Michigan Football, Supermasculinity, and Institutional Collapse
Saturday, December 13, 2025.
Why clinicians should care (even if they don’t care about football)
You don’t need to care about football to recognize this case.
You only need to have worked with power.
The collapse surrounding Michigan football—where a recently fired head coach now faces serious criminal charges—matters clinically not because it is shocking, but because it is diagnostically clean.
It is a familiar pattern, merely televised. If it feels dramatic, good. Pathology often only becomes legible once it’s broadcast in high definition.
For clinicians, this is not a morality play. It is a failure cascade produced by the convergence of three forces:
A role structured around supermasculine performance.
Narcissistic defenses continuously reinforced by institutional reward.
A family system quietly tasked with absorbing everything no one wants to name.
The useful question is not “What was wrong with this man?”
The useful question is:
What kind of psychological structure does this role reliably produce—and how does it fail under stress?
The coach as a supermasculine role, not a supermasculine man
Eldridge Cleaver’s concept of the supermasculine menial reads today less like political theory and more like an unacknowledged clinical memo.
I remember reading him in high school in 1970. Stripped of its polemics, the construct is fairly straightforward: a man is granted the performance of dominance while being denied durable agency, security, or permeability. He looks powerful. He is not safe. He is watched constantly and trusted never.
College football coaches embody this perfectly.
They appear omnipotent.
But they are structurally disposable.
The role promises omnipotence and delivers probation. This is not a paradox; it is the job description.
Clinically, this configuration reliably produces:
Hyper-control.
Boundary erosion reframed as addiction to “intensity.”
Entitlement disguised as leadership.
Emotional constriction mistaken for strength.
This is not confidence. It is armor. And armor, worn long enough, convinces the wearer he is invincible—right up until it doesn’t.
Narcissistic structure as institutional side effect, not origin story.
Narcissism is the diagnosis everyone reaches for in moments like this. It is not wrong—but it is usually lazy.
From a clinical standpoint, narcissistic traits here are better understood as adaptive responses to the role, not necessarily evidence of innate monstrosity. Certain environments reward grandiosity with such consistency that reality itself becomes a co-conspirator.
The role teaches:
You matter only because you win.
Rules apply differently to you.
Privacy and discretion is earned through performance.
Other people exist as mere extensions of function.
Over time, the environment keeps saying, Yes, you are exceptional, until one day it says, Security will walk you out.
Collapse occurs when institutional protection is withdrawn, the narrative fractures, and the private self is exposed to consequence. At that point, narcissistic defenses fail not quietly but spectacularly.
What follows is rarely calculated villainy. It is psychic disorganization: impulsivity, boundary violation, frantic attempts to reassert control.
Clinically, this is the danger window.
This is where containment matters most—and where institutions usually disappear.
The family system is not collateral damage—it is, unfortunately, the load-bearing wall.
The least discussed and most predictable casualty is the coach’s family.
These families are organized around chronic absence, emotional sequestration, and asymmetric visibility. The public role consumes attention; the private system absorbs volatility. Partners are asked to stabilize without recognition, tolerate secrecy without context, and protect the brand while losing the relationship.
They are praised for resilience in public and quietly punished for needing anything at all.
Children grow up with a parent who is revered publicly and unreachable privately—a configuration that reliably produces confusion, idealization, and grief that has nowhere to land.
When the institutional scaffolding collapses, the family loses everything at once: income, identity, social standing, and narrative coherence. The house is the same. The coffee is the same. The future is not.
Clinically speaking, this is not a stressful transition.
It is a systemic implosion.
Institutions confuse containment with accountability—and clinicians shouldn’t
Universities are very good at managing liability. They are far less skilled at managing meaning in larger contexts. Context is everything.
Terms like “inappropriate relationship” function as administrative sedatives.
They name risk without metabolizing it. Power asymmetry is reduced to policy violation, and urgency is replaced with process. Universities are very serious places, which is why they use language that sounds important while doing remarkably little.
Containment is achieved. Accountability is deferred.
The system survives. The people do not.
The institution then prepares to install the next man into the same psychologically deforming role and calls this “moving forward.”
What should this case should sharpen in our clinical practice?
For clinicians working with high-status men, executive families, or institutional leaders, this case offers several reminders worth keeping close:
Roles Shape Psyches. Do not over-pathologize souls without interrogating the structures that reward their defenses.
Supermasculinity is Often Compensatory. Where vulnerability, rest, and mutual influence are blocked, the performative escalates.
Families Carry Institutional Costs. When work demands total psychic allegiance, the family system pays—quietly, reliably, and without institutional acknowledgment.
None of this excuses harm. Accountability remains non-negotiable.
But causation is not the same as absolution, and institutions that confuse the two guarantee repetition.
Final Thoughts
The mess at Michigan football is not clinically interesting because it is scandalous.
It is interesting because it is legible.
When institutions reward dominance without permeability, success without accountability, and masculinity without relational integration, collapse is not an aberration. It is deferred psychic maintenance, finally due.
If a role requires distortion to function, the problem is not the man who breaks. It is the job that quietly taught him that breaking was strength.
Be Well. Stay Kind. Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Cleaver, E. (1968). Soul on ice. McGraw-Hill.
Gabbard, G. O. (2009). Transference and countertransference: Developments in theory and practice. American Psychiatric Publishing.
Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. Jason Aronson.
Kohut, H. (1971). The analysis of the self. International Universities Press.
Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Harvard University Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Sennett, R. (1977). The fall of public man. Knopf.
Tracy, J. L., & Robins, R. W. (2007). The psychological structure of pride: A tale of two facets. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(3), 506–525. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.3.506