What's happening to the Wolverines is gruesome, clownish and almost entirely self-inflicted.

Michigan definitely isn't struggling only because its contemporaries are improving while it is stagnating. The program is beyond well-equipped to enter and win any arms race; this decline has been a disparate mix of the competition doing what's necessary paired with the most destructive institutional vanity in college athletics today.

Dave Brandon's Michigan is a nice lesson other college football empires could learn from - if they're able to break from gawking at its slow burn long enough to diagnose and understand how this has been willfully allowed to happen. Ann Arbor's festering cautionary tale is going to be a riveting Harvard Business Review case study someday.

Maybe you enjoy seeing Michigan's struggle, but this type of unthinkable decline is capable of happening anywhere - especially at our favorite ivory tower. All it requires is unchecked power in the hands of the wrong goddamn person guarded by influential people supporting him or her for all the wrong reasons.

Much has been made of Brandon's corporatizing Michigan's game day experience, alienating students, alumni and season ticket holders, overseeing embarrassing ticket giveaways, tacky skywriting pranks and generally being a tone deaf helicopter dad with the football program - but those are merely symptoms of the larger, debilitating problem.

Michigan's TRUE conquering heroes - its ADMINISTRATORS - HAVE SEEN THEIR SALARIES INCREASE 72% SINCE BRANDON ARRIVED IN 2010.

Michigan hand-picked a megalomaniac with no experience as a collegiate administrator to treat its football legacy as his own personal toy. He rules over Michigan football like a child emperor unaffected by criticism and while rejecting the possibility that perhaps he might have something to do with this burgeoning crisis.

The university and its regents have been complicit in allowing him to consolidate power and balloon spending: Michigan's AD budget has skyrocketed from $94.4MM to $151MM during his four years. Meanwhile, the U-M AD's administrators - the real conquering heroes of the university - have seen their salaries increase 72% in that time.

Brandon himself was hired at $560,000 a year, will earn $900,000 in 2014 and is predetermined to receive $50,000 raises in both 2015 and 2016 (these are all base salaries that don't include his bonus opportunities which extend well into six figures). If Michigan parts ways with him prior to that he will be rewarded with a $3MM buyout. Brandon's predecessor Bill Martin made $380,000 when he retired.

That atrocious contract is not Brandon's fault. Michigan signed off on all of it, as if to suggest its newly-hired AD with zero experience was a flight risk.

So you've got an expensive, high-profile administrator spending unprecedented amounts of money while the football team has lost nine of 13 games playing in a stadium where season tickets have been consciously devalued by the university and attendance has fallen off a cliff.

Clearly, it's not going well. Brandon for his part refuses to point the blame at anybody or anything: