Families have verbal fights all the time. Here's what makes Juwan Howard situation different.

Juwan Howard has been cleared to sit in the head coach’s chair today when Michigan basketball hosts Eastern Michigan.

There was reportedly a screaming match between him and strength coach Jon Sanderson recently.

But Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said in a statement Friday night that, "The return of our usual coaching structure comes after a review of an incident involving several individuals during a team practice last week. Based on a thorough internal review, nothing was found to warrant disciplinary action for anyone involved.”

It begs the question: If the school found no one at fault for the incident, who felt the need to leak it to the public? And why?

It’s hard to imagine U-M allowing Howard to resume head coaching duties during games if they didn’t have plans to keep him. But then, imagining is all there is. Howard hasn’t talked.

His lead assistant — the man whose filled in as head coach for 10 games while Howard recuperated from a heart procedure earlier this fall — did talk Friday.

And Phil Martelli may be right.

That the Michigan program is no different from any other high-major basketball program. That if you looked under the hood of those programs, you’d find the kind of shouting matches between coaches and staff members that allegedly happened inside U-M's program.

That when Howard and Sanderson got into an (alleged) shouting match, they were merely venting in a way that’s common in college basketball.

Or common inside any family. He said that, too, on Friday afternoon when he met with reporters on a video conference call.

“I think everybody's family on this call has had bumps along the way, they're just not public bumps," Martelli said a couple of hours before Manuel announced Howard's status. "Certainly, these are opportunities to grow I think closer — not us against the world or any of that kind of stuff — but the value each person brings to the program can be accented in times of, call it what it is, stress.”

Good for him for renouncing the us-against-the-world crutch. Too bad he can’t convince the program next door in Ann Arbor to do the same.

As for his point about other programs? And families in general?

Again, he’s technically right. Most verbal spats in families do stay private. And most shouting matches within sports teams do stay private. But this point lacks context — not that Martelli was free to give it, as he said:

“I haven't talked to anybody. It's too sensitive. One word in a sentence could change people's view of it and it's not easy. ... There's no benefit for me to comment.”

It’s hard to blame Martelli. For one, this is now an HR matter for his employer. For another, this isn’t his mess. It’s Howard’s.

And while Martelli did his best to protect his boss by broadening the view and comparing the situation to internal politics within a family — or other programs — and while he did this without talking specifics about the alleged incident, he could not talk about Howard’s history. But you can bet HR and the athletic department at least considered it.

[ MUST LISTEN: Make "Hail Yes!" your go-to Michigan Wolverines podcast, available anywhere you listen to podcasts (Apple, Spotify) ]

Incidents like this are almost always about larger context. Draymond Green didn’t get suspended by the NBA “indefinitely” because he landed a swing upside Jusuf Nurkic's head Tuesday night in Phoenix.

He got suspended indefinitely because he also put a choke hold on Rudy Gobert last month, and put a foot stomp on Damantis Sabonis last spring, and put his fist into Jordan Poole last fall, and on and on. The pattern got him suspended. His history got him suspended indefinitely.

If news of Howard’s alleged spat were the first time the public had learned he’d lost his cool, not much would be said about it, if anything at all. It would’ve been read as an intense disagreement between coaches. Yelling is part of sports, for better and for worse. Heck, it’s part of life.

Certainly, Martelli wouldn’t have been asked so many questions about a shouting match. Yet there he was Friday afternoon in his car after practice, trying to figure out how to answer questions without unintentionally changing the narrative or getting himself in trouble with HR.

Yes, reports that Sanderson filed a complaint with the school’s human resources department would have raised eyebrows perhaps. And some would wonder what kind of relationship Howard had with his strength coach that said coach felt the need to run the incident up the ladder instead of working it out in-house.

Yet that still would’ve been dismissed as an oddity by most and forgotten by nearly everyone in relatively short order. But this isn’t what happened, because Howard has lost his cool before.

This is where the “other programs” point loses its edge, where the family metaphor loses its relevance. If a family member has a history of intense shouting, if that same family member took a swing at someone and landed that swing with an open hand, and then that same family member got into the face of another family member, the family would be forced to reconsider the boundaries of the relationship.

By all reports, the incident between Howard and Sanderson wasn’t physical, and the fact that it wasn’t almost certainly saved Howard’s job for now — the school has him under a “zero-tolerance” policy because he smacked Wisconsin assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft in the face during a handshake line in Madison.

That image still lingers, of course. And you can bet "Krabbenhoft" showed up in search engines more in the past week than it did in the past two years combined. In that way, Howard is still paying for it; he loses the benefit of the doubt in the court of public opinion.

Which means that the image of his swing at Krabbenhoft, or the image of him frothing at then-Maryland head coach Mark Turgeon during a 2021 Big Ten tournament game in Indianapolis, continues to define his tenure at U-M.

In some ways, it’s unfortunate. Folks make mistakes. Lose their cool. Get into counseling. Do their best to move forward and see things differently.

Yet, as Martelli pointed out, U-M basketball is a family in the public eye. The rules are different. More critically, expectations are different.

The university has been weighing the consequences of those expectations for at least the past several days and cleared their head coach to be the head coach on the bench, too. For now, this tells everyone U-M is behind him.

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Juwan Howard returns, but not before another hit to his reputation