Warde Manuel is starting to show a new side and it's one Michigan fans should like

His detractors thought this moment Tuesday would never happen. His naysayers claimed he didn’t have the courage to make the bold moves required to arrive at this point. His skeptics doubted that he had the natural instincts to act decisively, operate expeditiously and maneuver deftly so that he could usher Michigan basketball into a new era after it plummeted to the bottom of the Big Ten in recent months.

But here stood athletic director Warde Manuel, enjoying the last laugh inside the Junge Family Champions Center as he prepared to introduce Dusty May as the Wolverines’ new coach.

“It is,” Manuel proclaimed, “a great day.”

Not even two weeks had passed since the final dribble echoed from Michigan’s worst season in decades and Manuel had already landed Juwan Howard’s successor. It was a quick, rather seamless process that defied the expectations of Manuel’s most vocal critics, who had painted him as an ineffective administrator with slow reflexes. That negative perception ossified based on how Manuel reacted to several challenging situations. He showed reluctance to fire embattled hockey coach Mel Pearson in 2022. A year later, he was placed on his back heels throughout the protracted, but fruitless negotiations with Jim Harbaugh for a contract extension that never materialized into a new deal. By the time Harbaugh bolted for another shot at a Super Bowl with the Los Angeles Chargers in January, Manuel had already come under fire from a fan base that had made him a convenient scapegoat for anything and everything that had gone wrong with Michigan athletics.

Manuel had grown sick and tired of becoming the target of so much vitriol, thinking it was all rather unjustified.

On the night of Michigan football’s national championship, as he stood on a confetti-strewn field in Houston and relished one of the signature accomplishments in his career, Manuel clapped back at his haters.

“My father raised me to believe in yourself and not let the ignorance of other people take away from what you need to do,” Manuel huffed. “And believe me, I’ve dealt with it.”

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He continued to confront it while the basketball program nosedived in Howard’s fifth season. As the losses mounted and embarrassing headlines accumulated, anonymous souls in all corners of the Internet surmised Manuel wouldn’t have the strength to dump a coach who was once a famous member of the Fab Five and had the distinction of becoming the athletic director’s first major hire at Michigan. Those assumptions were made after Manuel expressed a willingness to remain patient with Howard in late January, when the coach was only six weeks removed from returning to the bench following his recovery from heart surgery last September. The uninformed speculation made its way back to Manuel, and it bothered him.

“Some of things I hear, I think are ridiculous,” Manuel snapped Tuesday. “I think some of it is just crazy. If you don’t ask me what I’m going to do, you don’t know what I’m going to do. … It’s insulting, in many ways.”

For the longest time, Manuel never answered the attacks or told his side of the story. He let others control the narrative as he adhered to a policy of silence, choosing to move the levers of Michigan athletics from behind a curtain. But in recent months, Manuel has stepped out of the shadows, becoming more approachable with the media and demonstrating some surface-level transparency. It is an encouraging sign that suggests Manuel is evolving as a leader. The new approach comes at a time when Manuel has taken a proactive stance on name, image and likeness by investing more resources toward an initiative that outsiders complained he neglected.

“It’s not about proving anybody wrong or right or whatever,” Manuel insisted. “It’s about doing what I think is best.”

Throughout much of his tenure, Manuel often elected to take the path of least resistance. His default setting, the cynics grumbled, was inertia. At the end of 2020, Manuel made the unpopular decision to retain Harbaugh after the Wolverines bottomed out with a 2-4 record during the COVID-19 pandemic. It ultimately proved to be the right choice, as Manuel is quick to boast. Yet it was also the easiest, considering the alternative was a regime change, the onboarding of a new staff and the resultant upheaval it would have caused. It’s why Manuel’s move to dump Howard less than 48 hours after Michigan crashed out of the Big Ten tournament was seen as such a departure from his previous behavior. Harbaugh’s redemption story, which included a 40-3 record over the past three seasons, could have convinced Manuel to throw Howard another lifeline and allow him to reboot a program that had flatlined under his watch. The case study of Michigan football's rise over that period was compelling enough to sway Manuel to follow his standard operating procedure and stand pat. But Manuel chose to go in a different direction after conducting a thorough analysis of the deteriorating basketball program.

“In the end,” he said, “I thought it was time for a change.”

Just like that, on March 15, he sprang into action and launched a search for Howard’s replacement. He consulted with approximately a dozen former basketball players and Howard’s esteemed predecessor, John Beilein, to identify a set of candidates and determine the criteria for the next coach.  Within a couple of days, he zeroed in on May, a hoops enthusiast and Bob Knight protégé who steered Florida Atlantic to the 2023 Final Four and a 60-13 record over the past two seasons. May was one of the most desirable, attainable options available, and Louisville, a well-funded program, was rumored to be chasing him. Realizing there was no time to waste, Manuel pounced. As soon as FAU was eliminated by Northwestern in the first round of the NCAA tournament on Friday, Manuel and his team made plans to fly to Fort Lauderdale and meet with May the following evening. There, they talked for 2 ½ hours. By the end of the night, a five-year deal worth almost $19 million was in place. As May concluded, “This was the right fit for me.”

Manuel was relieved.

He had landed the man at the top of his list.

“I wanted to do it as fast as I could,” he said. “It was a great process.”

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It was also a rewarding one that led Manuel to the podium where he stood Tuesday, absorbing the jovial scene in front of him. May’s first news conference in Ann Arbor marked the beginning of a new chapter in Michigan basketball and maybe, just maybe, an inflection point in Manuel’s tenure where the public’s perception of him started to swing in his favor.

As he left the lectern in front of him, he turned to May and told the audience, “Give him a round of applause.”

It was a nice gesture considering that Manuel, for once, was the one who deserved to take a bow and hear the claps.

Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him @RainerSabin.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Warde Manuel defied his skeptics. That bodes well for Michigan