Breaking down Warde Manuel's leaving the University of Michigan

And back here at home, big news out of Ann Arbor. Today the University of Michigan will be getting a new athletic director. Ward Manuel's will step down at the end of this year. The school also released their findings, kind of, from an independent investigation looking at the culture within the athletic department. That report says while changes need to be made, it did not find evidence that misconduct was necessarily widespread. So joining us to discuss this is attorney Jerry Mason. You've been on to talk about this before. A couple things here, right? Lots of success but also lots of scandal under Ward Manuel. What do you make of this latest decision to step down? Well he's leaving on his own terms and it sounds like President Grasso didn't want him to leave because he's asked him to stay on until the end of the year and be a special advisor to the president. Ward Manuel enjoyed extraordinary success at the athletic department during very tumultuous times. I think I pronounced that wrong but you know what I mean. I know exactly what you mean. NILs, changeover on COVID. Oh much happening. Budget problems and COVID for athletics was a disaster and he presided over all that and did so and he leaves the athletic department in the black. Increased revenue of 300 million a year, four national championships. Can't beat that. No he's had a terrific tenure there but frankly this is a pattern at U of M. This isn't just Ward Manuel since Santa Ono was chased away by the board of regents. We've had 14 people leave the University of Michigan. That's a lot. It's a lot and they're all the top upper echelon people and they're just tired of it. People don't want to put up with that as part of their job. So it is a sad day for U of M because now we've lost 15 people. Yeah and I mean I think a lot of people do have tremendous respect for Ward Manuel and obviously as you mentioned he is staying on to help with this transition. So it makes you a little curious about all the things happening behind the scenes. I think another issue may be that people are slamming that the the full sort of context of this report was not released. It was sort of just a general overview. How do you think that's going to be received? This is what I thought from what I read from the report. He has a 96 percent graduation rate of his athletes. That was in the report. From among people they interviewed who worked in the athletic department they had an 87 percent favorable rating which means they would recommend people to work in the athletic department. Another thing that was very telling in the report was they found that there wasn't misconduct in the athletic department and in fact it was a good culture. So most of the tension or the criticism seemed to be how the athletic department interfaced with football. And I can tell you that football has always been an island in the sun. It's always been independent. Nobody was going to go over and tell Bo Schembeck how you were going to run the football department. No we know that that was definitely not going to happen. But I do want to just kind of reference what Grasso said you know where they talked about the things in the report. This failure and accountability, structural deficiencies, weakness in our reporting and support system and concerns about retaliation. So definitely some communication gaps it sounds like. I've worked on this. I actually worked on this project for football under the previous coach Sharon Moore. There has always been a disconnect between the athletic department and football. Part of it is busyness. Football's crazy busy and then you want to sit down and talk to somebody about compliance or whatever and it creates more work that they don't want to do. So Amy there's always been a communication issue between football and the athletic department. But it's something they were working on to improve it. So that didn't surprise me when I saw it. In fact I was like yeah we we know that. That's always been an issue. Football generates nearly all of the revenue for the athletic department. They're very very busy. It never stops. They're recruiting. There's coaching. There's getting spring camp, fall camp which is going to start in a couple weeks. These guys go like a house of fire almost all year round and then they want to have communication on top of it. It's just hard because they're busy. Well and obviously that it sounds like there's some level of commitment to try to address this and so you know we'll see what happens. Here's what they need to do. I can make this real easy for them and for you. Human resources is the failure here. You have to do your due diligence when you hire people. Some things cannot be outsourced. You need to check people's social media. It was obvious to me that they didn't check Charon Moore's social media before they hired him right? Because he was following 300 only fan models. You'd have caught that. And so what U of M needs to do is really sharpen their pens a little bit and say what kind of people are we bringing in here? How are we doing our due diligence before we hire people and bring them in here? And then manage them and there definitely needs to be an improvement of how the athletic department interfaces with football and I think you'll see that. Yeah well I think that was definitely something they mentioned as the background checks need to be a little more robust and so I'm sure we'll see. They need to use my private investigator. Thank you Jerry Mason. Appreciate you being here with us and explaining all of this and I'm sure you'll be back. I know all about you by the way. I talked to my PI before I came in. Thanks so much.