Steve19;1032145; said:
HTM, look at this man with open eyes. Do you really see a clean break of this contract? Do you really believe he discharged his obligations honorably? Do you really believe that in the span of a few days he can decide that Michigan is the place for him for life and the place where little Rhett will play football? Well, frankly, I don't....
I don't pretend that RR couldn't have handled things better. Maybe he could have handed his resignation letter to Ed Pastilong himself. Maybe he could have waited a little while to call Terrelle Pryor. Maybe he could have met Coleman and Martin in Ann Arbor instead of Toledo (however, hopping a flight to Ann Arbor sends up flashing neon signs and sirens of suspicion.) Maybe he could have been more up front with his bosses. Maybe he should take the high road and pay the buyout. I hold absolutely no illusions that when he says, "I want to retire here," he'll feel the same way in 10 or 15 years. That's how coaching is these days.
I don't care he was saying a few weeks ago. A coach has
absolutely no choice but to
always put the happiest face on the situation he's in right at the moment.
Especially during the season. Doing anything else is burning the bridge before you cross it. You think the folks in WV want to hang him from the rafters now.....take a guess at what might happen if he was publicly hinting he might leave, and oh by the way Morgantown isn't really all it's cracked up to be, and boy I'd love to coach at some Big Ten school. Coaches also have no choice but to refuse to answer questions about speculative jobs, exactly the way RR did last Saturday. It's not being disingenuous, because that's the nature of the job. Disingenuous is Nick Saban convening a press conference specifically to say, "I will not be the coach at Alabama," and then going to be the coach at Alabama. Disingenuous is Dennis Franchione convincing his kids not to take the one-shot opportunity to transfer without penalty, and then transferring himself.
And I think Michigan did what it had to. There were three choices: Hire within the program as Carr was, look for a diamond in the rough no-namer like Tressel, or hire somebody else's big name. Option #1 sucks. Nobody within the program could possibly have fixed what is wrong with it. Option #2 wasn't really available. OSU had the luxury of being able to take their sweet time because they fired Cooper after the bowl, and they conducted their search during a dead time for recruiting. And finding Tressel did not require that much digging, him having already been with the program, and coaching in-state. Well, there's nobody like that for Michigan. That leaves Option #3: Hire someone else's coach. How should Martin have done that? Let every recruit twist in the wind while they wait politely for the bowl season to end? Play the permission game? That worked out great with LSU. Hire somebody who's not going to a bowl?
As for Rich Rodriguez. No doubt he was already thinking about leaving, otherwise it's likely his mind wouldn't have been made up so fast. And it's been theorized that Don Nehlen had a lot to do with it. Nehlen had a lot of complimentary words for Michigan, which he probably told RR before he made the decision. And let's look at what it's known that he did. He met twice with his bosses the day after meeting with Martin. He laid out a list of things he wanted done. He told the team to their faces that he was leaving. He never once denied interest in the Michigan job once it became known he was a candidate. He never declared his intention not to take the job. He did not make a circus out of it. Are these not the signs of a coach making at least some kind of a good-faith effort to leave the right way? I'd assume that Friday through Sunday were
extremely busy days for Rodriguez, not to mention ones where he had a lot of decision-making to do, and I don't think it's fair to bash him for everything he didn't do.
I find it funny that two of the football criticisms leveled at Rodriguez are that he can't recruit (and recruits criminals) and can't coach big games. Leave aside for a minute the fact that he's recruiting to
Morgantown, West Virginia, has crappy facilities, and has no in-state talent base to draw from and has to compete primarily with Ohio State and Penn State for recruits. If he can't recruit, then the fact that he's even in big games at all is testament to an extreme coaching talent. And the notion that he can't beat good teams is kind of explained by the lack of talent on the field, isn't it?
Rodriguez is too talented a coach to be leaving with his tail between his legs in three years. I see a lot of boastful posts - he couldn't recruit to WVU and won't recruit to UM either; he'll be out in three years; he's classless and dragging down the program; he recruits criminals; he chokes in big games, etc., etc., etc. I can only shake my head at that stuff, because the man has never shown up on the list of coaches with major problems. West Virginia has not had the problems that Miami, FSU, etc. seem to have. Think of lying weasel coaches that you've heard of - Saban, Petrino, Franchione. Think of the undisciplined ones running shoddy programs - Fulmer, Zook, Coker. Has RR ever shown up on these lists? Now all of a sudden he's hired at Michigan, and what a scumbag. Pardon me if I don't buy it. Rich Rodriguez is no Bo, but nobody is. My only disappointment with the whole thing is that I have to wait a year or three to see all the naysayers proven wrong. Give him the resources and in-state talent at Michigan, and I think we'll find he can recruit. Give him a program with a touch of the old school left and I think we'll find he can recruit without having to resort to the more questionable characters. And give him time, and I think we'll find he can win the big ones. He's done nothing but drive upwards his whole career.
Didn't mean for this to be so long, but I figured I might as well get it all out there.
