Risking Everything….
I continue to be amazed at what some people are willing to risk.
Take the recently fired University of Michigan coach who lost his job over an inappropriate relationship with a staffer in his department. I don’t know him, I don’t know his marriage, and I don’t know what kind of pressure cooker his life was at the time.
Let me be clear up front: I’m not excusing the affair. I think it’s awful. Full stop. But affairs do happen. People make selfish, destructive decisions every day. What truly astonishes me isn’t just that he cheated—it’s that he was willing to risk his marriage, his job, his reputation, and everything he’d built on an affair, and then compound that risk by doing it with someone who worked for him.
This wasn’t a momentary lapse or a drunken bad decision on a work trip. This was reportedly a two-year relationship with someone who was an underling. In his department. At his employer. The same employer that paid him something like $5 million a year and entrusted him with one of the most prestigious jobs in college sports.
That’s not just risking your marriage. That’s risking everything.
If he’d had an affair with a stranger—a Hooter’s waitress, someone he met at a bar, someone entirely outside his workplace—this likely would have remained a personal disaster rather than a professional one. The school might have issued a stiff statement and moved on. Messy? Yes. Fireable? Probably not.
But once you cross into a relationship with an underling, the institution has no real choice. Power imbalance. Workplace liability. Sexual harassment concerns. HR alarms blaring like air-raid sirens. At that point, the university doesn’t merely want to fire you—it has to.
And then there’s the detail that really makes you shake your head: after the relationship ended, she reportedly received a significant raise. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation. Maybe she earned it. Maybe the timing is just unfortunate.
But optics matter. And this looks terrible. It looks like hush money. It looks like an attempt to buy silence. And in situations like this, appearances alone can be career-ending.
So let’s tally it up:
- A seven-figure salary
- A top-tier coaching job
- Years of reputation-building
- A career that may not recover for a long time, if ever
All gambled away for something that didn’t even need to involve the workplace.
That’s the part I can’t get past. Not the affair itself, but the breathtaking willingness to light a match next to everything you’ve built. It’s not just poor judgment—it’s professional self-immolation.
I don’t feel smug about it. I don’t feel superior. Mostly, I feel baffled. How does someone smart enough to reach that level of success fail to see the most obvious red line imaginable?
Some risks are bad bets.
Some risks are reckless.
And some risks make you wonder if the person ever stopped to ask, “What happens if this blows up?”
Because this one did. Completely.
And for what?
Shaking my head.