Mandel’s Mailbag: Sherrone Moore’s Michigan needs to break free of Harbaugh era

Now more than ever, I feel like my job has become a college football therapist. There are so many suffering fan bases that just need someone to listen.

Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Is Sherrone Moore a victim of circumstance having been handed the job too late to find a transfer QB or top coordinators? Or is he like Juwan Howard — a nice guy, a Michigan man — who’s simply in over his head? — Jeff P.

Michigan has been disappointing, to say the least, but I’m not going to declare anyone in over their head after seven games. I’ve heard the same thing said about UCLA’s DeShaun Foster. But they are hardly the first new head coaches struggling to acclimate to a new job. Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman got that label a lot, too. He’s doing OK for himself now.

Unfortunately for Moore, he was hired primarily to promote continuity coming off a national championship season, but there turned out to be very little continuity for the Wolverines. Four staff members followed Jim Harbaugh to the Chargers. Moore, OC/QBs coach Kirk Campbell, receivers coach Ron Bellamy and O-line coach Grant Newsome are the only holdovers from 2023. And a handful of starters left for the NFL. On offense, in particular, it’s an entirely new team, and yet, it was viewed as an extension of the Harbaugh regime.

Then there’s the QB situation. Whether it’s because they were caught up in last year’s national title chase, Harbaugh already knew he was leaving, or both, it sure seems like he and Moore did nothing to plan for 2024. There was no thought or attempt to bring in a transfer. Even if that wasn’t obvious last December, it certainly was by spring camp. Granted, the big-name QBs were gone by then, but there had to be options better than the ones they have.

After his 4-3 team gets through the remaining miseries of this season, which includes dates with No. 1 Oregon, No. 13 Indiana and No. 4 Ohio State, Moore needs to make a clean break from the Harbaugh era and think of how the Sherrone Moore Michigan football program should look. Build out his staff accordingly. Recruit accordingly. (He just landed five-star tackle Andrew Babalola, who could become the Wolverines’ highest-ranked recruit in many years.) And most of all, aggressively hit the portal, especially at QB. And don’t be afraid to make some fundraising calls to do it.

We understandably focus on referees getting the call right, but isn’t that a little bit oversimplified? My biggest issue with the controversial Texas-Georgia play is not that they made a bad call to begin with, or fixed it to get the call right, it’s that the entire fiasco was completely the fault of their inability to follow basic procedure. — Benjamin D.

I reached out to the SEC on Tuesday to see if they’d provide a more complete explanation of what went down Saturday night beyond their brief statement. They said no, which is disappointing. This was an unprecedented situation — reversing a penalty on the field after it had been announced — in a game nearly 13 million people watched. I’m glad they got the call right, but the process leading up to that is just unheard of. And it leads to all manner of speculation.

Best-case scenario: The official who made the call realized he screwed up immediately and went to go confer with his colleagues, but then all hell broke loose in the stands and their attention got diverted. Which, if so, just tell us that. Because every explanation after is increasingly dubious.

The official was seen talking with an angry Steve Sarkisian, who was pointing at the scoreboard showing the replay on a loop. The most generous explanation is the official saw one of those replays and realized he screwed up. Or, the delay gave one or more of the other officials time to watch the replay and discuss further. But that lends straight to Kirby Smart’s concern about other fan bases copying Texas’ behavior to get the same result.

And finally, there’s the possibility that the folks back in Birmingham, realizing the call was wrong and could drastically impact the outcome of a top-five game, relayed a message to take another look. That would be a major breach of protocol, so I’m going to give the SEC, which has a competent commissioner, the benefit of the doubt it did not come to that.

Still, conspiracy theories will persist. They always do with officiating. Conferences have an understandable instinct to protect their officials, but this was too big to brush under the rug. Err on the side of transparency for once.

Are you at all surprised about Oklahoma? As you have mentioned before, in the world of larger conferences someone has to lose.  Yes, Oklahoma has a history of winning, but I’ve always viewed them as a team that is good specifically because of the league they played in.  Don’t you think they are destined for middle-of-the-road SEC life? — Ryan Duncan

I’ve said for three years it was a mistake for Oklahoma to go from big fish in a small pond to big fish swimming with eight other big fish. But what’s happening to the Sooners right now has very little to do with their conference and everything to do with their coach.

A year ago, Brent Venables was in a seemingly enviable position regarding his quarterbacks. He had All-Big 12 quarterback Dillon Gabriel, who beat Texas and led the Sooners to a 10-win season, and he had five-star freshman Jackson Arnold ready to go when Gabriel inevitably turned pro. Yet somehow neither started for Oklahoma the past two weeks.

Many have suggested Venables “ran off” Gabriel to turn to Arnold, but that makes little sense. The guy was terrific.

Venables recently recounted that when Gabriel told him after the last regular season game he was entering the portal, it caught him by surprise because he didn’t realize Gabriel, then in his fifth season, was considering coming back to college. Gabriel may have left anyway, both because OC Jeff Lebby left for Mississippi State and because Oregon likely made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

But benching Arnold four weeks into the season was a head-scratcher. Yes, he was struggling, but he wasn’t unproven. He threw for 361 yards in the bowl game. And his replacement, true freshman Michael Hawkins Jr., was completely unproven. And, as we now see, wasn’t ready to start for an SEC team — and the same thing would be true were Oklahoma still in the Big 12.

Venables is pivoting back to Arnold this week at Ole Miss, and he also fired OC Seth Littrell, but it’s likely too late to salvage this 4-3 season in which the Sooners play four ranked teams over their last five games. Venables will get to try again this offseason — provided he still has a job.

The job of a head coach at a Big Ten or SEC program is so vastly different today than being a national championship defensive coordinator, as Venables was, that I’m not sure the latter does much of anything to prepare you for the former.

As for Oklahoma’s big-picture future, there’s no reason that program can’t contend for SEC titles with the right coach. But unfortunately for the Sooners, there’s also no reason Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Texas, Texas A&M, Tennessee, Florida and Auburn can’t contend for SEC titles with the right coach.

It probably all sorts itself out, but the potential exists for some really messy tiebreaker situations in the SEC and Big Ten. For example, Georgia actually doesn’t control its own destiny in the SEC. What’s your favorite chaos scenario? — Rob, Atlanta

Oh, it’s going to be mad. In their rush to expand, the conferences did not think through what a 16/17/18-team conference with no divisions looks like. We may skip straight past three-way ties to four-way ties.

First off, a possibility exists in the ACC where Miami, Clemson and SMU all go 8-0. None play each other, and SMU’s nonconference loss to BYU is not factored in. Imagine winning all of your league games and finishing third.

My “favorite” Big Ten mess would be this: Oregon (loss to Illinois), Illinois (loss to Penn State), Penn State (loss to Ohio State), Ohio State (loss to Oregon) and Indiana (loss to Ohio State) all go 8-1. Five-way tie! Realistically Oregon hands the Illini their second loss this weekend, but you could still have a four-way tie that would go deep down the tiebreaker list because there’s no common conference opponent.

And now to the motherlode: I came up with an eight-way tie of SEC teams all finishing 6-2: Georgia (losses at Alabama and at Ole Miss), Alabama (losses at Vanderbilt and at Tennessee), Tennessee (losses at Arkansas and at Georgia), Texas (losses to Georgia and at Arkansas), Missouri (losses at Texas A&M and at Alabama), LSU (losses at Texas A&M and vs. Alabama), Texas A&M (losses at South Carolina and vs. Texas) and Ole Miss (losses vs. Kentucky and at LSU).

This would be the ultimate punishment for the SEC refusing to go to nine conference games.

Who has it worse this weekend: Rutgers kicking off at 11 p.m. Eastern on Friday night against USC or Washington kicking off at 9 a.m. Pacific Saturday at Indiana? — Karl T.

It’s got to be Rutgers, right? College football players are used to being up early for workouts and practices, so playing a game at 9 a.m. on their body is not as jarring as it may seem.

But no one’s practicing or lifting in the middle of the night, which is what it will be back east. They might be zombies by the fourth quarter.

The good news, though, is USC has been struggling to stay awake for the fourth quarter no matter when the game kicks off.

Will Curt Cignetti stay at IU or be poached? — Jason G.

That’s probably up to Indiana, which is paying Cignetti $4.25 million this season, 15th in the Big Ten. The 63-year-old may have zero desire to change jobs again, but he’s also going to be the belle of the coaching carousel if the Hoosiers keep winning, and SEC schools like Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma can offer a lot more than that. And even if he stays put, who knows what jobs will be open this time next year.

Indiana has not historically invested in football like Ohio State or Michigan, but it’s hardly poor. Its athletic department generated $145 million in revenue last year, according to the Indianapolis Star, which puts it in the upper half of the Big Ten. And that was before the conference’s new TV deals, valued at an annual average of $65 million per school, kicked in. The upcoming new CFP contract, beginning in 2026, will also inject a new revenue stream. And one assumes IU’s ticket sales and donations will soar from the excitement over this football season.

AD Scott Dolson should be working behind the scenes right now to keep his coach happy. Up that salary into the top four or five in the conference, at least on par with the $7.25 million Jonathan Smith got at Michigan State last year, bump up the assistant salary pool and make some facility commitments. Standard stuff. Note that Kansas, which does not have Big Ten-level money coming in, bumped Lance Leipold from $2.4 million to $5.75 million to $7.5 million over two years. It can be done.

I’d also note one possible unintended consequence of the expanded CFP. It used to be that winning at a Kansas or Indiana was fun, but if you ever wanted to make the Playoff, you had to move up. Not anymore. Indiana still has work to do, but if the Hoosiers make it in Year 1, it would be a strong indicator that Cignetti can achieve his career goals without ever leaving Bloomington.

Notre Dame probably has the worst loss as a ranked team. How can it possibly be considered a Playoff team? — Nicholas D.

Because they expanded it to 12 teams.

Is USC the new Nebraska? — Michael G., Los Angeles

I’m old enough to remember when nearly every program in the sport wished it could be Nebraska. Now it’s seen as everyone’s universal cautionary tale.

USC, like Nebraska, is nearing two decades of futility chasing its glory days of yesteryear. (Nebraska’s is closer to 30.) Much like Scott Frost was supposed to be the savior in Lincoln, Lincoln Riley seemed like the home-run hire to end all home-run hires. Instead, he’s lost nine of his last 14 games. And if he becomes the next guy cast off, there’s no obvious choice who would be a guaranteed upgrade. (And yes, that includes 73-year-old Pete Carroll.)

But there’s one enormous difference between the two: USC is in L.A! Any recruiter worth his salt should be able to field a top-15 team with just a sliver of the top-flight talent in Southern California. Whereas Nebraska must overcome the non-fixable issue of being located in the middle of the country, not particularly close to any recruiting hotbed. Tom Osborne overcame that with a specific style of football that’s been rendered largely obsolete. Nebraska needs the same athletes as everyone else.

Riley has not proven to be an adept recruiter. The Orange County Register recently ran an alarming story that USC’s coaches had not visited longtime Orange County powerhouses Mater Dei and St. John Bosco since last spring. “We must be the greatest coaches in America, is what they’re basically telling me because we’re doing it with a bunch of guys that aren’t qualified to play at USC,” said Bosco head coach Jason Negro.

Recruiting is not Riley’s only problem, but it’s astounding he’s in Year 3 and still has such obvious roster deficiencies, particularly along the offensive line, that a coach with his resume should have solved long ago.

The closer analog to USC is Miami, which has been stuck in the mud for two decades but appears to be finally getting its act together. From the time Miami fired its most recent national championship coach, Larry Coker, in 2006, it has gone through five head coaches. In Mario Cristobal, they got an alum and native who had a history of running a major program. The Canes are 7-0 in his third season.

Credit to Cristobal, but he has one major thing going for him: money. Miami is all in on football, from the contract they gave him (reportedly 10 years, $80 million) to the seemingly bottomless NIL well that allowed them to reroute Cam Ward from the NFL Draft and sign other accomplished transfers like running back Damien Martinez (Oregon State), receiver Sam Brown (Houston), defensive tackle Simeon Barrow Jr. (Michigan State) and others.

USC to this point has not been able to wrangle that level of support, but it was also slower to embrace collectives than most of its counterparts. And I’m sure it’s harder to hit up donors when they’ve got little reason to feel confident in their coach.

It feels like a fairytale year for the service academies. Looking at their remaining schedules, do you think one or both have a shot to make it into the Playoff? — Karl S.

They both have games against the current No. 12 team in the country, Notre Dame, beginning with Navy this weekend. That’s a big opportunity for a quality win. And then of course they could play each other in the AAC Championship Game, giving the winner a shot at a second Top 25 win.

But would that be enough given their incredibly weak schedules beyond that?

Navy and Army are currently ranked 144th and 148th, respectively, in Jeff Sagarin’s strength of schedule ratings. Several FCS teams, including Portland State, Northern Arizona and five Missouri Valley teams, are higher. Navy at least has a win over 6-1 Memphis that looks better by the week. But Army’s six conference wins are all against teams with losing records who are a combined 12-30. Their seventh win was against FCS Lehigh.

That’s why I haven’t been taking the CFP possibility too seriously. Tulane, currently 5-2 with losses to Kansas State and Oklahoma, probably has a better shot if it wins the AAC, with the Mountain West champ, presumably either Boise State or UNLV, as its main competition.

But if either Navy this Saturday or Army on Nov. 23 beats Notre Dame on a neutral field, they will suddenly have a better nonconference win than any of the other G5 contenders. (NIU, currently 1-2 in the MAC, will not likely be in the mix.) And of course, a strongly patriotic public opinion.

Heaven help the committee members if they do to a service academy what they did Florida State.

Is Mike Norvell in jeopardy of becoming the fastest head coach to go from undefeated regular season to fired? Who currently owns that record, Ed Orgeron? — Chris, Chicago

Orgeron holds the modern-day record, only lasting 22 games after his 15-0 season in 2019. LSU paid $17 million to buy him out.

Norvell’s buyout is currently $63 million. If FSU can afford that, the judge should toss its ACC lawsuit that day.

(Top photo of Sherrone Moore: Alika Jenner / Getty Images)