Pearson Out (for Good); Naurato In (at Least for Now)
Pearson Out (for Good); Naurato In (at Least for Now)
Mel Pearson has been fired; Brandon Naurato is his interim replacement. We assess the process that produced that outcome.
By now you’ve surely heard, the University of Michigan men’s hockey team has hired a new coach for the 2022-23 season. Mel Pearson’s culture of bullying and harassment has cost him the opportunity to remain in one of the most enviable posts in NCAA hockey, and Brandon Naurato—who spent the past season working on Pearson’s staff—is in as interim head man.
The new arrangement raises a number of questions.
Why did it take months to arrive at this conclusion after a report—published in early May—made plain Pearson’s offenses and the former head coach was already out of contract anyway?
Can Michigan fans proceed with any assurance that the indiscretions exposed by WilmerHale’s investigation into the program have been addressed and resolved?
Is Naurato—who has never been a head coach—ready to take over the reins for a team with national championship aspirations, even on just an interim basis?
None of the three invite a neat answer, but let’s try to tackle them in order anyway.
So why did this turn into a months long saga of embarrassment when the actual published report unequivocally exposes Pearson as unfit to lead and he did not have a contract to remain in his role?
Ummmm, administrative incompetence? That’s about the best we can come up with here.
As this process unfolded, the University of Michigan made the befuddling decision to leak the report (which we remind you was published in May) to reporters last week, without any official statement as to the outcome. The cynical reading was that the leak was a “trial balloon” attempt to gauge whether the fan base and general public deemed the findings fireable for Pearson. If this were the objective, the response the gimmick elicited was a fast-forming consensus that Pearson could not return for the ‘22-23 season.
Thanks to some reporting from John U. Bacon, the source of the delay became a bit clearer on August 4th, a day before the school announced Pearson would not return.
According to Bacon, all eight regents along with interim president Mary Sue Coleman were of one mind (that Pearson must be removed), while athletic director Warde Manuel dissented.
We don’t wish to extrapolate too much from a single tweet, but it’s hard not to read said tweet without reaching the conclusion that Manuel’s insistence on retaining Pearson (despite extensive evidence supporting the contrary conclusion) turned the process into what it became: a prolonged, self-inflicted embarrassment for a university that insists it is above such disrepute.
When a day later Manuel announced Pearson would not be back, his statement began “it has been determined that Mel Pearson will not return as our hockey coach.” His use of the passive voice in the opening sentence of his press release suggested something less than satisfaction at the decision.
Manuel’s statement brings us to the second question: Can Michigan fans retain their faith that the people in charge at the University and athletic department have definitively resolved this scandal?
One of the reasons we seem fascinated by punishments is the way they allow us to embrace a sense of satisfaction at a problem placed in the past. The culprit is gone, so the problem must be as well.
We certainly wouldn’t classify Pearson as a scapegoat—he is the one who bullied Strauss Mann out of the program, he is the one who allowed his buddy to get away with horribly inappropriate behavior toward their coworkers, he was the one in charge, so he deserves to be held responsible.
With that said, the culture Pearson and crony Rick Bancroft cultivated will not just wash out with the pair’s departure, especially when it seems Manuel never found their behavior all that troubling in the first place.
Manuel states “Our student-athletes having a positive and meaningful experience is of paramount importance, and our clear expectation within our department is that all employees and staff are valued and supported.”
This is as close as the Athletic Director came to acknowledging that something went wrong within the program.
What you don’t see in that statement is an apology to victims like former goaltender Strauss Mann or University employees Lora Durkee, Caroline Mandel, and Kristy McNeil. What you don’t see is any plan aimed at remedying the cultural problems of the Pearson era.
Perhaps it is unfair to nitpick a six-sentence statement, but when that statement is all the University offers, it doesn’t feel as though there is an alternative. Perhaps the same legal concerns that helped stretch this into a months-long affair gave Manuel pause in offering an extensive assessment of the situation. By not addressing those topics in a public forum, Manuel makes it difficult to believe that a culture of enablement is no longer in place.
Amidst its other generalities, Manuel does mention “the values we hold dear at Michigan,” and, of course, that brings us to the inescapable problem of the Michigan Man.
In a follow-up to the aforementioned revelation that Manuel was the lone consequential voice continuing to advocate for Pearson’s retention, Bacon wrote that Michigan would “sacrifice moral authority” if it did not remove Pearson.
We hate to have to be the ones to tell Bacon—whose books helped usher us into Michigan fandom, but we’re reasonably sure that a school that proudly displays a statue of a man who knowingly enabled decades’ of sexual abuse has long since sacrificed moral authority.
And this is where the issue of culture in sports becomes thorny. Coaches or management figures love to talk about building culture. They love to tell you what the culture of their program is. What they don’t seem to do (certainly not willingly) is indulge external investigation or assessment into what a program’s culture really is.
For Michigan, culture is a constant topic of conversation, and the narrative from those in charge is always the same. Michigan does not just think of itself as a competitive academic and athletic institution; it wants to believe it is the moral authority referred to earlier by Bacon.
In his book Overtime (written about the 2018 Michigan football team), Bacon writes “The Michigan ideal was simple, if not easy: a football program that would outperform others in the classroom and promote exemplary conduct in the community, while avoiding the many temptations to cheat that beset all but a few of the top teams.” Manuel himself made an ill-conceived podcast appearance in June to talk about the leadership lessons he gleaned from Bo Schembechler that persist in his department today.
Despite the insistence to the contrary from figures like Manuel and in different ways Bacon, it’s worth thinking about culture from a different perspective. In our initial review of the allegations against Pearson in late January, we wanted to emphasize culture as a lens through which to make sense of what was at the time an ongoing investigation. The reason for that emphasis was that the Pearson saga was just one morsel in a disturbingly hefty grab bag of recent or ongoing stories that demonstrated the inability of the University of Michigan to hold powerful people within the school accountable for their misdeeds.
Until we see something much more thoughtful from Manuel, it’s difficult to feel as though that cultural problem at the University has been addressed. Powerful people would still rather move on with haste than acknowledge the genuine harm that the school’s inaction has caused.
We thought three questions would be enough to tackle for today, but on the way to unpacking the second we’ve stumbled into a fourth: How should you deal with this news if you are a fan, someone without the power to effect change at the school but with a serious loyalty to it?
Once again, it is a messy question to answer, and we certainly don’t intend to tell anybody how to feel. What we might suggest, though, is that a certain dissonance is probably a healthy approach to modern fandom.
You can love Michigan athletics, root for its various teams to succeed, and still feel troubled by goings-on within the athletic department. You shouldn’t feel as though you cannot root for Michigan hockey to succeed this year, even if you are deeply troubled by the revelations in the WilmerHale report.
This is not to say that you should blindly support a troublesome operation because you have grown attached to the clothes they wear to work, and you would be well within your rights not to do so.
Nonetheless, fans have a unique opportunity to come to an organization from a place of devotion and express their discomfort or disappointment with that organization’s behavior. It might not mean that fans, especially not individual fans, have the power to hire and fire coaches, but their united voices carry weight.
On a recent episode of their podcast “Stadio,” Ryan Hunn and Musa Okwonga tackled this question as it relates to a number of incidents of sexual assault within the world of soccer.
The conversation began with Okwonga quoting from a recent tweet of Hunn’s:
The full conversation (which is well worth your time) explores this idea of accountable fandom, and the notion that you have no obligation to laud every choice your chosen team makes. Just because your favorite team signs a player with a sordid legal or personal history doesn’t mean you have to try to justify it to yourself or your buddies. Okwonga also speaks to the way fans can actually offer an air of accountability to the teams or clubs they support by pointing out the ways those organizations are violating their own professed values.
This last point is especially salient for Michigan fans. This is a school that loves nothing more than to ascend to a self-proclaimed moral high ground. If that is the game you want to play, then there is no room for a lack of accountability for powerful actors in leadership positions at the University. A blueprint is already present in the form of the “Hail to the Victims” movement that has grown out of Michigan’s mishandling of Schembechler’s legacy and Robert Anderson’s misconduct.
You don’t have to give up on being a Michigan fan over this misconduct, but you might allow it to reinvigorate your own small personal stake in holding this massive university accountable for the values it purports to express.
So, with all that in mind, what do we make of Naurato’s hiring on an interim basis?
In brief, the move seems to be one made out of low-risk pragmatism in a bad spot. Mid-August is not exactly an easy time to conduct a coaching search. As a point of comparison, Michigan State let go of Danton Cole in early April and hired new coach Adam Nightingale just under a month later on May 3rd.
Running an off-cycle, full-on search would likely limit your pool of candidates and risk the dissolution of what is slated to be a sterling recruiting class. As such, an interim appointment was the logical decision.
So Brandon Naurato, a thirty-seven year-old with the same amount of head coaching experience as the author of this newsletter, has been handed the keys to one of the fastest, most luxurious cars in NCAA hockey. Even if an interim hire makes perfect sense (and we believe it does), this is not a risk-free proposition.
Despite the massive talent exodus to the NHL last Spring, the 2022-23 Wolverines expect to compete for a national title, and that is not exactly an easy load for a first-time head coach to balance across his shoulders. Being the head coach at any collegiate program is a complex and political task; those challenges only mount when you are talking about one with the tradition and aspirations as Michigan hockey.
Nonetheless, there is genuine reason for excitement about what Naurato—who spent four seasons in Ann Arbor as a player between 2005 and 2009—might bring to the program. His background is in player development. He spent three years in the Red Wings organization, working in analytics and player development with the Wings and their AHL affiliate in Grand Rapids. Prior to that, Naurato founded the Detroit chapter of Total Package Hockey, where again his focus was on individual player development and he worked with Wolverines like Kyle Connor, Quinn Hughes, and Jacob Trouba.
In other words, Naurato brings a modern approach, emphasizing individual skill development and blending advanced stats and tactical analysis. Throw in Naurato’s NHL connections, and you should have the recipe for an excellent recruiter and developer, which in many ways will be the key for the Livonia native if he wants to hold this post long-term.
After it was reported that Michigan wanted to make an interim hire at this stage, one name that floated to the surface was eighty-two-year-old legend of Michigan Hockey Red Berenson. With total respect for Berenson’s golden years as a player and coach in Ann Arbor, my grandfather is eighty-six and has spent his entire life obsessing over craftsmanship, but he fell asleep trying to touch up the paint in his living room a few weeks ago.
If nothing else, it feels easier to be excited about the season with the possibility that the current coach might be building something in the long term, which again with total deference to Berenson’s resume would seem a longshot if he were chosen as interim.
Someone with Naurato’s resume would be unlikely to emerge from a crowded field if Michigan ran a true (inter)national coaching search, but the fact that he’s slid into it on an interim basis might be a blessing. Now, with a satisfactory performance this season, Naurato can earn one of the best jobs in American hockey. If there is one downside, it’s that if Michigan does choose to go in a different direction at the end of this season, perhaps it will lose Naurato from its staff entirely. Even then though, given the professed admiration for his alma mater that led him to leave the Wings with a year remaining on his contract, perhaps Naurato would stay even then.
In sum, it’s been a strenuous few months for Michigan hockey fans, but there is some reason for optimism about what’s to come. The best part is the Maize and Blue will actually be playing hockey again before you know it.
Editor’s Note: We wanted to conclude this post with a brief note on the ongoing World Juniors, featuring Thomas Bordeleau, Luke Hughes, Mackie Samoskevich, Jacob Truscott, and Kent Johnson. However, given that we are fast approaching 2,500 words, we’ll save a WJC musing for some time in the next week. Thanks as ever for reading!