What we know about Michigan's response to another avoidable situation

I want to preface this by saying that my intention is not to excuse anything from Michigan's point of view, as I believe we have been very vocal about how poorly this whole situation was handled all around. However, I do think it's important to understand Michigan's response to all of this and how it'll be a valuable lesson for the future that social media activity needs to be included in the standard HR checks.

As of right now, it's not the case at Michigan.

It depends on how the job is coded into the system and whether the position is 'public-facing.' In this case, the specific scouting position was not entered as public facing so a social media check did not occur.

It shouldn't matter what job coding into the system looks like, a hire like this, with the last name and all, should've been checked and it wasn't.

It's as cut and dry as that.

As for the football program's response, we have been told that Jim Harbaugh was not aware of the Twitter activity as he is no longer online, despite his Twitter account still existing on the platform.

Harbaugh not checking the social media activity before making a hire is a fair argument to make.

However, when working for an institution such as U-M, there should be someone that brought it to his attention sooner before it became problematic.

From multiple sources, we were told that Harbaugh was infuriated with the situation and became even more incensed when he brought up the tweets to the subject and the response was 'being canceled' instead of taking responsibility for one's actions. This angered Harbaugh to the point where he severed ties immediately.

One source said that the reaction 'could not begin to describe how angry Jim was.'

Again, this is a situation that should've never happened and the response to the situation is the bare minimum to something that should've never occurred.

Another potential gaffe in the situation was the way the hiring process worked, since the subject was not a contract employee and had a specific clause written into the contract, the firing process would've had to be handled by HR, which would've taken weeks to accomplish.

Instead, a resignation occurred so ties were severed immediately.

From our understanding, though, Harbaugh severed ties first. However you view it, the university avoided a potentially long, dragged-out disaster but that doesn't make things any better. The damage had been done and the backlash had merit.

It's a situation where the response is another in a long line of responses by the university that had a common-sense beginning to all of this.

A situation that could've, and should've, been avoided.

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