The biggest issue I have with Tommy Amaker was his mediocre tenure at Michigan. As an outsider, it always seemed like he underachieved. But to get a more informed opinion on his time in Ann Arbor, I asked blogging pioneer Brian Cook of MgoBlog his thoughts on Amaker. Brian's two cents follow:
"Amaker walked into a disaster area at Michigan and did make things better pretty much from the drop. Brian Ellerbe had filled the roster with ne'er-do-wells and many of them left either on Amaker's hiring or once they discovered that Amaker had a problem with them, say, jacking contested threes from halfcourt on the regular.
Amaker came in, nailed down a top-50 point guard from Texas named Daniel Horton, and made Michigan generally competitive except for one year where his team was destroyed by injury.
Unfortunately, that's where the improvement stopped. Michigan was perpetually on the bubble under Amaker and never got over the hump. His teams continually turned the ball over and he never got over .500 in the Big Ten except for one year where Michigan started out 0-6 with losses to Central and Western Michigan. His recruiting was wildly erratic; he was capable of getting kids to Michigan that few others would have managed but he also made crazy early offers to guys who had no business at a D-I school--a couple in fact transferred to D-II Saginaw Valley State, where they were bench players. Beilein inherited a mess comparable to the one Amaker did, without NCAA sanctions hanging over the program.
It does seem that Amaker's figured a few things out at Harvard he never did at Michigan. His time at M was seven years ago, as hard as that is to believe. He's built the Crimson into the most impressive Ivy program in 50 years. You would get an instant and real recruiting bump and he would get BC to a level where they're at least on the bubble. It's a defensible hire."
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