We know so little about Michigan’s shock firing of football coach Sherrone Moore. We know that the school fired him on Wednesday for cause, saving a $14 million buyout in the process. We know that Michigan found what it called credible evidence that Moore had an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. We know that Moore was in police custody by Wednesday night. We know that in a 911 call, a woman said someone who matched Moore’s description had stalked her for months and on the day of the firing, grabbed a knife and made violent threats. Moore was arraigned on Friday for a felony charge of third degree home invasion, along with stalking and breaking and entering charges, per ESPN college sports reporter Pete Thamel. All we know other than that is that we will learn more later.
The Moore story is shocking and will drag out for at least as long as his legal case does. After that, he will enter a cursed college football assembly of coaches who set their careers on fire and did who knows what other damage to who knows how many people.
But Moore, the man, will go on the public’s back burner soon enough. Michigan has already started a high-stakes search for his replacement. As it does that, the school should have already made one conclusive decision: Michigan has to make a clean break from the entire tree of people that yielded Moore. That means separating from the legacy of the school’s previous coach, national champion Jim Harbaugh, and more importantly from athletic director Warde Manuel. Many, many things about rebuilding (or just holding together) the Michigan football program will be hard. Sidelining the guy who has run the athletic department since 2016 should be easy.
After Moore’s firing, longtime Michigan writer Ace Anbender wrote: “it’s shocking that sherrone moore was fired and then arrested. it’s not surprising that a umich authority figure used their position of power to facilitate misconduct.” That is the crux of Michigan’s institutional problem. This athletic department has been the site of a long list of inexcusable coach and staff behaviors in recent years. Here, it’s worth setting aside the most famous of those stories: the one about Michigan electronically stealing signs from other football teams. Whatever you thought of that, it was a football crime whose victims were football teams being slightly to moderately disadvantaged in football games. It wasn’t a real crime.
The other stories don’t have that much in common, other than that they are all bad. Multiple football staffers were arrested for driving under the influence or while impaired, including one a few days after Moore hired him. Basketball coach Juwan Howard got into one altercation with an opposing coach and another with one of his own coaches, leading to an HR complaint. The hockey coach who had been athletic director Manuel’s first big hire turned out to be a nightmare. The coach and Michigan parted ways after a litany of allegations of serial dishonesty, berating staff, not controlling an underling who mistreated women, and calling at least one player a “Jew.” One of Harbaugh’s assistants on the football staff is under federal indictment for gaining unauthorized access to computers and downloading college students’ intimate photos. All of that has come to light in a period of three-ish years. All of the subjects of these stories stem in some way to Manuel, who hired them himself or empowered the people who did.
Manuel has not indicated that he’s the kind of person who could bring about a reckoning even if he wanted one. Manuel is a former Michigan defensive lineman who played under Bo Schembechler, the winningest coach in school history. Schembechler worked closely with a sports doctor, Robert Anderson, who sexually abused countless Michigan athletes over decades without the coach or the school stopping him. (In 2020, after the school solicited stories from survivors, people came forward with more than 1,000 allegations of on-campus acts of sexual abuse by Anderson.) Schembechler was extremely powerful at Michigan in those days, and one of his sons has said he knew of Anderson’s abuse. But under Manuel (and under Harbaugh, also a Schembechler acolyte), there’s been no institutional coming-to-grips with the legendary coach’s role in the Anderson story. A statue of Schembechler still stands. The football team still operates out of Schembechler Hall. Harbaugh never stopped backing Schembechler in public, and Manuel never thought to make him. Manuel continued to talk about Schembechler in hagiographic terms after the Anderson story came to public light.
There’s no direct cause and effect between one football coach’s destructive decisionmaking and an athletic department and school’s refusal to reckon with decades-old crimes. But leadership either sets a culture where misconduct by powerful people is unacceptable from jump, or it doesn’t. There is no way to argue that Manuel has set that culture at Michigan, no matter what else we learn about Moore’s firing. One other detail came to light on Thursday: “Michigan had been alerted prior to Wednesday that Sherrone Moore was dealing with mental health issues yet Warde Manuel fired him alone with no HR rep and no security present,” Nicole Auerbach reported. Later that day, Moore was in police custody.
Moore got the Michigan head coaching job in 2024, after Harbaugh won the national championship and bounced to the Los Angeles Chargers. Moore had filled in as Michigan’s coach for four games in 2023, while Harbaugh was serving a pair of suspensions for NCAA issues and the sign-stealing affair. Moore was a natural replacement for Harbaugh, having already done the job while the head man was banned from the stadium. Moore himself took a two-game suspension earlier this season for his own part in the sign-stealing. He had deleted his text messages with the guy at the center of the whole thing and offered what you would probably find to be an implausible explanation of why: that he’d been so upset at the guy’s behavior that he just didn’t want the texts with him to remain on his phone.
The sign-stealing story doesn’t matter here, except that it’s the thing that led Moore in various ways to the head coaching job. As that story was unfolding, Michigan briefly became a cult of personality around Harbaugh, whom the Big Ten had punished midseason in a kangaroo court process that Michigan accepted after some saber-rattling. During that title-winning 2023 season, Moore was a legitimate hero at Michigan. His emotional postgame interview after a win at Penn State, while Harbaugh was suspended, will go down as a historical Wolverine document. Moore was the temporary embodiment of Harbaugh, who was the embodiment of Schembechler’s legacy. Michigan beat the haters, won a championship, and wrote the perfect heel college football story. It was fun. Banners hang forever. But Harbaugh was already gone, and Moore is now gone too, and whoever coaches Michigan next shouldn’t have a serious connection to either of them. First things first, though: Neither should the person who hires that coach.
Update, December 12, 2025: This article has been updated to reflect news of Moore’s arraignment and charges.