EFWolverine Wolverine Immortal
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After two and a half years, reality begins to sink in.
5 hrs. ago (
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I guess this is where I pull a Joe Lieberman and break away from my party because of one crucial issue.
Well, here goes. I know some people here look forward to what I have to say. I already posted a blog post about it. A lot of what I say here will be a repeat of that.
So...
I suppose I kept blinders on because I've met the man in person on more than one occasion and I've spent enough time around people close to him to know he's not the immoral thug he's portrayed in the media. I know he's a good, decent person who was dealt a very unfair hand and has been treated like garbage by some very agenda-driven people in certain positions of power.
But the fact is this: Rich Rodriguez is one of the top 5 offensive minds in college football, and would be an amazing offensive coordinator at a high level BCS school, or an elite head coach under the proper circumstances at a non-BCS school.
But as a high level BCS coach, he is a failure, because he is guilty of almost criminal negligence on the defensive side of the ball. The "spread doesn't work in the Big 10" argument is a stupid one that holds no truth to it whatsoever. Rich and his assistants on the offensive side of the ball have done a great, great job turning around the flaming trainwreck they were handed two years ago. The current Michigan offensive line still isn't 100% Rich and Greg Frey, but it's the best offensive line Michigan's had in a decade. It's a mishmash unit at RB with decent, but not elite, players. The wideouts are dependable, not spectacular. Denard Robinson is an electric playmaker who was offered as an athlete by a bunch of schools, and Rich, Calvin Magee and Rod Smith saw the tools and intangibles in him that could be molded into a legitimately deadly spread offense QB.
But everything Rich has done right on the offensive side of the ball - the stubborn dedication to installing his system no matter what, recruiting specific types of players to fit that system and tirelessly working to make sure it was done right - he has failed at every aspect of that on the other side. And that just can't happen in order to be the head coach at a place like Michigan. Rich spends no time with the defense in practice, and yet he is responsible for the defense somehow being worse as his tenure goes on.
In 2008, he brought Tony Gibson and Bruce Tall with him from West Virginia, hired Jay Hopson from Southern Miss to coach linebackers, and hired Scott Shafer from Stanford to be defensive coordinator. When Shafer arrived, he had a reputation of being a blitz-heavy lunatic whose defenses racked up sacks by the bunches. And as the 2008 season unfolded, Michigan's defense was curiously passive, opting to drop into soft, bull**** zones instead of sending the house after the QB. What happened? Well, midway through the season, Rich's boys - most notably Gibson - essentially cut Shafer's balls off and took control of the defense, to the point where Shafer was literally excluded from defensive staff meetings. Rich stood by and allowed this to happen. This culminated in the Purdue game that saw Michigan's defense give up 48 points and 522 yards to a Boilermakers offense quarterbacked by a third string freshman who was a wide receiver weeks earlier.
After the season, Shafer was fired, rendering any bleak lessons and schemes taught to the players during the season as useless. Shafer's now the defensive coordinator for the 15th-ranked defense in the country at Syracuse.
So enter Greg Robinson. The scheme wasn't radically different, just tweaked, with new terminology and some new assignments. For the most part it was a 3-4 or a 4-3 under. There were still very noticeable personnel deficiencies at certain spots, and to the surprise of no one, the defense crumbled into another smoldering mess by the end of the 2009 season, with the safety and linebacker spots being especially embarrassing. This time, the chopping block came down on linebackers coach Jay Hopson. By the end of 2008, the linebackers were halfway decent. For whatever reason, the coaching Hopson gave them didn't mesh with Robinson, and both Obi Ezeh and Jonas Mouton regressed badly in 2009, both of them putting forth multiple embarrassing efforts. So Hopson was let go and went to Memphis.
Rodriguez's solution? He promoted a quality control staffer from within from the WVU days, and "recommended" to Robinson that the defense make the adjustment to a 3-3-5 scheme with terminology used from the West Virginia days. It is here that the Michigan fans crying for Greg Robinson to be fired are misguided. The defense we're running now isn't Greg Robinson's design. He is not helping matters, but this is not his defense. It's Rich Rodriguez's bastard child, and it's an abomination. He has failed to dedicate this program to any specific scheme or direction on the defensive side of the ball. In a sense, he was doomed from the start, when Jeff Casteel turned down the job to stay at WVU. BTW, West Virginia's defense is currently ranked 7th in the country.
He also was foolish enough to go to the 3-3-5 at the start of Year THREE. That's bad enough after the Shafer debacle. Worse when you consider that Rocky Long, one of the gurus of the 3-3-5 defense, was available after the 2008 season, having resigned from New Mexico. Yet for some reason Rich has decided to push this scheme on a coordinator who doesn't know it and a team entirely ill-equipped to run it. Forcing a scheme on the wrong personnel is annoying, but understandable....if this was his first year on the job and not his third. But to force a scheme on this defense...
The "strength" of Michigan's defense, if there is one, is the defensive line. Yet we are running a scheme that takes a lineman off the field. The worst part of the defense is the secondary. Yet we are running a scheme that puts an extra DB on the field. The linebackers are timid, slow to react and can't shed blocks. Yet we are running a scheme that relies on linebackers to react quickly to fill the gaps created by the defensive line's slants.
Lloyd Carr left this team with some very irritating gaps; specifically at safety and linebacker (talking just defense here). But under Rich Rodriguez's "guidance", every single thing about the defense has swirled the drain. There is not a single redeeming quality here. They aren't strong, they aren't fast, they don't tackle well, they don't take proper angles, they don't play assignment football, they don't contain, they don't force turnovers, they don't do ANYTHING. They simply occupy space until the offense has to take the field again.
Funny, since I think that might be Rich's attitude toward defense in general.
I hate that I'm saying this. I like the guy. Like I said, he's a good person. But after witnessing that fiasco yesterday, it's clear to me now that this is a problem that will not be fixed.
So...fire away, folks. I don't have any more excuses. I'm done defending this incompetence.
After two and a half years, reality begins to sink in. 5 hrs. ago (permalink)
