If a U-M story falls in the forest and MGoBlog doesn't cover it...

Last week, former Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr was elected into the College Football Hall of Fame.  Carr joined not only Michigan coaching legends Bo Schembechler and Fielding H. Yost in the Hall, but other icons of the game such as Bobby Bowden, Paul "Bear" Bryant and Knute Rockne.

Needless to say, it's a hell of an honor.

On top of all that, due to his longtime charity work and fundraising for C. S. Mott Children's Hospital, the new cancer floor slated to open this fall will be named after Carr.  At the request of the floor's chief benefactor, the seventh floor will be called the Coach Carr Pediatric Cancer Center Unit.

There are some who might even say this second achievement is more of an honor - and more impressive - than the first.

In any event, if you're a media outlet that covers Michigan sports, especially U-M football, these two events - that were announced the same weekend - are not only an obvious story but, I'd dare to say, a must cover.  A no brainer.

As such, Carr's selection to the HOF and the Mott honor were covered by the local news broadcasts, the Detroit and A2 newspapers, as well as written up on several Michigan blogs.  Heck, we even came out of of our off-season semi-hibernation and deviated from our tired timely posts about The Troubles in C-bus to put up something.

But the one place you didn't find anything of note on either of Carr's two honors was on the biggest Michigan football - and to my knowledge, biggest college football - blog in America: MGoBlog.

Somehow the most-read Michigan football blog - by a wide, wide, wide mile - didn't deem the selection of the third winningest coach in Michigan football history to the sport's Hall of Fame worth a post.

In May.


Oh, it was mentioned on the main page a couple days after the fact.  Here:

I can't recall how I got to this article from The Daily (not that Daily: the Rupert Murdoch one) on Lloyd Carr being a nice dude who's in the Hall of Fame hurrah. In thirty seconds the generic newspaperese will fade from my brain, but I'll always remember the time I went to that site to read an article that was a half-meg 768x3072 image and marveled at how random the selection process for executives is. I know it's an iPad app and all but raising a giant middle finger to Google is maybe not the best policy.

I'd call that "damning with faint praise"...if indeed it were praise, which I'm not sure it is.

Look, I get that MGo didn't-slash-doesn't like Carr.  Fine.  That was clear when he was coach, clearer still when Rodriguez was in A2 and continues to be oh-so-clear to this day.  But to not even cover the above accomplishments, to pretend they didn't even happen - on the biggest, most read Michigan blog in the country - borders on petty.

I don't understand it.  It's impossible to find a former player who says a bad thing about the man.  There was never a hint of scandal during his tenure.  He won five Big 10 titles in 13 seasons and the school's only national title in 60 years.  Yet the disdain seems almost personal.

Was he a perfect coach?  Of course not.  No coach is.  And we were just as critical as anybody after The Debacle. 

But MGoBlog's anti-Carr sentiment feels like it even bled over into the coaching search-slash-hiring of Brady Hoke (who was on Carr's staff).  It seems every compliment toward Hoke is backhanded or prefaced with an "I don't mean that as an insult" disclaimer, every great move explained away as simply "not screwing up." Which isn't surprising considering that after Brandon named Hoke as head coach, MGo had this to say:

This is a stupid hire. It will always be as stupid hire and David Brandon just led the worst coaching search in the history of Michigan football. He managed to chase off half of an already iffy recruiting class, hired a Plan C coach on January 11th, probably ensured the transfer of the reigning Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year, and restricted his "national search" to people who'd spent at least five years in Ann Arbor. Michigan just gave themselves a year of USC-level scholarship reduction voluntarily.

Well, not only did the "Plan C" coach a) not chase off half the recruiting class nor b) ensure the transfer of the reigning B10 OPY nor c) give themselves a USC-level voluntary scholarship reduction, but such slams feel especially hypocritical in the wake of those who were often lambasted on MGo for not being "all in" for Michigan's coach even after the program posted back-to-back losing records for the first time since black and white TV - let alone before the latest hire had led so much as a single practice.

The post quoted above went on to say:

A completely average coach should be able to take 20 returning starters on a 7-6 team that sees the schedule ease considerably and get to 9-3. That's good, because that's probably what we hired.

I'll ignore the "damned if he does, damned if he doesn't" trap behind that statement for a second to simply say that if Brady Hoke goes 9-3 this season, he should be named Coach of the Year.  Period. 

Look, there's a reason MGoBlog is the biggest U-M-slash-college football blog around - it's damn good.  It provides the most in-depth Michigan football coverage on these here Interwebs, always has new content and is really funny to boot.

I read MGoBlog regularly.

I'm also a fan of Brian Cook, the site's founder, curator and blogger extraordinaire.  He was our first guest on the old Internet radio show Benny and I used to host and very supportive during The Cowherd Thing.  There's a reason he was able to ditch whatever job he had to follow his passion and turn his love of Meeechigan into a career.

But the continued Lloyd bashing-slash-Hoke-hating-slash-kinda-grudgingly-giving-him-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-for-now stuff is, well, beneath him and his site.  For better or worse, due to his site's size and influence, MGo is the Michigan blog of record and Brian is the Peter Parker of Michigan blogging.  And with that great power comes great responsibility.