In less than 48 hours, Sherrone Moore went from the second-highest-paid state employee in Michigan, where he coached football games in the largest stadium in the Western Hemisphere, to a video arraignment from a jail cell.
The enormity of his fall from grace is on a scale of the 107,000-plus-seat University of Michigan colossus where he worked — its nickname, the Big House, now dusted with cruel irony.
Details are still unclear on what all university officials knew about their former head coach’s relationship with a female football staffer and, crucially, when they knew it.
Is this just college sports now, with the quest for national titles hiding a school’s moral free fall into the abyss?
Whatever Moore’s misdeeds, the stench emanating from this situation is too strong for only one person to be at fault. Moore is a 39-year-old married father of three who, in the wake of being fired, has been accused of stalking his mistress, breaking into her home and threatening suicide. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.)
Is this just college sports now, with the quest for national titles hiding a school’s moral free fall into the abyss? Should we expect to see ugly and unconscionable realities if we peel back more layers of the warped communities known as programs that dominate “College GameDay”?
Events of the past week, detailed in Friday’s arraignment, read like a bad Hulu screenplay. On Monday, Moore and the woman with whom he had been in a relationship broke up. That day she showed university officials texts and voicemails that confirmed the relationship. Moore was fired Wednesday and arrested hours later, after going to the woman’s home.
Moore “barged his way into that apartment,” prosecutor Kati Rezmierski told the court, “then proceeded to a kitchen drawer, grabbed several butter knives and a pair of kitchen scissors and began to threaten his own life.”
Events of the past week read like a bad Hulu screenplay.
The coach said, “‘I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to make you watch. My blood is on your hands. You ruined my life,’ and a series of very, very threatening, intimidating, terrifying — quite frankly — statements and behaviors. She was terrorized,” Rezmierski went on.
Among the unanswered questions underlying all this: whether Michigan officials, who reportedly conducted an internal investigation in October that did not yield evidence of an inappropriate relationship, knew more about Moore’s behavior and relationship than they are now saying. And if so, did they wait to act until after a 9-3 season — considered subpar for a program that won the national title for the 2023 season?
One wonders whether Moore would still be employed had his mistress not outed him and had the Wolverines qualified for the 12-team college football playoff.
If past sex and child abuse scandals at be-true-to-your-school universities are any guide — think Penn State, Michigan State — winning is the great deodorant; it covers up the stench of everything until evil can’t hide.
Michigan’s athletic director should himself be fired for cause.
Even as much remains unknown, a few things are clear, chief among them that Michigan’s athletic director, Warde Manuel, the man who fired Moore on Wednesday, should himself be fired for cause — now.
Manuel’s ratio of national titles to scandals is roughly 1-to-10 since he took the job in 2016. Beyond the 2023 sign-stealing saga that tarnished the national title season — in which Moore, then the co-offensive coordinator, was also implicated and punished — Michigan’s litany of incidents under Manuel’s watch has been as inexplicable as it is awful.
The record — summarized by the Detroit Free Press — includes a 22-year-old low-level football staffer being captured in a video that went viral two Novembers ago while he allegedly attempted to meet a 13-year-old girl. He was fired. But the culture under both men’s watch was problematic.
Michigan said in a statement that it dismissed Moore for violating university policy by “engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a staff member.” Manuel reportedly fired Moore in a one-on-one conversation, notably without standard figures in terminations present such as an attorney or a human resources officer, or both. This is especially salient because Moore has reportedly been experiencing mental health issues.
According to the criminal complaint, Moore was charged on Friday with third-degree home invasion — a felony — as well as misdemeanor stalking and misdemeanor breaking and entering. He left the woman’s apartment only after she told him she was calling her attorney, the prosecutor said.
There’s another, indirect casualty in this scandal.
“The totality of the behavior is highly threatening and highly intimidating,” Rezmierski said, adding, “We consider him a risk to public safety, a risk to this victim.”
There’s actually another, indirect casualty.
Moore was one of just 16 Black head coaches in an NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) pool with more than 130 programs. While Black players make up more than 50% of big-time college rosters, Black coaches make up less than 12%. In a sport where change comes embarrassingly slowly at the top, there are now just 15 Black head coaches.
When a white coach has a scandal, he’s looked at as an outlier in a pool of others that look like him but aren’t thought of as monolithic. When a Black coach like Moore fails, many former and future candidates of color are at greater risk of being lumped in with him.
Moore’s next court date is Jan. 22. In the near term, Michigan’s board of regents has reportedly broadened its investigation to include Moore’s firing and the culture of its athletic department. The university is all but certain to say it didn’t see this coming and to treat Moore as a pariah who abused his job and privilege until the university was forced to terminate him.
Sadly, too often in college sports now, we laud our winners and fire our losers and pretend nothing happened in between.
Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to the College Football Playoff as having 10 teams. There are 12. The text above has been updated.
