On the Rich Rodriguez Firing

Three years ago, I was surprised to hear that Rich Rodriguez was hired by Michigan to be their head football coach. I could understand why both parties liked the pairing, but I had some misgivings about the actual relationship.

When Lloyd Carr was retiring from his job as the head coach of Michigan, he was leaving under a cloud of a lack of recent success. While he turned out several good teams, he had been having a lot of trouble with Ohio State after the arrival of Jim Tressel, and his loss to Appalachain State was an embarrassment from which he could never really recover. Add in a few embarrassing losses in the Rose Bowl and Michigan was getting restless.

Meanwhile, Rich Rodriguez was a very hot name in college football, thanks to some huge wins by West Virginia in the previous years. Admittedly, he had been upset by Pittsburgh in the final weekend of 2007, knocking the Mountaineers out of national title game and out of their shot at their first-ever national title. But his offense was a thing of beauty and Rich Rodriguez, as its architect, could not have been flying higher in the national estimation.

The Problem with Perfection

One of the funny things I have learned about the NFL is that the first pick in the draft is not always the best thing in the world to have. That's because there is usually a player that you, as the team with the first pick, are supposed to pick. It could be a running back or a linebacker or (usually) a quarterback, but he is always THE guy that you are supposed to take. However, that player may not be all that they are cracked up to be, they may not be that motivated once they get their giant contract and multi-million-dollar signing bonus, or they may just not be designed for the pro-style game. The thing about it is that, even if the team has misgivings about Joe Number One, they are often obligated to take him because they would be considered stupid not to.

I mention this because Rich Rodriguez was THE coach to hire after the 2007 season. And Michigan, as the winningest team in college football history, is as prime a destination as any other. What was not to like about this matchup? A great, forward-thinking coach with an innovative offense at a football juggernaut program that could attract top players from across the country. To the outside observer, it really was the best of both worlds and it seemed to be an absolute slam dunk for both parties.

Unfortunately, however good a coach Rich Rodriguez is, he was not a good fit for Michigan. For one, they played in the Big Ten, where teams based on small, quick players are going to be ground down by the big, hard-hitting players. Yes, the small players will be able to get loose for long gains, but all those hits from the big guys were going to take their toll as the season wore on. Especially in an offense where the quarterback was expected to carry to ball so often; that quarterback was going to be worn out and beat up by the end of the season.

The Oft-Cited (By Me) Problems With the Rodriguez Spread Option

As I have pointed out on several occasions, all those little dings and bruises add up over time. Running backs can come off the field and walk off a twisted ankle. A quarterback has to stay out there and run on that ankle again, or use it as part of his proper throwing motion. Those little pains sometimes just need a quick rest before they are worked out again. If they don't get that rest, small hurts can turn into injuries. And even if they don't turn into injuries, pain is going to limit the player all the same, which means more hits are going to be applied, which means that he is going to get more bumps, bruises and possible injuries. This is particularly true for the smaller quarterbacks that Rodriguez prefers.

The Rodriguez spread option, when it works, is darned fun to watch when it's not against your team. But the X's and O's of it are sometimes overridden by the human limitations of the people running it.

However, I should point out that I watched Michigan several times this year, and you could absolutely see that this offense was brilliant. It consistently created excellent opportunities, but they could never capitalize on those opportunities with any consistency. Dropped passes and fumbles were particular problems for Michigan this year, and they killed several prime scoring opportunities that could have put more pressure on the opposition. This offense is not something I would want to run all the time for reasons stated above, but other coaches can clearly learn a lot from the plays run in it.

The Other Problem

The biggest problem for RichRod, however, was his defense. Or, more to the point, his lack thereof. His offense was effective—usually—but his defenses just kept getting worse. This year was a particular problem, when the defense could barely even slow anybody down on their way to the end zone. The 3-3-5 scheme could not be more poorly designed to stop Big Ten power offenses, and it showed by the bucketload this year. So even though the RichRod offense was starting to work properly, the defense was making it impossible for the offense to get on the field very much, and it was giving up too many points to let the offense keep up.

On the Firing

It seems that West Virginia fans got to see all their most angry wishes come true. They were very bitter at Rodriguez for treating their school like a second-tier stepping stone, which turned his departure into the sort of acrimonious divorce that leaves the children scarred and embittered forever.

Michigan was in a tough position coming into the bowl game. After two terrible season, Rodriguez got the Wolverines to a bowl. Admittedly, not a very good one, but it was a bowl game. They showed some improvement thanks to the emergence of Denard Robinson, but 7-5 should not happen at Michigan.

The problem was that those recruits that Rodriguez pulled in to run his offense were only sophomores this year, so their best years were still ahead of them. They were still works in progress, so they might still be able to bust out with a great season once they got more seasoning.

Academically, I pretty well figured that Michigan was likely to need to fire Rodriguez at some point. He just wasn't a good fit there. But if he managed to pull out an 8-5 season, I thought he might get one more season to make his offense work. As we all saw, he didn't. Not only did he lose the bowl game, but his Michigan team was annihilated 52-14 by a fairly unremarkable Mississippi State team. After that, there was simply no ambivalence left. That's the thing about bowl games: they stand alone in a gap in the season, magnifying the games into huge proportion, making wins especially elating and losses crushing beyond comprehension.

There was no recovering from 52-14. Not after 3 years of frustration and futility. Not after 3 years of successively worse and worse defenses. Not after 3 years of gut-wrenching, agonizing losses. Not after 3 years of not even sniffing a Big Ten title. You wait 3 years to get back to a bowl and that happens. 52-14 is a complete catastrophe. Magnified, it is the Apocalypse. It was over and everybody knew it, Rich Rodriguez included.

I stood up for Rodriguez as much as I could. I realize he was kind of a d-bag in a lot of ways, but he was a very good coach for a long time and I liked his West Virginia teams. But after that disaster in the bowl game, there was simply no questions or devil's-advocate arguments left. It was time to move on.

The Future

Michigan football will be back. Notre Dame football survived Gerry Faust, Oklahoma football survived John Blake, Michigan football will surive Rich Rodriguez. Nebraska football survived Bill Callahan and they are on their way back; not all the way, but they are on their way back.

Rich Rodriguez is a tougher case. After dropping the ball so badly at a premiere program, it will be tough for him to resurrect his career. Unfortunately, he burned his bridges at his alma mater (West Virginia), so he won't be going back there. The Big East would be a nice destination, except that West Virginia is in that conference and he won't be welcome back in Morgantown. Likely, he will end up at a smaller school somewhere in the mid-major range before maybe moving up to another job with a moderately good team like Mississippi, Clemson, or Arizona State. At the very least, he will be able to get a job as an offensive coordinator in 2012. But he will not be back to the top of the mountain.