It’s been a long past week, so it might have already slipped your memory. But only a few days ago, the biggest story going was that of Sherrone Moore, the now former head football coach at Michigan whose life unraveled in public view with remarkable haste. This wasn’t the normal big time football coach downfall, where you lose a bunch of games and then your locker room and end up falling a few notches down the coaching mountain. This was a full human meltdown from one of the loftiest peeks in college sports at a university that tends to hold something of an elevated perception of its own status.
To review, the expedited timeline went something like this. At some point Wednesday afternoon, word breaks that Moore is being fired for cause for having an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. A couple hours later, we hear that Moore is now in police custody for breaking into someone’s apartment and possible assault. We later discover this was the apartment of the former staffer with whom he had a long-term romantic relationship. We also discover he threatened to kill himself in the apartment. Moore then spends two nights in jail before being arraigned on Friday, when photos of him wearing a white prison jumpsuit at the hearing circulate across the Internet. This all came less than two weeks from when Moore stood on the sidelines coaching his team against Ohio State. Currently, Michigan is trying to figure out next steps with an interim coach and, to say the least, a significant HR situation while also trying to assure both their current players and alumni supporters that they’ll fix it.
To be fair, this is not the first major college coach who has lost his job because of an affair with someone in their org chart. Most famously, then Arkansas head football coach Bobby Petrino was fired when it was discovered that he was having a relationship with a former student athlete that he hired into a staff role – and that was discovered when he got into a motorcycle accident with her on the back. Not great, but still didn’t break into anyone’s house and grab kitchen knives. Interestingly, after all that public shame, today Petrino serves as – wait for it – the interim head football coach at Arkansas. You can’t make it up.
I don’t know that time will be as forgiving to Sherrone Moore, given the intensity of the charge. There’s also stories circulating about other potential affairs and ties to OnlyFans, all of which you’ll be able to read about in lurid detail on signs held up by Ohio State fans. And don’t forget, this whole escapade comes in the wake of NCAA violations because a guy named Conor Stalions filmed other teams to allegedly help previous head coach Jim Harbaugh win a national title. Moore was Harbaugh’s successor, the guy who was supposed to keep the titles coming while also avoiding more transgressions. It seems he’s failed on both counts.
It would be a mistake to make this story entirely about college football and its highest paid employees – for the record, beyond his marriage and freedom, his behavior cost him over $20 million in unpaid salary. There’s plenty of folks in all kinds of jobs who have had affairs with subordinates and ended up fired or worse. We’ve all seen the Coldplay video.
That said, there is a sports narrative here, at least in the public discourse of these events. College football and basketball coaches, at least at the highest levels, have taken on outsized stature on even the most endowed of campuses. Deferential to no one other than the boosters and yielding far too much influence over any university brand, the rise and fall of someone like Sherrone Moore got way more oxygen than it should have. You can imagine that if Michigan football was more similar to, I don’t know, the robotics club, the narrative would have been a bit different. It’s a reminder of how much the tail wags the dog – and that’s at a place like Michigan, where admittedly there’s far more going on than just a football team. I mean, not for nothing, the basketball team is ranked second in the country.
I don’t have an answer – well, other than try not to date and then abuse your employees. And maybe a background check before any big hire. And perhaps try to remember that this is what can happen when school sports gets bigger than the school itself.
Then again, if next week is like the last, we’ll probably forget it ever happened.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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