"If you run a program at Ohio State or at Michigan or something like that, so much of what you do is public," Rodriguez said. "There's not all this crazy cheating and things like that going on that people think. There are some guys out there that bend the rules a little bit or they get around the rules and try to get a competitive advantage. I don't think that was the case in this at all. There were five guys who sold items who shouldn't have sold it. And they were wrong for doing it. Did that give Ohio State a competitive advantage? I don't think so."
Rodriguez continued: "There's coaches out there that are trying to get a competitive advantage the wrong way, a handful, and they seem to get away with it. And there are other coaches that are really trying as hard as they can, doing everything in good faith, and they seem to get nailed. I think that's the thing that frustrates coaches, like, 'Geez look at what these guys did, and they're winning and they did all that.'
"How do we fix that?"
Rodriguez said that while he and his staff at Michigan dealt with negative recruiting, it was never at the hands of Tressel and the staff at Ohio State.
"In my experience in three years of recruiting against them we didn't sense that, hey, Ohio State is one of these schools that are on the edge," Rodriguez said. "There were others we thought were doing that."
Cowherd pressed Rodriguez to identify those schools.
"You're putting me on the spot," Rodriguez said, chuckling. "I think some of them are getting looked at right now. So that will come out here pretty soon."
Rodriguez quickly added another emphatic defense of Ohio State and its recruiting habits, at least as it related to the Michigan-OSU rivalry.
"(We experienced) ? a lot of negative recruiting (while at Michigan)," Rodriguez said. "People just bashing individual coaches and schools and programs, and I think that's a bad practice to do.
"Some people would think Ohio State-Michigan is such a big rivalry, they probably did a lot of negative recruiting. They didn't. There were other schools that did, but they didn't, and that to me sends a message they're trying to do things the right way."
... yes