When Michigan fired coach Sherrone Moore on Dec. 10, it seemed to take the college football world by surprise. However, it became clear very quickly that something was wrong within the Wolverines’ athletic department—especially after the day of Moore’s firing ended with the coach in handcuffs.
Accordingly, Michigan commissioned an independent investigation into the department’s culture from the Chicago law firm Jenner & Block. Now, reports of those investigation’s findings have begun to trickle out.
None has been more damning than Tuesday’s from Rachel Bachman and Corinne Ramey of the Wall Street Journal, which suggested that the Wolverines had an idea of Moore’s conduct long before it became public.
Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel seems to have been suspicious of Moore as early as August 2024
Two days before the Wolverines’ season opener against Fresno State in ‘24, according to Bachman and Ramey’s report of the investigation’s findings, Manuel wrote a handwritten note that seemed to allude to a past conversation between Manuel and Moore about staffer Paige Shiver, with whom Moore carried out the relationship that led to his termination.
“I told him I didn’t remember if we had already discussed, but that she couldn’t accompany him on trips,” Manuel said in that note.
That would appear to call into question Michigan’s persistent claim that it did not know about Moore and Shiver’s relationship until Shiver reported it to the department.
According to Bachman and Ramey, Moore and Shiver began their relationship during a recruiting trip to Colorado in January 2022, shortly after Moore messaged Shiver on Instagram for the first time.
Jim Harbaugh’s name turns up
Additionally, Bachman and Ramey reported that Chargers and former Wolverines coach Jim Harbaugh’s name surfaced in Jenner & Block’s findings in the context of a bout with postpartum depression Shiver suffered in ‘22.
“Mr. Harbaugh helped me get into the head person here,” Shiver texted Moore, with “here” presumably referring to the hospital at which she was treated. “Don’t worry he doesn’t know everything and won’t[,] just knows I’m not well.”
Harbaugh did not return the Journal’s request for comment.
Where does Michigan go from here?
Reports have placed Manuel’s job in jeopardy all week, with a university Board of Regents meeting looming Thursday (the Board’s agenda does not include reference to Manuel or the investigation). It also remains unclear how much of the Jenner & Block report will be made public; both Moore and Shiver’s attorneys have sought its release.
What seems clear is an essential rot within the Wolverines’ departmental culture, which can be interpreted in a number of different ways—as a condition unique to the public-minded, all-things-to-all-people University of Michigan; as a condition unique to the Big Ten, which has endured decades of nearly uninterrupted scandal; as a condition unique to college football, the last bastion of a dated value system; as a condition unique to elite 21st-century sport, where winning is everything. Most likely it is a combination of all four, but the Wolverines can only clean their own house.
Michigan already smothered its nostalgia addiction in the head coach’s office, bringing in Utah coach Kyle Whittingham to marry his no-nonsense public persona to the prouder elements of the program’s history. It seems time to do the same in the athletic director’s office.
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