Here We Go Again
Here We Go Again
The Ann Arbor News reveals investigation into toxic culture of Mel Pearson’s program; for anyone who has followed Michigan’s leadership in the last twelve months, the pattern is disturbingly familiar
On Saturday morning, the Ann Arbor News/M-Live published a story with the following lede: “ANN ARBOR, MI - The University of Michigan ice hockey program is under investigation by the university for, among other allegations, attempting to hide COVID-19 cases before last year’s NCAA Tournament, according to documents obtained by MLive/The Ann Arbor News.”
The article is behind a paywall, and, while I am uncomfortable skirting a mechanism that can promote living wages in journalism, given the circumstances, the below tweet from Drew Van Drese—a proud U of M alum and former student manager for the hockey team—offers the story’s key details.
In brief, the WilmerHale law firm is in the midst of an investigation of a toxic program culture cultivated from the top down by head coach Mel Pearson and director of hockey operations Rick Bancroft.
The Allegations
The article names four central allegations. First, Pearson instructed players to lie to contact tracers as COVID threatened to and then derailed Michigan’s participation in last season’s NCAA tournament. Second, Pearson and Bancroft cultivated a toxic culture toward women working within the hockey program. Third, Pearson retaliated against a student athlete for raising concerns about his program’s culture. Fourth, Bancroft knew about rampant sexual misconduct by former athletic doctor Robert Anderson.
The Context
I believe there are three essential contexts for making sense of allegations: Michigan hockey’s recent deception with regards to the cancellation of the Western Michigan leg of the Great Lakes Invitational, the numerous scandals to emerge from Michigan leadership, and the painfully obvious toxic culture abounding within the world of hockey.
Let’s begin with the GLI, the most innocuous of these three contexts. Michigan caused quite a stir in late December when it announced that it would not be playing a scheduled game against Western Michigan as part of the GLI due to being short handed as a result of combination of the World Juniors, injuries, and COVID. Immediately, the prevailing wisdom was that Mel Pearson—keen to protect his team’s resume from a PairWise system designed to avoid allowing for nuance or context—wanted to dodge a top ten opponent who had already won in Yost earlier this year.
At the time of the incident, Pearson emphasized that the decision to cancel the Western game (and proceed with the game against Michigan Tech) was made by university health and safety staff. A subsequent email—obtained through a FOIA request and published by the website Tech Hockey Guide—revealed that Pearson had been the one to request a cancellation, first over the summer and then in the immediate run-up to the cancellation announcement.
In that moment, I tried to suggest that Pearson prioritizing player wellness over an ultimately meaningless showcase was not the smoking gun those who decried the Wolverines for ducking a difficult opponent wanted it to be. In retrospect, I was woefully incorrect. Instead of a well-intentioned decision devoid of any media savvy or clarity, this was the first public indication of the arrogance and entitlement that now seem to characterize Pearson as a leader.
Now for the second piece of the equation: pervasive ineptitude on behalf of University of Michigan leadership. Let’s work in reverse chronological order here.
Just last week, the University announced a $490 million settlement with the victims of longtime athletic doctor Robert Anderson. Over a period of nearly forty years of employment at Michigan, Anderson sexually abused over 1,000 victims. His victims were mostly men from the football, track, and wrestling teams. That many of them were Black contributed to the willingness of the University to turn a blind eye to their abuse, a point driven home by an effort by former Michigan football player and Anderson victim Jon Vaughn, whose role in forcing this story into the consciousness of the extended Michigan universe can only be described as heroic.
Anderson was harbored by the epitome of the Michigan Man Bo Schembechler, a football coach who was supposed to be the champion of the program’s status as an on-field power with a self-appointed claim to being a lone beacon of morality within the corrupt world of major college football. That coach’s name is still on the school’s football building, and his statue stands outside its front door.
(Photo by Sam Dodge, author of the Ann Arbor News piece announcing the ongoing investigation into Michigan hockey’s misdeeds)
The current head football coach, and the program’s most prominent alum in national media have both denounced the allegations as one side of a “he said/he said” argument, a case one can only make if they are willfully ignorant of a mountain of evidence to the contrary.
Two weeks ago, Michigan announced that President Mark Schlissel would be fired with cause, stemming from an inappropriate relationship between Schlissel and an unnamed colleague. On the one hand, the relationship raises existential questions about the nature of consent between an employee and their supervisor. With that said, Schlissel’s actual offense seems more to do with embarrassing the University via an extra-marital affair than heinous behavior on par with Anderson. I say this not to excuse Schlissel’s behavior or trivialize his offenses but rather to point out that the manifestations of a putrid culture of leadership at the school exists on a spectrum.
In November of 2020, Michigan announced a $9.25 million settlement with the victims of sexual misconduct at the hands of former Provost Martin Philbert. That Philbert was able to rise through the administrative ranks of the University is perhaps the most glaring evidence of the cataclysmic failings of the school’s leadership of any of the misdeeds enumerated here. Incidentally, it was WilmerHale who carried out the investigation into Philbert’s misdeeds.
Earlier that Fall, Schlissel’s regime threatened an injunction against the union representing Michigan’s graduate student instructors, seeking to require those instructors to end their strike. That strike was two-pronged. It sought to compel the University to institute far more stringent protection measures for its workers as the school launched a doomed attempt to return to in-person learning for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. It also aimed to sever the cozy relationship between the school and the militant Ann Arbor Police Department.
In some ways, this last scandal diverges from the specifics of the others named here, but the pattern remains the same. The powerful men pulling the strings at a University that identifies itself as superior to any other show a fundamental disregard for the humanity of the students whose welfare and education have been placed in its hands. Through at least the Schlissel years, the University of Michigan was a place where those in power acted with impunity at the expense of the wellbeing of everyone beneath him.
Lastly, we have the context of hockey culture writ large, which, following the University of Michigan’s unfortunate lead, provides myriad examples of its toxicity, whether you look for them in the short or long term.
In brief, we would be making a grievous error if we perceived the allegations against Pearson’s program as at all anomalous, or to be frank surprising, within the world of hockey.
Just last weekend, hockey found a way to remind us of how ready-to-hand explicit acts of racism are within its world when Jacob Panetta made a bigoted gesture at Jordan Subban, the younger brother of New Jersey Devils’ defneseman P.K. Subban.
Last summer, the only story that mattered in the NHL had nothing to do with on-ice performance. Instead, tireless reporting from Rick Westhead of TSN brought to light a horrific incident in which the Chicago Blackhawks knowingly harbored video coach Brad Aldrich, despite Aldrich’s sexual assault of then-Blackhawk Kyle Beech. Based on Westhead’s reporting, it is clear that numerous people within the organization—from general manager Stan Bowman to head coach Joel Quenneville to the players—knew about Aldrich’s crime and did nothing, attempting to avoid distractions as the team marched toward its first Stanley Cup in forty-nine years.
Why does this matter?
I went to such lengths to expound about the various contexts for this latest story of despicable leadership not to distract from its severity or unique details but rather to illustrate a pattern.
This is not a story about an isolated incident of trouble within an otherwise pristine and orderly world. This is a story about entitlement, arrogance, and privilege. This is a story about the consequences of empowering a select few men (and yes, gender matters here) to preside over their own little fiefdoms, setting before them an incentive structure in which humanity and morality pale in comparison to championships and avarice.
Like all elite collegiate athletic programs, Mel Pearson’s Michigan is a machinic assemblage. It boasts extraordinary financial muscle. It shields itself with the veneer of a proud tradition. While it may not have won a national championship since 1997, it is at present the unquestioned NHL factory within NCAA hockey today.
If the allegations against Pearson’s program are true (and barring a major reversal here, it feels safe to assume that they are seriously substantive even if there remain some uncertainties), there is simply no way Pearson and most, if not all, of the team’s staff can retain their jobs.
As we continue to fit together the pieces regarding this program, we must remember the confidence with which Pearson acted in reprehensible faction, empowered by a university and a sport that have made a habit of telling powerful men like him that their actions needn’t correspond to consequences so long as their on-ice results do not suffer.
We still await the details of Pearson’s alleged toxic program culture, but I feel confident suggesting that the coach never even considered the possibility that his belief that rules did not apply to him would be met with repercussions.
That is why Pearson would be comfortable instructing student-athletes to lie about their close contacts in hopes of preserving the chance of winning a championship that would cement his own job security and legacy for the foreseeable future. That is why Pearson would see no problem with systemic mistreatment of female staffers. That is why a university and athletic department who have reaped mountains of money from the toil of unpaid athletes would see no need to redirect some small percentage of those funds toward a women’s hockey team.
In a world where the powerful are taught time and again that the rules do not apply to them, abuses of their power are the rule rather than the exception.
What now?
This is not a story about what happens on the ice, but it is impossible to overlook the relevance of the actual playing of hockey games to the fallout from these allegations. As I write these words, Michigan is about five hours away from playing the back half of a two-game set with Wisconsin. Barring a last-minute change, Pearson will be behind the bench.
For fans of Michigan hockey, it is near impossible to know how to proceed. Can one separate the performance of a school’s student-athletes from the misdeeds of its leadership? In theory, the answer should be yes, but it’s almost impossible to imagine sitting down to watch tonight’s game as anything other than a painful experience.
The Ann Arbor News story offers us the foundation of what are self-evidently devastating allegations against the hockey program, but it also leaves some major questions unanswered.
Specifically, we can’t glean much from this morning’s story about what role, if any, the current crop of Wolverines played in this scandal. Were players involved in the toxic culture alleged by the article? When the article mentions that Pearson “retaliated against” a Michigan athlete who spoke out against that culture, was the athlete a concerned hockey player or from a different sport, attempting to shed light on misdeeds by players within Pearson’s program?
Optimistically (a word that feels out of place in a story like this one), we can hope that this culture was limited to Pearson and his staff rather than the players he recruited and relied on. In that scenario, it would feel reasonable to continue to support this year’s incredible hockey team on their quest for another national championship, especially once Pearson and company were removed from that picture. Likewise, it could become possible to avoid punishing this group of players for the wrongs of the man charged with leading them. I sincerely hope that this path will feel tenable as more details emerge.
However, it would also feel naive, if not negligent, to presume a sterling record on behalf of Michigan’s players without waiting for more details to emerge. It is impossible to follow competitive sports without, at some point, being let down by athletes whose physical prowess tricked you into believing that they were also exemplary citizens when the reality was far more bleak.
Again, I hope that further details limit the scope of the misconduct to the administrative level as they emerge, but it would feel irresponsible not to allow for the possibility of that not proving the case.
For now, we are left without a clear path forward. What seems at the moment obvious is that Pearson must be removed from the team immediately, along with any other implicated staffers. We also have one more unambiguous entry into a long-standing narrative of systemic issues within the leadership of the University of Michigan and the culture of hockey more broadly. Beyond those, there are no more easy answers for the time being.
If Pearson’s removal appears an obvious and necessary solution, the next steps from there are more complicated. Given the expansive roots of the problems at hand, it feels impossible to trust this University to hire a replacement who can avoid falling back into an all-too-familiar pattern.