Mark Schlissel
Last month, Chicago Tribune reporter Teddy Greenstein portrayed the much heralded University of Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh as not a very caring guy when it comes to dealing with recruits. The Trib story was titled: "Ethics no obstacle to Michigan's Jim Harbaugh dumping verbal commits."
Greenstein writes that Harbaugh had no qualms about over-recruiting, stringing a player along and then telling the teenager to get lost when there's no room on the roster.
Now, the University President Mark Schlissel is defending Harbaugh, who is credited with quickly turning around the football program.
Nancy Bellanger of Bridge Magazine writes:
When University of Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh’s staff allegedly let high school senior Erik Swenson know that the Wolverine football program was no longer into him, it might have been a crushing disappointment to Swenson. But such incidents aren’t an affront to the Ann Arbor school’s values or practices, according to U-M’s president.
In an interview this week with Bridge, his first on the subject, President Mark Schlissel offered a full-throated defense of Harbaugh and his ethics following a week in which the coach’s recruiting practices have come into question.
“I have a lot of confidence in Coach Harbaugh, and we’ve gotten to know each other quite well,” Schlissel said Wednesday. “And he looks me in the eye and says, ‘It’s no fun to win if you cheat.’ He’s very simple in that regard, and absolutely clear, and that’s one of the things that makes me think he’s going to be here for a long time and be very successful.”
In recent days, two verbal commitments to Michigan’s 2016 recruiting class ‒ Swensen, a commitment for two years, and Rashad Weaver ‒ said that after being offered a spot in the school’s recruiting class they were no longer part of U-M’s plans as National Signing Day approaches next Wednesday. Swensen spoke of receiving the silent treatment from U-M coaches in recent months before being pushed aside, presumably in favor of newer, more talented recruits.
“It is the negative, darker side of recruiting,” Tom Luginbill, ESPN’s national recruiting director, told Detroit News columnist Bob Wojnowski. “You have to make tough choices, and if you offer a kid you’re not sure you want to take, you have to deal with the ramifications” of dropping them when better recruits come along.
In his interview with Bridge, Schlissel defended the coach. Speaking generally of such recruiting controversies, he echoed an argument made by others defending the U-M program: that what’s being said and written in the media about high school recruits represents only one side of the story. He noted that Harbaugh and his staff are prevented from talking about recruits until after a player signs a letter of intent.
Schlissel also noted that there is a difference between a coaching staff making a verbal scholarship offer to a recruit and the decision by a school’s admissions office to accept that player into the freshman class.
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