University of Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel announced this week that he and football coach Jim Harbaugh would determine Harbaugh’s future on Dec. 19 –the day afterhigh school recruits commit to their future schools. 

In other words, by delaying the decision, Michigan will force a couple dozen high school students to make one of the most important decisions of their lives without knowing who their head coach will be. They have chosen to attend Michigan at least in part because they want to play for Harbaugh. Now they could sign their letters of intent to Michigan on December 18, then find out the next day that Harbaugh will not be their coach. 

If that happens, and it certainly could, what recourse do the 17-year olds have? They can hope they’ll like the next coach, and the next coach will like them. Or they can beg the other schools who offered them scholarships, and see if they still have one left – which they probably won’t. 

Harbaugh is just about the last coach in the country to sign his next deal. Thus, waiting until December 19 is an uncharacteristically short-sighted, selfish move by Michigan, at the recruits’ expense.

This is bewildering to me because I’ve seen both men go out of their way to put their players first. Warde Manuel has done that countless times, in ways both big and small. One example: as Manuel told me, “Michigan currently has 20 former student-athletes on medical scholarships, including mental health. The NCAA doesn’t require it, the Big Ten doesn’t require it, a lot of schools don’t do it. But we think it’s the right thing to do. That’s always been true here.”

I have also seen Jim Harbaugh put his players first just as often. One example: When Grant Newsome suffered a career-ending knee injury, Harbaugh visited him often, kept him on scholarship, and hired him as a graduate assistant. Harbaugh has emphasized education. His teams usually finish in the top five academically, and his players have been solid citizens – even though no one outside Ann Arbor seems to care. 

That’s why, when Manuel and Harbaugh cancelled Michigan’s game against Ohio State – for the first time since 1917 – I didn’t doubt that they did so out of a sincere concern for the players’ safety, and not because the Wolverines have already suffered four bad losses and would be 30-point underdogs. Both men took a lot of grief from Ohio State fans and the media, as they knew they would. But to do otherwise would ignore science, and the well-being of their players. It was a tough decision for two competitive personalities, but it was the right decision.  

Any coach can suffer a disappointing season, even Harbaugh, the prodigal son. But given the high character I’ve witnessed in both men, I am stunned they will now force their recruits to decide on Michigan before Michigan decides who’s going to coach them. Waiting this long to decide is unheard of. After cancelling Michigan’s last two games due to COVID, they should have plenty of time to settle this one way or the other much sooner.  

Michigan’s football coaches often tell recruits, “These four years will determine your next forty.” So how can they expect recruits to decide on their all-important next four years without knowing who their coach will be? 

Making matters worse, Michigan President Mark Schissel is of little help. For the first time in Michigan’s history, the faculty this fall narrowly passed a vote of no-confidence in Schlissel. Some deans now quietly ignore him. By all accounts he’s eager to leave, and Michigan is just as eager to let him. But that’s another decision both sides are delaying, with the students caught in the middle. Warde Manuel is not likely to receive valuable guidance from this president, who never expressed much interest in sports even before he had bigger problems of his own. 

The best argument against delaying Harbaugh’s decision comes from Warde Manuel himself, when he told me two years ago, “If we say we really care about the athletes, we’ve got to care about everything. We can’t pick and choose— we care about this, but not that—or wait until the timing’s most beneficial to us.”

But that is exactly what Michigan is doing now. 

And that is not the Michigan I know.