Warde Manuel will step down as the athletic director of the University of Michigan at the end of the calendar year, ESPN reported. He has held the job for more than 11 years.

What an athletic director is, for readers outside the US

The role has no clean equivalent in most countries, so it is worth a sentence. A US university's athletic director runs what is, in effect, a large professional sports operation attached to a college: multiple teams, substantial budgets, and the hiring and firing of coaches whose salaries can exceed those of any academic on campus. Michigan's is among the biggest such operations in the country.

That scale is why a change at the top is news, and why the surrounding circumstances matter.

The departure and the inquiry

The article does not state an explicit reason for Manuel's exit. His own statement was valedictory rather than explanatory: "I am very proud of all the successes and accomplishments of our athletic department over the past 11 years."

The university's framing was notably less warm. Its president, Domenico Grasso, issued a video statement critical of the department's "culture, conduct and procedures," referred to "significant challenges," and said flatly: "This is unacceptable."

Between those two statements sits an independent investigation. The university commissioned the Chicago law firm Jenner & Block to examine the department's culture and operations, at a cost of nearly $12 million. Its summary concluded that misconduct was not "widespread," but identified "failures to quickly and effectively act on allegations of wrongdoing."

That is a specific and limited finding, and worth reading precisely. It does not say the department was broadly corrupt. It says that when things went wrong, they were not dealt with quickly or effectively enough.

What went wrong

The inquiry followed a run of separate episodes, each of which ESPN records.

The former football coach Jim Harbaugh's program was the subject of NCAA violations and a sign-stealing scandal. The former offensive coordinator Matt Weiss was indicted in 2024 on federal felony charges of identity theft. And Sherrone Moore, who was Michigan's head football coach, was fired in December 2025 over an inappropriate relationship with a staff member, and was later arrested and charged with misdemeanors.

Set out in a line like that, the pattern is what the president's statement was responding to. No single one of these is necessarily a firing offence for an athletic director, who does not commit the misconduct himself. But a department that produces several such episodes in succession invites exactly the question the inquiry was asked: not whether the director did wrong, but whether the structures he ran caught wrongdoing and acted on it.

No successor named

ESPN's report does not name a successor, and does not say whether the university will run a national search or promote from within.

Manuel leaves at a turbulent moment for the American college game in general, as the rules permitting direct payment of athletes reshape how these departments are run and funded. Whoever follows him inherits both that transition and the remediation the university's own president has said is required.