Michigan football’s head coaching search marches on. Whether or not this is because of Kalen DeBoer’s game at Oklahoma tonight remains to be seen, but candidate rumors continue to flood our timelines unabashedly. On Wednesday, we detailed what traits we want the new head coach to possess. Today, it’s your turn.
What qualities or characteristics are the most important to you for Michigan’s next head coach?
To summarize our thoughts, our own Grace Foulk broke it down into five traits — experienced, recruiter,
developer, culture builder and winner.
After two years, it’s clear Sherrone Moore only fit one or two of those qualities. Moore was never a head coach prior to his time at Michigan, and also didn’t meaningfully develop many players (though two years is admittedly a small sample size). There was initial hope he could build a solid culture, but that has since gone out the window. Lastly, never winning 10 games in a season disqualifies you from being considered a winner in my book.
Moore was an excellent recruiter, so we have to give him credit for that. True freshmen such as Andrew Marsh appear to be on the path to stardom, for which Moore does get credit for identifying. However, being a recruiter can’t be your only positive trait.
Michigan will likely (hopefully) have a new head coach in place by the time the transfer portal opens up on Jan. 2. Looking at the candidates that have been most mentioned like Kenny Dillingham and Kalen DeBoer, they each check significantly more boxes than Moore did at the time he was hired. However, this isn’t a definitive list of boxes that need to be checked.
Other coaching characteristics include being an offensive or defensive mastermind, a motivator, having ties to the program, youth/exuberance, or moral character.
Do you place higher emphasis on any of these than we did in our rankings? If so, what is the most important characteristic or trait of the bunch? Let us know down in the comments.
