Warde Manuel returned to his alma mater in January 2016 with one of the most coveted jobs in college sports: leading Michigan’s athletic department. Nearly a decade later, his future is suddenly uncertain.
Michigan’s Board of Regents is expected to consider the findings of an independent investigation by Jenner & Block into the athletic department’s culture later this week, with the review placing Manuel’s leadership under scrutiny after months of controversy surrounding the football program. Manuel, who said Tuesday he has not seen the report and does not know what the future holds, has publicly insisted he remains focused on leading the department as speculation about his job continues.
Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel uncertain on future as internal investigation results loom
Brad Crawford
During his tenure, Manuel has become one of the most influential figures in college athletics, serving on the College Football Playoff selection committee since 2022 and chairing the inaugural 12-team playoff in 2024. His time leading the Wolverines has been defined by both extraordinary success and extraordinary turbulence — national championships, blockbuster coaching hires and championship-caliber programs alongside scandals, investigations and lawsuits.
As Michigan weighs what comes next, here’s a look at the good, the bad and the ugly of Manuel’s nearly 10 years leading the Wolverines.
The good
Championship pedigree
Manuel’s tenure has coincided with one of the most successful stretches in Michigan athletics history. The Wolverines have finished in the top 10 of the Learfield Directors’ Cup standings, which rank the best all-around athletic programs nationally, in seven of the nine eligible years since he arrived, including three top-three finishes.
Michigan has captured national championships in football, men’s basketball, and men’s and women’s gymnastics under his watch, along with dozens of Big Ten titles, including five combined between football (3) and men’s basketball (2).
This season’s run to cutting down the nets at the Final Four made Michigan just the second program this century to win national championships in both football and men’s basketball, joining Florida. It was also the Wolverines’ first national title on the hardwood since 1989.
Betting on Jim Harbaugh
Manuel’s most consequential call may have been the one he didn’t make. Jim Harbaugh had already dropped his first five meetings with Ohio State, extending Michigan’s losing streak in the rivalry to eight games — the longest in its history — when the Wolverines stumbled through a losing record during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.
Calls mounted for Manuel to move on from his coach. He didn’t.
The payoff came fast. Michigan finally beat Ohio State in 2021, snapping the losing streak and punching its ticket to the Big Ten Championship Game. That launched a run of three consecutive conference titles and College Football Playoff appearances, the last of which ended with a national championship in 2023.
Harbaugh departed for the NFL weeks later, returning to coach the Los Angeles Chargers before Michigan ultimately bore the brunt of the NCAA fallout from a sign-stealing scandal, which resulted in major sanctions and financial penalties for the athletic department.
Whatever those consequences, Manuel’s decision to stay the course with Harbaugh transformed the trajectory of Michigan football. The Wolverines went from a program facing questions about whether it could ever clear Ohio State to a national champion that reestablished itself among the sport’s top tier.
Taking a chance on Dusty May
When Michigan needed a men’s basketball coach in the spring of 2024 after moving on from Juwan Howard, Manuel bypassed several more established candidates and hired Dusty May away from Florida Atlantic after his Cinderella run to the Final Four.
The gamble paid off almost immediately.
May won 27 games in his first season, the most ever by a first-year Michigan coach, while delivering the program’s first Big Ten tournament title since 2018 and its first NCAA tournament appearance in three years. He followed that by assembling the nation’s No. 2 transfer portal class, according to 247Sports, then leading Michigan to 37 wins and a national championship.
May left for the Dallas Mavericks less than two months after cutting down the nets, but Manuel’s hire still delivered one of the most successful two-year runs in recent program history.
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The bad
Coaching turnover
Stability has long been part of Michigan’s identity. Under Manuel, however, the past three years have brought remarkable turnover. Since the beginning of 2023, Michigan has cycled through six different head coaches across football and men’s basketball, most recently promoting Mike Boynton Jr. after May’s departure.
Not every hire Manuel has made has aged well, and the misses haven’t been limited to what’s happened off the field. Sherrone Moore is the most glaring example, and for reasons that go well beyond football. But even setting the scandal aside, Moore’s two seasons leading the program were trending in the wrong direction.
His eight losses were more than the six Michigan dropped over Harbaugh’s final three seasons. Staying within the Harbaugh coaching tree was a questionable decision from the start.
Manuel’s answer was to swing the other direction entirely, hiring Kyle Whittingham away from Utah. A proven winner, but also a 66-year-old coach taking over a new program for the first time in 22 seasons.
With his first men’s basketball hire, Manuel turned to Juwan Howard in 2019 after John Beilein left for the Cleveland Cavaliers, bringing back a Fab Five legend to lead his alma mater. The symbolism was obvious, and it briefly looked like the right call. Howard took Michigan to the Elite Eight in his second season, but the program slid steadily from there, bottoming out at eight wins in 2023-24, a collapse that ultimately ended Howard’s tenure.
Hockey program in turmoil
Manuel’s handling of men’s hockey coach Mel Pearson added a different kind of black eye. An independent investigation commissioned by the school found Pearson had instructed players to falsify COVID-19 contact-tracing forms, misled recruits about scholarship money, and failed to act on findings that a member of his staff had mistreated female employees, among other conclusions.
Pearson was also accused of pushing out a team captain in retaliation for raising concerns about the program’s culture. He wasn’t fired until August 2022. Multiple reports said Manuel had sought to retain Pearson and even explored a contract extension before the university’s regents and interim president moved to end his tenure.
Conference tensions
Manuel has been one of the more vocal skeptics inside the Big Ten of a proposed $2.4 billion investment from the University of California’s pension fund, a deal that would have created a new entity called Big Ten Enterprises and handed the investor a 10% stake. The proposal appears to have stalled after Michigan and USC pushed back, though Manuel stopped short of closing the door entirely, telling CBS Sports’ Brandon Marcello this spring that it isn’t in Michigan’s interest “right now.”
The friction became serious enough that a Michigan regent publicly raised the possibility that the school would leave the conference by 2036 if a private equity deal were ever forced through.
A basketball scheduling dispute created a smaller headache. Duke’s deal to stream a game against Michigan on Amazon ran into pushback from Fox, the Big Ten’s primary broadcast partner, over territorial rights to the Madison Square Garden matchup. Manuel said he hadn’t realized Duke’s Amazon package had expanded to three games; Duke’s athletic director said Michigan had known from the start. Rather than scrap the matchup, the schools relocated the Dec. 21 game to a ballpark in Miami. It was another example of Manuel balancing Michigan’s interests with the conference’s.
Michigan AD Warde Manuel steps forward, preaching steadiness after years of navigating storms
Brandon Marcello
The ugly
Connor Stalions’ sign-stealing scandal
The most consequential scandal of Manuel’s tenure traces back to Connor Stalions, the low-level football analyst who directed an elaborate in-person scouting operation across the 2021, 2022 and 2023 seasons, arranging for people to record opposing teams’ sideline signals at more than 50 games. The scheme became public in October 2023, and Stalions resigned three weeks later after refusing to cooperate with investigators.
Manuel didn’t sit quietly through the fallout. When the Big Ten suspended Harbaugh for the final three games of the regular season under its sportsmanship policy — before the NCAA had even finished investigating — Manuel called the move unethical, and an assault on due process, and Michigan briefly sued the conference over it before abruptly dropping the suit five days later.
Harbaugh coached through the controversy anyway, and the Wolverines finished undefeated and won their first national championship in 26 years at the end of the 2023 season.
Manuel’s decision to stand firmly behind Harbaugh helped preserve Michigan’s championship season, but it also tied his own leadership more closely to whatever consequences followed.
The NCAA’s Committee on Infractions issued its final ruling in August 2025, finding Michigan, Harbaugh and Moore to be repeat violators. The school was hit with four years of probation and a fine exceeding $20 million, tied in part to lost postseason revenue, while show-cause orders went out to four people connected to the case: eight years for Stalions, 10 years for Harbaugh, three years for former assistant Denard Robinson, and two years for Moore.
Matt Weiss federal case
Another crisis landed on Manuel’s desk in January 2023, when Michigan began investigating co-offensive coordinator Matt Weiss over allegations of unauthorized computer access. The school fired Weiss days later, with Manuel announcing the decision himself after citing a review of university policies.
What initially appeared to be an isolated personnel matter has since become intertwined with the broader questions surrounding Manuel’s leadership. According to a federal lawsuit filed this month by former linebackers coach Chris Partridge, Michigan’s internal investigation into Weiss first alerted officials to Connor Stalions’ sign-stealing operation in January 2023, nine months before the scheme became public.
Ex-Michigan coach’s lawsuit alleges school leaders covered up sign-stealing scheme ahead of 2023 title season
John Talty
Partridge, who was fired that fall after being accused of leaking details of the NCAA investigation to a player, is now suing Michigan, Manuel, former university president Santa Ono, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and the university’s Board of Regents, alleging they knew about Stalions well before the scandal broke and made Partridge the fall guy. The claims are unproven, but they add another thread to the same question the Jenner & Block review is already asking: how much did Michigan’s leadership know, and when?
Federal prosecutors indicted Weiss separately in March 2025 on 24 counts, alleging that between 2015 and 2023 he hacked into athlete databases at more than 100 colleges and universities, pulling personal and medical records on more than 150,000 athletes nationwide, according to the Justice Department. Prosecutors say he then used that information to break into the personal accounts of more than 3,300 of those athletes — the majority of them women — to steal intimate photos and videos. Weiss pleaded not guilty in March 2025 and faces more than 70 years in prison if convicted on every count.
The case has produced mixed rulings for Weiss in recent weeks. A federal judge tossed evidence gathered through an earlier state search warrant but let other evidence stand, then separately rejected Weiss’ bid to have most of the remaining charges thrown out on procedural grounds, according to the Detroit Free Press. The criminal case heads to trial in September, and Weiss also faces a separate civil suit from dozens of alleged victims that names Jim Harbaugh and Ono among the defendants.
Sherrone Moore’s downfall
Moore’s tenure carried its own baggage well before it ended. NCAA investigators found that Moore, then Michigan’s offensive coordinator, had deleted a thread of 52 text messages with Stalions; messages later recovered through device imaging and treated as a Level II violation. Michigan self-imposed a two-game suspension for Moore during the 2025 season as a result, even as the school maintained that the recovered texts showed no evidence that Moore knew the full scope of Stallions’ operation.
That controversy looked minor compared to what came next. Michigan fired Moore on Dec. 10, 2025, hours after evidence of an inappropriate relationship between Moore and a subordinate staff member, later identified as Paige Shiver, came to the department’s attention. Moore was arrested that same day, accused of forcing his way into Shiver’s home and charged with felony home invasion, stalking and breaking and entering.
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Shiver said she had endured “years of manipulation, harassment and exploitation” from Moore and that the university failed to protect her. Moore ultimately pleaded no contest to misdemeanor counts of malicious use of a telecommunications device and trespassing; a judge sentenced him in April to 18 months of probation and a $1,000 fine, with the felony charges dismissed as part of the deal.
Shiver’s attorneys said in March that she may not have been the only person subjected to predatory behavior by Moore, a claim that has since become central to the university’s broader investigation into what the athletic department knew and when.
The reckoning
That broader investigation is what now threatens Manuel’s own future. Michigan’s Board of Regents is scheduled to meet on Thursday in Traverse City to review the findings of the Jenner & Block investigation and determine the university’s response. According to CBS Sports, Manuel has been weighing his options, including retirement.
What separates this moment from the controversies that have marked Manuel’s tenure isn’t that he’s under scrutiny. That has happened before. It’s that, for the first time, the scrutiny is directed at his own leadership. Previous crises cost coaches and staff members their jobs. This one could cost Manuel his.
