Who Wears the Pants in the Amaker Household?

Okay, I missed the Michigan-Ohio State basketball game yesterday, opting to see Zodiac instead. Some might argue that my sports fan card should be suspended for that. I'd point to the Big Ten men's basketball standings in my defense, which would've supported a case for a blowout that I had no obligation to watch.

(Sitting through almost three hours of Zodiac wasn't necessarily more fun. It's not that I didn't like the movie, yet I'm not saying I liked it either, so there's your less-than-enthusiastic endorsement. Drink some coffee beforehand, or get a Pepsi from concessions; there's a lot of sitting and talking. But I digress...)

So I didn't get to see Michigan get their hopes crushed by the Buckeyes yet again. (To even make such a comparison between football and basketball is silly, of course.) But it looked like a close one, at least according to the score I saw on my cell phone after the movie. The mantra from the home locker room at Crisler Arena, however, was "Coming close doesn't mean anything."

Tommy Amaker argued that his team deserved more, but I don't think he knows what he's really saying. As the Ann Arbor News' Jim Carty points out, if those seniors deserved anything, it was to have a better team built around them, and a coach who could teach them how to develop into better players. And Amaker never managed to do that in their four years at Michigan.

Yet probably the worst kept secret in Ann Arbor is that there will be no coaching change in the men's basketball department. Maybe Amaker did enough to save his job this week by beating Michigan State and fighting the #1 team in the country to a four-point margin. Some have said that the decision has already been made to keep Amaker, regardless of how his team finished the season. How is that possible? Well, such a decision might not have anything to do with basketball. Check out this nugget from Drew Sharp's column in today's Detroit Free Press:

"... fueling the coach's job security most is that he's the second-most-popular Amaker on campus. His wife, Dr. Stephanie Pinder-Amaker, is an associate dean of students who co-chaired a large university fund-raising initiative. She's a rising star in the academic community, something that's not lost on university president Mary Sue Coleman, who remains an advocate of diversity despite recent legal challenges.

Do you think she'll risk losing a highly qualified African-American female educator because her basketball-coaching husband hasn't fulfilled expectations?"

Of course, you could write that off as speculation (and many would dismiss it because of the byline "By Drew Sharp"). However, it might also explain a few things. Bill Martin is getting a lot of negative feedback for the state of the men's basketball program, and maybe he's to the point where he might want to make a change, too. But what if it's not ultimately his call? If you're a Michigan fan (I'm not going to say "Michigan basketball fan" because that applies to a smaller readership), how infuriating is that?

And if you're Tommy Amaker, how big should your budget be for Valentine's Day, birthdays, and Sweetest Day? Maybe throw in something for Mother's Day too, just for the hell of it.