Ben Mathis-Lilley - The Hot Seat: A Year of Outrage, Pride, and Occasional Games of College Football

At about 1:50 p.m. EST on Saturday, November 7, 2020, a lot of people were thinking about the United States presidential election. Just before noon, a number of news outlets had projected that Joe Biden would win the state of Pennsylvania, making him the presumed next president after four tense days of waiting for votes to be counted.

I was supposed to be one of those people. My job is to write about the news for the online news magazine Slate , and the 2020 American presidential election was a pretty big news story. Instead, the record shows that at that time, on that day, I was sending an email, the subject line of which was Next Coach Thread, to five other people.

The University of Michigan football team was in the process of losing to the historically mediocre Indiana University football team and falling to a record of 1-2 with a number of additional losses presumed to be imminent. I felt it was important as an act of formally moving onthose are my exact, still-embarrassing wordsto begin discussing who might become the teams head coach after its current coach, the zealously unconventional Jim Harbaugh, was dismissed, which I assumed to be an inevitability. The six of us on the email chain are citizens of a country that was at that moment experiencing unprecedented electoral chaos. We have a combined six spouses, six mortgages, and eleven childrenin other words, a lot of other things to think about. We exchanged thirty-seven more messages about Michigans football coaching situation over the next forty-eight hours. (I did some posts about the election for my real job too.)

The season only got worse, and the group conversations became more heated. Here are some highlights from another 2020 Michigan football discussion that I was part of, this one conducted via Twitter direct messages with an entirely different group of people, none of whom I had ever met, at that point, in real life:

This is a catastrophe for the entire Harbaugh Era

Harbaughs worst loss

Ive never been more OK firing Harbaugh

Worst loss of the Harbaugh Era and its not that close

[name of player] needs to be sent to space jail

Im gonna kill my self [ sic ] in real life [he was joking; hes still alive]

this team is not good fellas

we suck lmao

This is a paradigm shifting loss

Ive never felt this bad

Ive learned the most important lesson in life: it sucks

There is no more fun to be had for me

With every succeeding snap my belief in firing him on the spot grows

Basically anything would be an improvement over this

it particularly sucks to see all these guys who can play put in a position to suck donkey ass

OK gang give me a few hours. Im gonna fly to Ann Arbor Municipal Airport, and then Im gonna pick up Jim Harbaugh. And then Im gonna drive him back to the airport so we can fire him on the tarmac

It really is like they have eight players on the field

This is worse than wouldve been reasonable to expect. And it wouldve been reasonable to expect bad

It seems like we have six guys on the field

guys what the fuck

please quit your job jim

soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup soup [The coach that many people wanted Michigan to hire to replace Harbaugh was Iowa States Matt Campbell , hence soup.]

I keep saying this and its not rhetorical: What is this team doing in practice

God dude

That was awful

So bad

dflksdjfklsdjf

The moon landing didnt happen

Im not sure what that last one was in reference to. But the word fire comes up 293 times in an archive of messages from that fall. We did not all necessarily feel personal hostility toward Jim Harbaugh. Some did, while some felt sad for him. But we all assumed that he was not going to be the coach of the Michigan football team anymore and that he had earned that fate.

Many, many other people felt the same way. On the MGoBlog fan site, the subject of discussion in the comments section under a recap of the Wolverines 49-11 November loss to Wisconsinits worst home loss in eighty-five yearswas not whether Harbaugh should be fired, but who else the university should fire such that the root cause of the systemic suck is figured out and eliminated. The word fuck appeared 171 times in comments about the game. (One of the sites moderators tracks this figure each week.)

Harbaugh was described as on the verge of being cannedor assumed to be a foregone subject of terminationby sportswriters and commentators at the Associated Press, CBS, Fox Sports, and multiple arms of the ESPN content machine. (ESPN had also asserted that his job was in danger in 2019, while Yahoo! Sports and Fox had done so in 2018.) Later in November, Michigan was beaten by a COVID-19addled Penn State team that at that point was 0-5 and whose signature move was fumbling the ball. On Twitter, ABC color analyst Brian Griese, a professionally objective and even-tempered observer who, like Harbaugh, is a former Big Ten champion Michigan quarterback, posted a graphic highlighting the low points of the coachs recent record with the caption enough is enough. National sportswriters and pundits made jokes and exchanged memes at Michigans expense, of the sort that suggested other football teams in the Big Ten conference would be so happy to see Harbaugh retained as coach that they would dance in the manner of characters from popular film and television programs.

Multiple people with connections to the Michigan program to whom Ive spoken identified the teams October home loss to Michigan State University Spartans, which preceded the Indiana game, as the most shockingly grim of the 2020 seasons many grim events. MSU, naturally one of Michigans biggest rivals, was playing with a roster that had been thinned out during a transition between head coaches and had lost its previous game to Rutgers, which is generally not a good team. MSU nonetheless beat Michigan 27-24 on its own field. (Because of COVID-19, there was no crowd. Harbaugh wore a mask over his headset microphone all season, distending it to the point of both aesthetic and epidemiological unsoundness.) The margin of the final score belied both the games horrible air of disaster and the simultaneously panicked and anesthetized manner in which the Michigan coaching staff seemed to have prepared the team to play. MSU basically had one offensive idea, which was throwing the ball as high up in the air as possible and hoping that someone on the right team would catch it, as is done at elementary schools. It worked every time. As one person I spoke to put it, Jesus Christ.