealing with. To excuse Hoke from blame is ridiculous.

The game was well out of hand. Whether it was his leg, his head, his little pinky, sit his ass down for a few plays until you know what is happening. If you think he's good enough to go back out, put him back out.

Looking at the right player??? Who the hell else is there to look at??
 
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I'm not say he shouldn't 100% have been pulled. Someone should have seen it. There should have been someone, out of the ton of personnel available, that caught it and was in a position to do something about it. The buck stops with Hoke, so it's ultimately his fault. But Hoke's mistakes were made prior to the actual event. Not in the moment.
 
I mean, the entire team is surrounding the QB, the QB got smashed, I really don't know where else people should be fixing their eyes.
 
I mean, the entire team is surrounding the QB, the QB got smashed, I really don't know where else people should be fixing their eyes.

to me, the part about Morris pointing to his leg and telling the trainers about his leg only, gets Hoke off the hook.

if he didn't see the hit or how Morris got up and wobbled, and Morris was pointing to his leg, how many coaches in that situation would say "come out of the game and let's start the concussion protocol." very few, if any.

plenty of other things to slag on Hoke for not doing well, but this scandal is all on Dave Brandon. and a lot of the "outrage" from the fanbase has/had more to do with the fact that Brandon was very unpopular at the time (and rightfully so maybe), Hoke was failing miserably, and the team was falling apart. that made them a lightning rod for criticism.
 
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The scandal may have been on Brandon, but what happened in that moment, on that field... That's 100 percent on the coach.

But if he stood up and was pointing at his leg, limping around, why wouldn't a coach bring him out for a play or two to get him checked out?? The game was WAY out of hand, there's no reason to keep someone in there who could have his leg explode at any minute.
 
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The scandal may have been on Brandon, but what happened in that moment, on that field... That's 100 percent on the coach.

But if he stood up and was pointing at his leg, limping around, why wouldn't a coach bring him out for a play or two to get him checked out?? The game was WAY out of hand, there's no reason to keep someone in there who could have his leg explode at any minute.

He did take him out for the leg. (Should have taken him out earlier due to the leg of course.) He took him out, sent Gardner in, Gardner lost his helmet, Hoke tried to burn a timeout rather than send Morris back, official wrongly said that wouldn't work, so Hoke sent Morris in for a handoff and then sent Gardner back in. If you think it's a leg injury and not a head injury, all that is pretty reasonable. Still a clusterfuck that Bellomy didn't have his helmet and wasn't available, but it's incompetence and mistakes as opposed to unethical disregard for player safety.
 
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Well, those go hand in hand. His incompetence essentially is disregard for the player's safety. That's not an excuse.
 
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Well, those go hand in hand. His incompetence essentially is disregard for the player's safety. That's not an excuse.

no one is arguing otherwise, but there's a difference between a guy who doesn't give a shit about his players, and one who does, but makes a mistake in the middle of a game situation.

I think the stress of the overall situation was crushing Hoke at that point in time; I don't see the point of running him down further for being in over his head.

he did not come in and trash the program like his predecessor, and leave it a mess. and going 11-2 with what RR left was a hell of an achievement on its own.

I think he (and his boss) unfortunately became victims of their own success after that.

if you think he's just a horrible person, such that he'd leave his QB out there to get destroyed because he's desperate to win a game, I have to say your judgment is off
 
Well, those go hand in hand. His incompetence essentially is disregard for the player's safety. That's not an excuse.

I think that's only true if a person is aware and accepts their incompetence, which I doubt is the case here.
 
No, I don't think he's a horrible person, I never implied that.

I think this is getting away from the basis of the discussion. I was just blown away that there was another train of thought that Hoke was completely or mostly blameless from what happened on that field. And that's hard to stomach.
 
No, I don't think he's a horrible person, I never implied that.

I think this is getting away from the basis of the discussion. I was just blown away that there was another train of thought that Hoke was completely or mostly blameless from what happened on that field. And that's hard to stomach.

People mean different things with words like responsibility, blame, and fault. If you are responsible for the activities of many people under your leadership, and the system breaks down, and it's difficult to pin the error on one specific decision, it's tough to describe things in a way people agree on both because they see what happened differently and they use the words differently.
 
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