Buy the ticket, take the ride: Michigan football's wild 2014 certainly one for the books, Buy the ticket, take the ride.
I really don't have the words to completely describe the massive ebb and flow that was Michigan football in 2014, so I'll just swipe them from a legend.
Hunter S. Thompson, take it away.
"No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced conscious expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten."
If you bought the ticket last January, and hung on long enough to make it through New Year's Eve, then you probably ran out of Dramamine three months ago.
Michigan's been playing football since 1879, and while there have no doubt been some wild years during the program's historic run, perhaps none of them featured as many extreme stops on the emotional spectrum as 2014.
This thing had it all.
There optimistic moments.
Brady Hoke was applauded by many in January for firing former offensive coordinator Al Borges and hiring Doug Nussmeier from Alabama. Most believed Hoke was doing what he had to in order to change the declining momentum of his program. Was it a last-ditch effort? Yeah, it was. But at the time, people believed it just might be enough to save his job.
The optimism built throughout the spring, when Hoke was able to finish off his recruiting class with the one player everybody wanted: five-star cornerback Jabrill Peppers. Despite negative vibes, Hoke's recruiting stayed strong through the spring and summer. Ty Isaac transferred in. Mike Weber, Chris Clark, Brian Cole and Darian Roseboro committed. Maybe things wouldn't be so bad?
But then, there were the Band-Aid moments.
It took two games for the bloom to fall off the Nussmeier rose, as Michigan's offense was downright embarrassing in a 31-0 rout at Notre Dame. Things only got worse from there. Michigan's offense crippled the team all season. It never worked. It was a disaster, and it was a Band-Aid.
The recruiting momentum? It fell apart, too. Peppers, for one, suffered two notable injuries in the first month of the season, and ultimately played in just parts of three games, eventually taking a medical redshirt. Roseboro decommitted in late September. Clark did the same in early December. Weber? He backed out of his pledge midway through a home finale loss against Maryland.
Borges was never this team's sole issue. Michigan was poorly coached and poorly prepared. And though Hoke was an outstanding recruiter, no one could've held up in the face of mounting losses and off-field fiascos.
There were the apologetic moments.
Michigan found itself in the midst of a hornet's nest after a humbling loss to Minnesota when Hoke allowed sophomore quarterback Shane Morris to re-enter a game after suffering a concussion. That was mistake No. 1. Everything else was on athletic director Dave Brandon, who allowed a public relations disaster to engulf Michigan's athletic department for an entire week.
He left Hoke out to dry, allowing people to take shots at his character for days. He issued a medical statement, written by himself, in the middle of the night. Then, five days later, he spoke for the first time. He apologized. Kind of. But it all appeared to be too late. Protests broke out. Brandon was the main topic of conversation at a Board of Regents meeting. Michigan fans had seen enough. The apologies continued a month later, when Hoke issued a written "sorry" to Mark Dantonio after one of his players drove a stake in the Spartan Stadium grass prior to a 35-11 butt-kicking.
The off-field nightmares never seemed to stop. The Brendan Gibbons saga. Offseason arrests (Graham Glasgow and Csont'e York). Frank Clark's eventual dismissal for domestic violence. All of them ugly.
Hours after damning purported email exchanges between Brandon and fans surfaced in October, the embattled athletic director called everything nonsense. The next day, he told president Mark Schlissel he'd be resigning. Two days later, Jim Hackett took over (more on him in a minute).
There were also moments of character.
Devin Gardner has the worst season of his life in 2014, but as a person, he never wavered. Gardner and an inspired defense helped will Michigan to a night game win over Penn State. He continued to play hurt, and continued to do all he could for his school. He served in his community, time and time again. He proved football's just a game when he showed a moment of human compassion at Ohio State. He left without a championship, but said he'll always feel like a champion in life.
There was also Hoke. He made his share of mistakes. The Gibbons situation was bungled. He made a mistake during the Morris mess. But when he was left out in the cold by his boss, he did his best to shield his locker room, taking it all himself. And when he was fired in early December, he showed once again why his players never quit on him when he showed up at the team's football banquet.
He was emotional. He was heartbroken. He was beaten. But he was there, because his players wanted him there. And just before he left, Hoke did the program one final favor: He told them to stick together, no matter what happened during the lengthy coaching search that followed his dismissal.
And then, suddenly, there was hope.
Hackett entered the most important coaching search the program's seen since it hired Bo Schembechler in 1969 under unprecedented circumstances. He had zero experience as an athletic director. He'd only held the job for a month and change. After two failed hires in the previous seven years, Hackett absolutely couldn't miss this time.
So, he didn't.
Hackett played the waiting game. He held his ground. He targeted the biggest fish in the pond -- Jim Harbaugh -- and never took his sites off him. NFL insiders and executives refused to believe it was a possibility, but they were all proven wrong on Dec. 30 when Hackett re-emerged from his coaching search with these words.
"I asked you to be patient with me as we started this search. And we pledged to you a deliberate nature of our work, and we discussed how broadly we were going to search for this coach. We did that," he began. "One particularly famous pro coach who had done broadcasting for many years told me this: You know, Jim Hackett, you didn't just get a great coach, you got the best coach in football today.
"College or pro, in Jim Harbaugh."
Is Harbaugh enough to make Michigan fans forget the year that was in 2014? Maybe. But he shouldn't be.
You shouldn't forget your past. You should learn from it. Michigan should do the same. Hackett did throughout the month of December, when he conducted one of the best coaching searches the game has seen in years. As a program, a team, a department, Michigan football can learn plenty fro the year that was.
The main lesson? If you're not careful, it really can all go away. Harbaugh gives Michigan an immediate chance to wash away the foul taste the last seven years have created, but those seven years are a part of Michigan's history now. And they shouldn't be ignored or dubbed an aberration. They should be embraced, and used as motivation.
2014 probably did get a bit too heavy at times for Michigan football fans. But, for the most part, they still tuned in, they still freaked out. And more than they'd like to admit, they did "get beaten."
Will 2015 be just as wild?
