Hogg: Dave Brandon's athletic department failed Brady Hoke early Tuesday morning
On Saturday, Brady Hoke and his football staff failed Shane Morris.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Dave Brandon's athletic department failed Brady Hoke.
As far as anyone can tell from the power plays currently underway on Michigan's athletics campus, the first mistake was one of communication, not compassion. The second one, though, seems a little more sinister.
Throughout his press conference Monday afternoon, Hoke reiterated that Shane Morris had been dealing with an ankle injury against Minnesota and that, "to the best of my knowledge", he had never been diagnosed with a concussion. He brushed aside any questions about what treatment and clearances Morris had received, saying they would be addressed in a statement from the medical department.
And then, like everyone else, he waited. And waited.
More than twelve hours after Hoke had started referring to this mysterious statement -- at 12:50 Tuesday morning, to be precise -- it finally arrived. It wasn't close to what Hoke seemed to think he was going to get. Coming from Brandon, not the medical department, it laid out in great detail how a lack of communication meant Morris had not only been allowed to stay in the football game after sustaining a brain injury, but once he been removed, he was somehow allowed back on the field before the team's neurologist had been able to examine him.
As Brandon made clear, there was no failure of caring about Morris, but there was a complete breakdown in the communication system on Hoke's sidelines. The medical staff was unable to tell Hoke there were concerns about Morris having a head injury, which led to him playing quarterback while concussed -- the single most dangerous moment for an athlete that has sustained brain trauma.
That chaotic sideline situation is on Hoke, who is in charge of the football team, and responsible for the methods in place to quickly communicate injury information from the medical staff to the coaching staff. That didn't happen, and it left Morris exposed to further injury.
After the game finished, though, it was Brandon's athletic department who failed. On Sunday, Morris was finally diagnosed with a brain injury. Tiger fans know that's not unlikely -- Alex Avila has, on multiple occasions, only shown concussion symptoms a day or two after the original event.
Somehow, after his starting quarterback was diagnosed with brain trauma, Hoke wasn't told. On Monday afternoon, he walked into a hostile press conference, still not knowing his staff had let Morris stay in the game after the team's neurologist had concerns about a head injury, and actually put him back in the game before those concerns could be addressed.
So Hoke stressed that his program would never have a player on the field that might have a head injury, and that they had medical personnel on the sidelines to make sure it never happened. As he said those things, there were people in the athletic department who had known since Sunday that they were no longer true, but they let Hoke take the podium without anything resembling full information.
The only hope Hoke had was the "medical statement" that the media would soon receive -- a document that he clearly thought was going to vindicate what happened on the Michigan Stadium sidelines during the Minnesota game.
He was then left twisting in the wind for 12 hours until, long after many writers had gone to bed, Brandon released a statement that called what happened "a serious lack of communication that led to confusion on the sideline." It's Hoke's sideline, so that put the blame squarely on his shoulders.
Brandon goes on to say that the second breakdown in communications -- the one that left Hoke with bad information and no support on Monday was "another mistake that cannot occur again."
The report then goes on to list ways that things will be immediately improved, including a medical professional in the press box who can quickly relay information to his colleagues on the sidelines, as well as a plan to "reinforce our sideline communication processes" so that the medical staff can communicate with the coaches.
The failures that Brandon points out, and his planned solutions, all bring one image to mind -- an old-school football coach who, on Monday afternoon, gave a sarcastic "Thank you" to a media member suggesting that wearing a headset might make communication issues easier, before stating that he wouldn't be putting one on.
An athletic director stressing communciation failures, both on and off the field, a football coach who stubbornly refuses to use a simple, modern communication system, and a player in obvious distress who was allowed to play with a brain injury.
In 2014, given all the recent discoveries about the horrible consequences of brain trauma, that's an ugly look for Michigan.
