The God of Michigan’s Idolatry

As the Shemy Schembechler saga proves, harmful embarrassment will shroud U-M football for as long as it refuses to acknowledge what anyone with their head free from sand already knows

Content Warning: This article discusses the sexual abuse perpetrated by Dr. Robert Anderson and overseen by Bo Schembechler.  It also discusses a wide array of vile viewpoints endorsed by Shemy Schembechler.  In the interest of level setting, this article will not review the extensive evidence of Schembechler’s complicity in Anderson’s misconduct; that work has been done and accepting it is a prerequisite for this conversation.  If this is not material you wish to read about, do not hesitate to close this window and check back in for next week’s newsletter, when I hope to get back to hockey.

From beginning to end, it was neither complex nor unpredictable—none of it. Not that the head coach would make the hire, nor the hire’s politics, nor the fans’ reaction to both the new guy and his politics, and not even the embarrassing conclusion.

A week ago, on Wednesday, May 17th, the University of Michigan football team announced the hiring of Glenn “Shemy” Schembechler to serve as assistant director of recruiting.  As his sobriquet and surname both evoke, Schembechler is the son of disgraced former Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler, and it’s difficult to scan the process that led to his hiring as anything other than defiant, arrogant, and shameful.

Is it entirely fair that a man should not be allowed to work at a particular institution because of the actions of his father?  No, it isn’t, but when the father in question met decades of sexual abuse within his program with inaction and the institution in question has spent most of the past three years embarasssing itself with various forms of impropriety (a president resigning over infidelity with a subordinate, repeated and prolonged fights with graduate student instructors seeking living wages for their foundational work in sustaining undergraduate education, a hockey coach fired for workplace bullying continuing to show up in the luxury boxes at Yost Ice Arena and even finding his way to the broadcast booth to name just a few), it should require neither public nor human relations expertise to recognize that the University of Michigan should not hire a man who goes by Shemy Schembechler.

Channel 6’s Holly Anderson has a saying to explain the deplorable behavior of powerful institutions: They did it because they wanted to.  Why was Shemy Schembechler hired?  Because Jim Harbaugh wanted him to be hired.  Did Jim Harbaugh care about the message this sent to the survivors of sexual assault who wore the same winged helmet he did or to those survivors who support his team from afar?  If his actions are any indicator, the answer is no.

That Harbaugh struggles on a personal level with the revelations around his former coach’s true legacy is understandable.  Harbaugh conceives of his collegiate coach as a father figure, someone who shaped the professional life he has chosen, and there is something human in his inability to accept that a man he so idolized could act with such calloused cruelty.

However, Jim Harbaugh is not a private citizen, working through his individual relationship with a flawed man he once revered; instead, Harbaugh is the most powerful spokesman for a university that once again cannot muster a meaningful apology for the deplorable deeds in its not so distant past.  Harbaugh’s inaction and his refusal to accept and condemn the deeds of his former coach reflect and enable an entire university’s willingness to do the same.  

In this regard, the short unhappy life of Shemy Schembechler, Assistant Director of Recruiting is nothing more than the latest inciting incident in a stance that Michigan’s football program has made clear since the WilmerHale report released in 2021 laid plain Anderson’s crimes and Schembechler’s complicity: Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the University of Michigan refuses to accept that the coach it long heralded as a standard bearer for morality in the corrupt world of major college football was a fraud.  To any objective observer, Schembechler’s association and guilt were clear, yet still his statue sits in front of a building bearing his name at the team’s base of operations on South State Street.

The misdeed and its far-reaching consequences are clear, and the best Michigan can offer at an institutional level is acknowledgement, even then a tenuous and vague acknowledgment.  

Not apology, not serious consideration of the implications of the reality that such a totemic figure within the program’s history was guilty through his inaction, not legitimate effort to reconceptualize a program obsessed with history that remains unable to define and advertise itself without dipping into Schembechler’s well of aphorisms.  

Instead, Michigan accepts that Anderson’s deeds occurred and are now public, but beyond that, the school has demonstrated no appetite for serious truth-telling or reconciliation.  Within that context, it is no surprise Jim Harbaugh felt comfortable hiring Shemy Schembechler.  After all, dismissing the sins of the past is by necessity a daily ritual at Schembechler Hall.

Worse still, these profound and obvious moral objections were overlooked for a fifty-three-year-old man named Shemy to obtain a sinecure in the recruiting department.  

This fifty-three-year-old man named Shemy does not appear to have worked in college football since the early 1990s, when he was a graduate assistant at the University of Michigan (I wonder how he got that job).  His last job was as a scout for the Raiders in the NFL, where he was hired by Jon Gruden, a man who had to walk away from a $100 million-dollar contract when his virulently racist and homophobic emails were made public (more on this topic in just a moment).

It would be bad enough to overlook Schembechler’s shameful legacy to hire someone who might offer something unique toward the achievement of on-field success, a calculation all too familiar in the world of college sports.  Yet to make those concessions for a failson in a perfunctory role is somehow even more arrogant and embarrassing and harmful.

Of course, within hours of Shemy Schembechler’s hiring, rightfully outraged Wolverine fans uncovered a slew of hate speech in the “Likes” tab of his public Twitter account, the same Twitter account on which he described himself as “honored to return home” upon the announcement of his hiring.  These tweets ranged from trans- and homophobia to the hypothesis that Black Americans benefited from Jim Crow. (Here it feels worth pointing out again that there was no gray area at any point in this process; complexity and nuance were unnecessary to understand its stakes.)  In other words, Shemy Schembechler found a way to further disgrace the family name, and three days after his hiring, on May 20th, the program announced his resignation.  In an ostensible apology seeping with the garbled pablum of a PR firm, he described his actions as “flippant behavior.”

The same pattern of acknowledgment and nothing more exists in the three sentence statement with which Michigan football announced Shemy’s resignation:

Effective this afternoon, Shemy Schembechler has resigned his position with Michigan Football. We are aware of some comments and likes on social media that have caused concern and pain for individuals in our community. Michigan Athletics is fully committed to a place where our coaches, staff and student-athletes feel welcome and where we fully support the University’s and Athletic Department’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. 

Warde Manuel, Donald R. Shepherd Director of Athletics

The first sentence is an admission of the only possible conclusion to this latest embarrassing episode.  The second sentence is a declaration of acknowledgement—we saw the vile behavior you all pointed out for us.  The third sentence is word salad, devoid of all meaning given the context in which it has been delivered.

Topics not covered in the statement?  An apology for obviously poor judgment shown by the university and its head football coach in hiring this hateful fifty-three-year-old named Shemy.  A basic admission that what happened was wrong and embarrassing.  A framework for revamping the vetting process for new hires.

The second sentence is perhaps most emblematic—We are aware of some comments and likes on social media that have caused concern and pain for individuals in our community—and it’s that phrase “we are aware” that jumps off the digital page.  Are you troubled by the despicable content of Schembechler’s Liked Tweets, Warde Manuel, Donald R. Shepherd Director of Athletics?  Presumably the answer is yes, since Schembechler no longer works for the university, yet still the statement refuses to name the obvious—that this hiring was shambolic from start to ignominious end.

Even setting aside the issue of his father, that Schembechler was hired begs fundamental questions of Michigan’s standards for prospective employees.  It seems either Michigan did not vet Schembechler at all (because the head football coach’s desire to hire him trumped any further commitment to decency and standards) or that Michigan’s supposed vetting didn’t uncover information Michigan message boards unearthed in a matter of hours.  It didn’t take a Freedom of Information Act request or in-depth conversations with past employers to get to the bottom of Shemy Schembechler’s deplorable politics; it required only a few taps of a smartphone screen.

It’s hard to say which option reflects worse on the University of Michigan, but in either case, it feels fair to doubt that Michigan Athletics is indeed fully committed to the university and athletic department’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as the tautological final sentence of the aforementioned statement suggests. 

If there is some small solace to be taken from the occasion, it is that the Michigan Athletic Department and, more specifically, its football coach had no choice but to bow to extraordinary public pressure to do the right thing—getting rid of Schembechler.  At an institution as large and powerful as the University of Michigan, it’s easy to feel as though protest and resistance fall only on ears that have long since made peace with absorbing one public relations debacle after the next.  In this case, widespread resistance to the hire forced Michigan’s hand, such that with the help of receipts gathered by disappointed and disheartened Wolverine supporters, Shemy Schembechler’s dismissal was unavoidable.

However, the revelation that there is a degree of shame and disastrous PR that the University of Michigan cannot abide is little consolation in the face of the fact that somehow the football coach thought hiring this man was a good idea and that nobody felt it appropriate to contradict him.  

An apology is already long overdue; the university’s inability to meaningfully reckon with Anderson’s deeds and Schembechler’s complicity once they were laid bare has by now become an essential extension of Anderson’s story.  

Still, there is no time like the present to begin correcting that egregious blunder.  Even if it’s several years too late, an actual acknowledgment of wrongdoing—that Schembechler’s legacy is not one of leadership and morality but rather a cautionary tale about the perils of prizing on-field results, continuity, and the old boys club over everything else—would be a welcome step in the right direction.

In the years since the WilmerHale report, Michigan fans have had no choice but to embrace the kind of tightrope act that seems inevitable in modern fandom, characterized by a sense of supporting a group of players while rejecting the flawed institution those players represent.  Thanks to consecutive Big Ten championships, that task has been made a lot easier—the discontent easier to tamp down when accompanied by the on-field results the program has craved through twenty-five-odd years in the desert.

This week though, something about that model—dwelling in a dissonance that holds the team and its individual members dear while condemning the institution—feels less sustainable than ever.  After all, for those of us who gravitate toward collegiate sports ahead of professional ones, the sense that the teams we are watching represent more than just their own laundry but rather a bigger institution and group of people associated with it is among the chief attractions.

When the team we want to support represents an institution so flagrant in its disregard for common decency and so bare-minimum begrudging in its apologies, the mental gymnastics to justify any form of support grow more taxing. 

So for now, Shemy Schembechler is out, and the University of Michigan has solved a short-term PR crisis of its own making.  But as the school continues to ignore its actual moral imperative—removing any and all sense of genuflection from the Schembechler name and legacy—it grows harder by the day to offer anything resembling allegiance to the football program that made that name famous.  Until Michigan football denounces the god of its idolatry, shame and embarrassment will be ready at hand, no matter what happens on Saturdays each fall.

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