When Michigan football head coach Jim Harbaugh left the program in January to (finally) go to the NFL, after years of speculation, there was really only one name that came up in Ann Arbor to replace him. And that was the eventual head coach Sherrone Moore.
But that didn’t stop rumors and conjecture from happening that there could be an outside hire, particularly a familiar face who once led a rival program.
In the days following Harbaugh’s departure before Moore was officially hired and announced, the internet was abuzz with the idea that Brian Kelly, the former Notre Dame coach, could step down from his current post at LSU to take the Michigan job. The rumors didn’t appear to be coming from within the athletic program, so the speculation was that Kelly himself was lobbying to depart the SEC powerhouse to lead the maize and blue.
However, in a new exclusive interview with The Daily Advertiser, Kelly insists that the Michigan job wasn’t something that was on his mind.
I really didn’t think much about it. I think if my ears were interested in listening to that stuff, maybe it would affect me, but I have no interest in that. I have great respect for what Michigan has accomplished as a football program. They’re the all-time winningest program, but I knew that when I was at Notre Dame. So, it wasn’t anything new. This was a conscious decision to come to LSU because I wanted to be in this conference. It was much more than an individual school as much as it was, collectively, I wanted to play in the SEC and play the competition that’s here.
After being at Notre Dame and playing Michigan and playing in the Midwest and playing those schools, it was a great experience, but it would almost be reliving it again, you know what I mean? It was déjà vu for me to think about in any other way. So, it wasn’t something that, really, I gave much thought to.
The respect is real, but it doesn’t appear there’s anything beyond what is the current status quo.
Kelly is obviously a good coach who has had success at every stop he’s made along the way. And he has familiarity with the state of Michigan having coached at Grand Valley State as well as in Mount Pleasant with Central Michigan.
Ultimately, whether or not Kelly was considered or if it was merely a rumor, Michigan football made the right choice by promoting from within. Moore was a handpicked successor to Jim Harbaugh and the Wolverines, throughout modern history, have had more success with internally promoted candidates. Though Gary Moeller was only the head coach for a few short years following the Bo Schembechler era, he was a steady hand stewarding the program. When Moeller was ousted for an off-campus incident, Lloyd Carr — who was previously the defensive coordinator and a longtime assistant under Schembechler — stepped in and won the program’s first national championship since 1948.
Will Moore have similar success? While he does have a solid, but short, track record filling in as the interim coach for Harbaugh, only time will tell. But history shows that the maize and blue do better with internally promoted head coaches — at least since Schembechler’s arrival and departure.