Like many rivals, Michigan and Ohio State are more similar than alike -- at least when it comes to hiring head coaches. Very rarely do those schools step outside the proverbial family. In the post-World War II era, you can count on one hand the amount of times the Wolverines and Buckeyes have hired true outsiders to lead their respective football programs.
Where the similarities breakdown is that Ohio State football is practically recession proof, while Michigan football is very much not.
Proof: John Cooper is the only outsider Ohio State has hired in its modern era, and his tenure was generally regarded as a failure. He went 111-43-4, won three Big Ten championships, and entered the College Football Hall of Fame in 2008. Furthermore, if Ryan Day was abducted by aliens tomorrow, there are no less than eight active FBS or NFL head coaches with ties to Ohio State and/or the State of Ohio. The Buckeyes have finished outside the AP top-15 three times in the 25 seasons since Jim Tressel's hiring. In other words: it would take a chain reaction of bad decisions for Buckeye football to suffer a serious downturn in the foreseeable future.
Michigan's place among the college football elite is far less secure.
The Wolverines have only finished within the AP top-15 11 times over that same span, and three of their last four hires were failures. They stepped outside "the family" to bring in Rich Rodriguez in 2008. His three seasons are now remembered as three of the most miserable seasons for coach and program in modern college football history; the difference between his tenure and Cooper's is the baseline separation between the Maize and Blue and the Scarlet and Gray. After Rodriguez, Michigan brought former assistant Brady Hoke back to campus; he went 11-2 in his first season, and then 20-18 in his next three.
And that brings us to Jim Harbaugh. On the one hand, one wonders where Michigan football would be today if he'd never entered coaching. A unicorn candidate that came along at just the right time, the former Michigan quarterback did what he was hired to do: win a bunch of games, and piss a lot of people off along the way.
Ordinarily, a tenure as long and successful as Harbaugh's is a fig tree, bearing fruit for years to come. The Harbaugh tenure was anything but ordinary, though, and it now seems as if the entire athletics department may need a clean break from itself. Jesse Minter, the 42-year-old national title winning coordinator working under Harbaugh in Los Angeles, has likely fallen from shoe-in candidate to persona non grata through no fault of his own.
So... yeah. Of course Michigan is interested in Kalen DeBoer.
At least at the college level, there are no obvious candidates with ties to pre-Harbaugh Michigan. That means Michigan is attempting to do something it hasn't done since 1969: make a successful hire of a candidate with no prior ties to the program. That search resulted in Bo Schembechler.
And they're attempting to do so with an interim president and an athletics director facing questions about his own job security.
None of this is to say Michigan can't or won't hire a successful coach, but it's a degree of difficulty never before seen that has missed on more hires than it's hit in the recent past.