​Sports fans are deeply irrational creatures. There’s nothing logical about attaching such a fundamental part of your identity to a bunch of people you’ve never met who only share in common a certain color cloth they wear, who chase a ball or puck around for about three hours every weekend.Yet billions of people do. I’m one of them.And those “irrational people” end up developing some irrational rituals. One of the ones you’ll most frequently encounter as a sports fan is the old scapegoat ritual. Within approximately a month of discovering a new team to root for, no matter the sport, you will soon discover the universal maxim: it’s never actually your own team’s fault.Lose a big game? The referee was on someone else’s payroll. Sell or trade your favorite player? Let’s blame the front office. It’s easy, and maybe even a little fun, to point the finger at someone else, and continue living in a more innocent world; one where your sporting heroes stay frozen in time as blameless paragons of competitiveness and virtue.And Michigan fans, over the past few years, have had a relatively easy target to point their finger at: now-outgoing athletic director Warde Manuel. Though the Wolverines snapped lengthy championship droughts in both football and basketball the last three years, the athletic department has been less successful at eluding controversy and allegations of misconduct, both personal and sporting. And there’s the obvious factor of the program’s inability to hold onto either of its national championship-winning head coaches, with Jim Harbaugh and Dusty May both departing shortly after leading Michigan to the ultimate prize.On Monday, however, the leaves turned over, with the announcement that Manuel will step down from his position at the end of the year. With his time in Ann Arbor wrapping up, I wanted to take a look at whether or not he deserves the scapegoating he receives from Wolverines fans.Spoiler alert: my answer is yes, though maybe not for all of the reasons you’re thinking.Let’s start strictly with his sporting track record. I don’t even think the most charitable retrospectives on Manuel would pencil him in as a “good” or “great” athletic director. Of the two great accomplishments of his tenure, the seeds for the 2023 national championship in football had been planted nearly a year before Manuel arrived on campus. Harbaugh had already coached Michigan through a full season before Manuel took the job. Meanwhile, Dusty May, the architect of Manuel’s second great triumph in the 2026 national title, had been hired on the recommendation of Wolverines great John Beilein.Manuel perhaps deserves some credit for backing Harbaugh after a pandemic-riddled 2-4 season in 2020, admittedly a polarizing move that paid dividends. But when evaluating his broad resume, it is hard to point to one unmissable stroke of brilliance. His first major head coaching hire, Juwan Howard, to replace the outgoing Beilein, end