UConn athletic director offered Michigan job

Manuel will replace Michigan’s interim athletic director Jim Hackett.

The Detroit Free Press and former Boston Globe writer Mark Blaudschun, on his blog AJerseyGuy.com, first reported the news.

“We have no information to share with you about this report”, UM spokesman Rick Fitzgerald told The Free Press.

According to the report, Manuel – who will be the school’s 13th athletic director – is a former MI football player who served in the U-M athletic department for several years as an administrator. He also was an associate athletic director with the Wolverines.

The Courant learned Manuel interviewed for the job in Ann Arbor last week and attended a Board of Trustees meeting Wednesday morning.

Under his management, UConn raised the necessary funds to build what is now known as the Werth Family Champions Center, a $35 million training facility for men’s and women’s basketball.

“It’s happy and sad for us”, she told the newspaper. All he did was bring home the national title back to the UConn. MI is a very fine place.

Manuel will fill the void left by Dave Brandon, who resigned in October of 2014.

He was named Athletic Director of the year in 2015.

Despite football team’s success under Harbaugh and Hackett’s other achievements, he announced late a year ago he would not be a candidate for the permanent job. Manuel and Herbst were not able to secure the school an invitation to join one of the Power Five conferences, leaving most UConn teams mired in the much lower revenue-producing American Athletic Conference after the breakup of the old Big East.