Michigan football just spent 2 years riding as high as any program in the country, and now the man who ran the athletic department through most of it is on his way out. Warde Manuel, Michigan's athletic director since 2016, is stepping down at the end of the calendar year, first reported by ESPN's Pete Thamel. It's the kind of news that would normally get a quiet segment and a few hot takes. Instead it turned Wake Up Barstool into a demolition derby.
Football is so back!! Brandon Walker is LOSING IT/flipping over tables in the WUB studio!
That's not a metaphor. The Wake Up Barstool set, complete with football helmets and memorabilia on the shelves, ended the segment with an overturned table and empty chairs where Brandon Walker had just been sitting. Whatever your read on Michigan athletics, that's a real reaction to a real breaking-news chyron, not a bit.
The timing matters. Manuel's exit comes attached to fresh fallout from the Sherrone Moore saga, with new details suggesting the athletic department knew about Moore's inappropriate relationship with a staffer well before it became public. Michigan president Domenico Grasso announced the news alongside the results of an independent culture review of the athletic department, and asked Manuel to stick around through the end of the year as a special advisor to help implement reforms. The review reportedly credited Manuel's commitment to student-athletes but flagged failures to act quickly on internal allegations of wrongdoing.
Manuel's resume is not nothing. He arrived in Ann Arbor in 2016 after building a UConn athletic department that won 6 national titles in 3 years, and on his watch Michigan has hung banners in men's gymnastics, football and women's gymnastics. That track record is exactly why the exit landed as a jolt instead of a formality, and why the Barstool crew treated it like breaking news instead of a bureaucratic reshuffle.
Portnoy wasn't buying what Walker was selling on the recruiting angle, and the split-screen argument played out live while the Manuel chyron scrolled underneath them. It's the kind of back-and-forth that makes the show watchable, two guys arguing college football minutiae while an actual athletic director's job status is breaking in real time behind them.
There’s only one school in the history of not only America, but in the world, that has won a National Championship in both football and basketball since the beginning of the CFP… and that’s Michigan #GoBlue
Whoever replaces Manuel inherits a program that just won a national title in football in 2023 and has been a fixture in the sport's biggest conversations ever since, for better or worse given everything tied up in the Moore investigation. Michigan says the plan is for Manuel to stay through the end of the year while the school figures out its next move, which means this story isn't going away anytime soon, and neither, probably, is Brandon Walker's blood pressure.