Michigan Coach Quotes

We spilled onto the court to celebrate, but most of the guys were confused about how excited they were supposed to be. I mean, sure we won the tournament, but at the end of the day it was the NIT and being the best team in the NIT is like being the most attractive Michigan cheerleader.

We want the Big Ten championship and we're gonna win it as a Team. They can throw out all those great backs, and great quarterbacks, and great defensive players, throughout the country and in this conference, but there's gonna be one Team that's gonna play solely as a Team. No man is more important than The Team. No coach is more important than The Team. The Team, The Team, The Team, and if we think that way, all of us, everything that you do, you take into consideration what effect does it have on my Team? Because you can go into professional football, you can go anywhere you want to play after you leave here. You will never play for a Team again. You'll play for a contract. You'll play for this. You'll play for that. You'll play for everything except the team, and think what a great thing it is to be a part of something that is, The Team. We're gonna win it. We're gonna win the championship again because we're gonna play as team, better than anybody else in this conference, we're gonna play together as a team. We're gonna believe in each other, we're not gonna criticize each other, we're not gonna talk about each other, we're gonna encourage each other. And when we play as a team, when the old season is over, you and I know, it's gonna be Michigan again, Michigan.

Huyck proved to be an outstanding administrator and, despite his lack of experience, quickly achieved one of the board’s top priorities. By ensuring that the teachers, curriculum, and classroom offerings met the necessary educational standards, he earned official accreditation for the school, a certification that made it eligible for federal and state financial aid.9 Along with his academic duties, he made time to coach the school’s poultry-judging team, which—as the local press proudly noted—“won over six other teams from high schools in larger towns in a recent contest.”10 At the annual meeting of the Michigan State Teachers’ Association in November 1923, Emory was chosen as a delegate to the general assembly and helped draft a resolution calling for the strict enforcement of the Volstead Act—formally known as the National Prohibition Act—“not only to prevent production and consumption of alcoholic liquors, but also to teach the children respect for the law.”11 He was also a member of both the Masons, “the most prestigious fraternal organization in Bath’s highly Protestant community,”12 and the Stockman Grange, at whose annual meeting in January 1924 he served as toastmaster and delivered a well-received talk on “The Bean Plant and Its Relation to Life.”13 Perhaps unsurprisingly for a man with his military training, Huyck was something of a disciplinarian, demanding strict standards of conduct from both the pupils and staff. “At day’s end,” writes one historian, “students were required to march from the building to the tune of martial music played on the piano. During the day, students tiptoed in the halls.” When a pair of high-spirited teenaged girls “greeted their barely older teachers with a jaunty ‘Well, hello gals,’” they were immediately sent to the superintendent, who imposed a “penalty [of] individual conferences with those teachers and apologies to them.”14

My small circle of friends in Iowa includes Madison, who is barely around and only wants to party, Elliot, who moved to Michigan, and Rex Gunderson, who had a bounty on my vagina last semester.

Goss, his wrestling coach, and other experts came up with sensible reforms to end the long-standing practice of extreme weight cutting, then told the Big Ten and the NCAA that Michigan would only wrestle under those rules, and would only wrestle against other teams that abided by them, too. Such a stand might have gotten another program blackballed from the wrestling community. But when it came from the Michigan athletic director, it proved to be the lever needed to reform the sport at every level, with the Big Ten adopting Michigan’s reforms, followed by the NCAA, and the high schools—a sequence of events that Yost, Crisler, or Canham would have readily recognized as Michigan’s influence at its best. Those rules are still in effect today.

The coach of a college football team can make thousands, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions of people many of them otherwise stable and superficially reasonable adults insanely angry. I experience churning gastrointestinal distress on Saturdays during the season until Michigan has a lead of at least seventeen points. In my idle moments, when taking showers and driving my three children around northern New Jersey, I spend more time mentally debating self-posed hypotheses such as. "Did Jim Harbaugh corner himself into a no-man's land between the Wisconsin Iowa system development model and the Ohio/Penn State talent acquisition model?" than I do thinking about any other question, including things such as, "Do I have the right career?" and "What are parents' and children's obligations to each other?" and "What happens to our souls when our bodies die?" This kind of fixation, conducive to neither peace of mind nor personal productivity, is very common. Why are so many people like this?

In my forty years as a player and coach, one team of mine stands out as defining the concept of team. And that team won the national championship. Obviously, that is no coincidence. At the start of the 2003 season, I had a sense that this group of young men understood. I had no idea we would get so far, but I knew the ingredients were there. We elected no captains as we had no dominant leader, but we had lots of character. We had conviction and consistency, and the players bought into the team concept. It seemed like every game someone else stepped up, from freshman running back Justin Vincent to defensive tackle Chad Lavalais to our punter, Donnie Jones. Somehow, some way, we managed to win all but one of our games. Even after our one loss, at home to Florida, the players didn’t point fingers, but rather looked at how each one of us could get better. It was remarkable. The fact that one team that I have been associated with in forty years was truly a team should tell you just how difficult it is. On the flip side of the national championship LSU team is the Michigan State team of 1998. We were loaded headed into the season, and expectations were high. But distractions and personal agendas crippled the team concept. Star defender Dimitrius Underwood decided to sit out the entire season, refusing to suit up. Other guys were more concerned about their draft position than winning games. It was the most talented team I’d had in East Lansing but we struggled to a 6–6 record. Remarkably, the following year, when we were less talented but more of a team, we won nine games and then beat Florida in the Citrus Bowl to end up 10–2. It just isn’t a coincidence.