Michigan is unduly benefitting from Tattoogate. They are getting recruits they wouldn't have dreamt of getting while Ohio St. was under Tressel. Hoke is thoroughly undeserving of a job at a helmet school, and yet he is going to come out of this looking like roses because he is getting recruits strictly through circumstance and because he has the highest-paid coordinator in the country outside of the SEC to coach his defense.
I will maintain forever that, regardless of how the next few years turn out, DickRod is a far better head coach than Hoke will ever dream of being. His two fatal mistakes were: 1) going wholesale to the spread immediately, rather than phase it in as he gained the appropriate recruits for it; and 2) making an absolutely horrible DC hire in Greg Robinson.
Hoke's entire career is based off one miraculous season in which Hoke led Ball St. to an undefeated regular season against one of the weakest schedules in college football history (seriously - his non-conference slate was Northeastern, Indiana, Navy and Western Kentucky - you can't make it up), and then were slaughtered in both the MAC Championship and their bowl game when they finally met decent opponents who both had far better head coaches than he - Turner Gill and Todd Graham. He parlays this once-in-a-lifetime lucky season into a slightly-better-than-lateral move to SDSU, where he manages to turn a 5-3 conference record in his second season into one of the best jobs in the country. And he got that job on the basis of nothing more than the fact that he was a DL coach for Lloyd Carr a few years ago.
I guess the lesson is that you can't just look at the records to determine the worth of a head coach. I am still flabbergasted how in the hell he got that job. Were I Dave Brandon, I would've taken any number of candidates available this offseason (including either of the other new Big Ten hires) before I even dreamed of looking at Hoke.
