That's defining a legacy

I was briefly concerned yesterday that I would wake up at some point and realize that it was all just a dream and Michigan had in fact not beaten Ohio State for the first time since shortly after I graduated high school. It's Sunday now. It's really over.

The words: I do not have them. I just keep telling people "Michigan beat Ohio State!" and making weird sounds that apparently are some combination of exhilaration and relief. That's all I can do after that.

I went from nervous to concerned to psyched to ecstatic to frustrated to ANGAR to nervous to scared to excited to WOOO to NOOO to horrified to horribly horrified to relieved to exhilarated to ... ummm ... whatever I am now. I don't even know what to feel. Michigan beat Ohio State. It's over. There's no more streak. There's no more crap. The stupid fanboi Columbus Dispatch counter is gone (I won't even link to the page because it's so stupid). It's so, like, satisfying. But that doesn't seem sufficient.

I looked for a picture yesterday that told the story better. I found a few:

. . . . .

One of the revelations from Three and Out was that Lloyd Carr held a team meeting the day after the end of the '07 season and offered to sign transfer papers on the spot for anybody who wanted to leave rather than play for RichRod (the degree to which he advised leaving depends on which player you believe). A lot of guys took him up on that, and the abyss of '08 was directly related. That team was never gonna be good but didn't have to be "10 new offensive starters and multiple starting walk-ons" awful.

Brian Cook at MGoBlog wrote this at the end of the '08 debacle (he also busted it out after the Minnesota game this year for a post that says a lot of what I'm saying right now):

Some of you will stay. And you will go insane. You will work, and you will work, and we will build something here from nothing. Because, make no mistake, this is nothing. You will build something out of this. If you're a senior next year and you teach some freshman something, you will build something. If you're a freshman and you refuse to quit on your stupid decision, you will build something.

What you build will be yours. Few in the great history of his university have had that opportunity. Everything came based on what came before. They were part of a great chain, now broken.

Those of you who stay will forge a new one, starting today. When we are done we will fix the last link to the broken chain, and break the first link, and tell those who come after us to live up to it.

It took three years. The guys who stuck it out put up with more crap than the previous 130 classes combined and, before this year, had absolutely nothing to show for it except a bunch of devastating losses, a lot of you-don't-want-that-record records, (allegedly) one pathetically pointless bowl game and another coaching change. Everything memorable was memorable only in a pitiful way. That hardly even qualifies as a legacy.

These seniors were given nothing (nothing good, anyway) and earned everything. There is something to live up to only because of them.


Damn straight. That's defining a legacy.

David Molk and Mike Martin and Junior Hemingway ...


... and Kevin Koger ...


... and Ryan Van Bergen ...


... earned that. Those who stayed will be are champions.

I don't wanna forget the last three years. I stuck it out and suffered (not the same way they did) and watched this team go from nothing to something to this thing. Some people didn't; they gave up their emotional investment and will never understand what I'm feeling right now. I don't wanna forget the last seven years either. The "appreciate success blah blah failure blah blah" quote comes to mind.

It didn't used to be like this; this is sweeter. I'm gonna enjoy it.

. . . . .

My other all-over-the-place thoughts on the game will be consolidated here. First ... I mean ... whoa. That was most definitely not what I expected, which you probably know if you read my post from Friday night.

Ohio's offense went from "lol look how much they suck" to "irresistible force" against a defense that came into the game in the top 15 in the country in yardage and the top 10 in scoring. Braxton Miller did become Troy Smith circa 2004 -- until the final drive, anyway. The idea of him running the Urban Meyer offense concerns me a bit. The idea of him running the 2-minute offense ... not so much. Letting 40 seconds run off the clock on two plays that gained a total of four yards and then spiking it on third down worked out great for Michigan but not so great for Ohio.

The big difference between yesterday's Braxton Miller and the rest-of-the-season version of Braxton Miller: hitting the big stuff. Ohio's passing game has been completely dormant due to the quarterbacks' consistent inability to complete anything longer than five yards. The plays are there but never made; watching Miller is actually a lot like watching freshman Denard, who had hilariously wide-open receivers all over the place but was about 50-50 to throw it to those guys or members of the opposing secondary.

As for Michigan's defense, the secondary was not good. They probably had "run run run run run" beaten into their heads all week since that's the only thing Ohio has been able to do all year, but yikes. This ...

... is bad. This ...

... is also bad. And this ...

... is worse given the situation. Clean pair of shorts, plz.

Thomas Gordon blew his zone on the first touchdown, got yanked, watched Troy Woolfolk do the same thing on the second touchdown, then went back in the game to do some more sucking on a couple other bombs, including the last one. I would be concerned about the free safety spot if Michigan had given up more than one 50-plus-yard play all year. As it is, I'm not really sure what to make of that stuff.

The idea of Greg Mattison getting outcoached by Jim Bollman is patently ridiculous and therefore must be disputed. My assumption is that the gameplan was pretty similar to the one against Nebraska: put eight in the box, stop the run with some consistency and hope the arm-punting QB is too incompetent to produce anything downfield. It worked to some extent -- Boom Herron had 15 carries for a whopping 37 yards -- but Miller's light-bulb moment came at a rather inconvenient time and was aided by the aforementioned atrocious safety play. Michigan's typical third-down okie package also was less than ideal against a team that'll run quarterback draw on third-and-anything. I yelled draw-related profanities more than once.

Clearly, Michigan isn't Alabama in terms of talent. Not even Greg Mattison's awesomeness can always overcome the horrifying mistakes made by three freshman starters and a couple other former MAC-level recruits in the back seven. The assessment and going-forward expectations (in the short term) will have to be lowered just a tad.

Still, the Michigan defense just played its worst game of the year and will still end the regular season at ninth in scoring defense (!) and 16th in total defense. The slight drop from last week can't be criticized in any way given the absurdity of those numbers in general.

On the flip side, Al Borges FTW. Michigan put up 444 total yards and 40 points (although two of those were on a safety) against an elite defense despite not having a truly short field all game. UM averaged 9.8 yards a pass, 5.5 yards a carry and 6.63 yards a play. Think about that: almost 7 yards a play! That's easy to do against Minnesota but not as easy against Ohio and Jim Heacock.

There weren't a ton of new looks in general. What worked was the heavy implementation of the veer, which produced this ...

... and this ...

... and this:

There was also a lot of jet-sweep motion and a true counter draw, both of which were pretty useful in terms of getting guys out of position:

Fitz Toussaint finished with his typical 20 carries for 120 yards and now has over 1,000 yards this year despite not becoming the starter until five weeks ago. Crazy.

And Denard ... just wow. In this case, the numbers tell the story: 26 carries for 170 yards (the third-highest rushing-yardage total in the history of The Game) and two touchdowns and a ridiculous passing line of 14 for 17 for 167 yards with three TDs and no picks. He personally accounted for all five of Michigan's touchdowns. He threw as many touchdown passes as incompletions. He did this on a huge third-and-11 ...

... and he did this to set up what should've been the winning touchdown (more on that momentarily):

It was the best game of his career. He was pretty ridiculous in the 2010 Notre Dame game (502 total yards lol), but given the level of competition and his scoring production, this one was better and obviously bigger. He could've had six freakin' touchdowns.

Speaking of which, the late-game officiating was pretty crappy. I'm not entirely sure how the replay booth could look at the two angles provided on Toussaint's should-have-been touchdown, neither of which was right on the goal line, and say, "that is indisputably a foot short of the line" (which is where the ball was spotted).

Whaaa? If Toussaint was down, he was down with the ball at the 1-inch line, and I don't think it was indisputable since I'm disputing it right now. Denard scored on the next play only to have it called back on a hold and a personal foul that made what should have been a touchdown a 43-yard field-goal attempt. The kick was good but not very soothing since OSU still just needed a touchdown to win a game that had already seen 74 points scored.

Thank God for Courtney Avery. Gratuitous video:

Yesssssss.

So .... Michigan is 10-2. Unless Georgia beats LSU and initiates an SEC takeover of the BCS, Michigan is probably headed to the Sugar Bowl. The Fiesta Bowl is also possible but less likely since the Sugar would get the first at-large pick to replace the SEC champ (LSU) and Michigan is probably a better draw in New Orleans than Stanford. This is mind-boggling and awesome and eeeeeeeeeeee.

There is literally nothing more I could've asked of Brady Hoke this year. Whatever I said in criticism of his track record has to be thrown out the window and replaced by what I've seen the last four months. That's his track record at Michigan; it's impressive. BRADY HOKE GETS IT:

One more time: Michigan 40, Ohio State 34.

It's over

The picture says it all. Party time? Party time.

Beat Ohio

It was almost exactly eight years ago that I bought a single ticket to the '03 Michigan-Ohio State game and flew back for the weekend. I chose wisely:


Yes. It was thoroughly enjoyable.

I never thought at the time that I'd be sitting here eight years later waiting for another Michigan win. That's almost 30 percent of my life (guh). I don't feel like calculating the number of days since it would only make me angry.

It's been a long time.

. . . . .

My brain has been going "OMG SATURDAY SATURDAY SATURDAY" for the last six days and yet I can't come up with any words for any sort of preview. I have both everything and nothing to say.

I wrote in my season-preview-type thing that Michigan would end up 8-4 and Ohio State would end up "closer to typical Ohio State than apocalyptic Ohio State." Nay. One team is a win away from a BCS game and the other is a loss away from 6-6, which makes perfect sense except lol wut? Why is Adam Sandler coaching Ohio?

This is the year it has to end. Eight years of horrifyingly painful losses and death and frustration and pity I didn't even want were eight years too many. No mas.

Ohio has an offense roughly the equivalent of Minnesota's (!) and a defense slightly worse than Michigan's (!!!). There is literally no meaningful offensive or defensive stat/comparison I can find that says Michigan shouldn't win this game. It's going to happen unless Denard turns the ball over a thousand times (plausible, unfortunately) and Braxton Miller turns into Troy Smith circa 2004. Michigan is 7-0 at home and hasn't been challenged since Notre Dame. The defense is getting better to the point of being legitimately elite, which is such a ridiculous statement that I can't really believe it unless I look at the stats and say "oh yeah, elite." A fairly standard (for lack of a better word) game will end with Ohio having about 10 points; Michigan hasn't scored fewer than 28 at home this season.

It's pretty hard to reconcile all that with the past 2,500-ish days. It's even harder given the past 1,000-ish; Michigan has been outscored 100-24 in the last three versions of The Game, two of which weren't even competitive after halftime and one of which was competitive only because Jim Tressel allowed it to be by being Jim Tressel. Going from there to here makes no sense logistically but makes soooo much sense to that thing inside me that protects the stupidly childish belief that Michigan represents everything good and the other guys represent everything bad. I can't explain that thing any better, but I don't think I need to; you get it.

I keep telling myself to lower the expectations. Not happening. This is it. I'd be worried about the possibility of being heartbroken if it hadn't become the norm over the last eight years, interrupted only by blips of utter devastation (2006) and embarrassment (2008, 2010).

There's nothing left to do but win. I wish I could be there.

Beat Ohio. Please.

SEC chaos theory

As of right now, there's no question that LSU should be No. 1 and Alabama should be No. 2. Nobody else has a comparable resume; Arkansas being third says way more about the middle-of-the-top-10 implosion than it does about Arkansas being some kind of terrifying juggernaut. We're talking about a team that beat Ole Miss and Vanderbilt by a combined eight points and hasn't really done anything more impressive than rally from 18 down to beat Texas A&M (now 6-5) by four points.

But since it's November and crazy/unpredictable/WTF things are guaranteed to happen, the question of the week is this: What happens if Arkansas beats LSU on Friday? OMG CHAOS:

NOM NOM NOM.

I've been arguing this week that a hypothetical one-loss LSU would still have to be No. 1 because every other contender would have at least one loss and nothing close to LSU's resume. Think about it: With the head-to-head tiebreakers irrelevant since all of the top three teams would've beaten each other, wouldn't you have to zoom out and vote on overall quality? Pending a totally improbable Arkansas blowout Saturday, I don't see any way Arkansas can stake a claim to No. 1 given the aforementioned meh-ness this season (not to mention the four-touchdown loss to currently higher-ranked Alabama).

The computers apparently agree (this is from BCS expert-type guy Brad Edwards):

"When I was able to study the details of the computer ratings, it became obvious that those numbers are so heavily in LSU's favor that it would be difficult for the Tigers to fall outside of the BCS top two, even if they drop to No. 3 in both polls."

Translation: LSU is golden. There's no way they drop lower than No. 2, which is really the only spot that matters.

What I've assumed all along is that the SEC divisional tiebreakers are the same as the Big 12's: the highest-ranked team in the BCS wins. But that's not the case. It's actually kinda the opposite: The lowest-ranked team gets thrown out of the equation, and the remaining two teams default to the standard head-to-head two-team tiebreaker. If LSU doesn't fall out of the top two, Alabama can't win the tiebreaker and Arkansas would have to jump Alabama to win it; that seems wildly unlikely given that Bama is currently way higher in both the polls and the computers and beat Arkansas by a gajillion points like six weeks ago. In other words, it's pretty likely that LSU will "win" the SEC West even with a loss Saturday. Bama sliding up to No. 1 wouldn't matter.

Edwards thinks the human votes will be split somewhere close to evenly between the three, although that's probably an Arkansas-friendly estimate given that LSU is currently a unanimous No. 1. If he's right and it comes down to the computers or he's wrong and the voters say "oh yeah, Alabama killed Arkansas," Bama is gonna come out ahead. Who's gonna drop Alabama (after beating Auburn, obviously) behind Arkansas? Again: Alabama 38, Arkansas 14.

Back to Edwards for the upshot:

... a seemingly improbable event is certain to happen -- either Alabama will beat Auburn and drop from 2 to 3 in the BCS standings or Arkansas will beat LSU and remain at No. 3 in the BCS.

In my e-pinion, that last scenario seems way more likely than the first, which means the result of the Arkansas-LSU game matters not at all. That seems totally illogical on the surface but a lot more logical given the big-picture view of what all three teams have done this year and which one-loss versions would be most deserving of spots in the title game.

Lee Corso never fails to amuse me

The most profane thing that's ever appeared on this blog comes directly from College GameDay:


Hilarious. I'm not sure if I laughed harder at the "AH, FUCK IT!" or at Chris Fowler reacting the way only Chris Fowler can. Please keep Lee Corso on TV; the humor is totally worth the senility.

BTW, does GameDay not have a delay? Seems like it might be worth the effort.

Miami knows what's up

Remember when Miami went boom back in August? The current-player penalties turned out to be pretty insignificant, which was spectacular news for Al Golden but mostly meaningless for an institution in a lake-deep pile of potentially disastrous muck. One day in the (probably distant) future, the NCAA is gonna come back with a notice of allegations that's about 8,000 pages long and includes a bunch of awful things, and awful penalties will follow.

Miami's response:

CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- Miami is not going to a bowl this season, self-imposing a ban that school officials say was "necessary" in response to an ongoing NCAA investigation into the university's compliance practices.

Players were informed Sunday that Friday's game against Boston College will be the last this season, even though the Hurricanes have enough wins to qualify for a postseason appearance. By self-imposing a ban, Miami is trying to lessen the impact of whatever sanctions the NCAA hands down once its investigation ends.

I'm not sure there's ever been a self-imposed bowl ban before. Given the NCAA's typically glacial speed, it's pretty unlikely Miami would've been looking at any immediate punishment; there's a 90-day window after the notice of allegations (which is probably a ways off considering the depth of the story) before a hearing with the relevant people, and the penalties aren't finalized until some time after that. We're talking, like, April at the earliest. In other words, this year's Miami team had already dealt with all the NCAA penalties it was gonna get.

But here's the thing: Donna Shalala isn't an idiot. Taking a one-year ban up front is a token gesture for a 6-5 team that was headed to the SomeRandomSponsor.com Meaningless Bowl but also might make a two-year (or three-year or whatever) ban a little less likely, which is the ultimate goal when you've got a 15-foot-thick NCAA file that's gonna end up being categorized somewhere between "really bad" and "totally devastating." Miami's in damage-control mode and is sacrificing one meaningless game to try to save a a couple others that might actually mean something. It's a chess move with no real downside (although I'd feel terrible* for seniors like Jacory Harris and Sean Spence if they weren't directly involved).

I guess this is also a chess move:

Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith said Tuesday that Ohio State would not penalize itself by keeping the football team from making a postseason trip as a way of mitigating potential NCAA sanctions.

Obvsly. Why worry about the NCAA when you can send your unwatchable 6-6 team to the the Motor City Bowl to play (insert MAC team here) in front of 27,000 people? W00t.

Ohio State and Miami are in remarkably similar situations right now; it's hilarious to watch one athletic department do things the logical way and the other do everything the stupidly defiant way. The big difference is that Miami knows what's up and is headed straight for damage control while Ohio State still refuses to believe that anything bad could possibly happen at Ohio State since Jim Tressel is practically Jesus and everybody gets a new car every three months and so on and so forth.

That's their story and they're sticking to it. Nothing changes. The consistency is both impressive and amusing given the unending flood of information for the last five months that finally resulted in a "failure to monitor" charge about two weeks ago. They did deviate just long enough after that letter to go "crap crap crap" and slash a few scholarships, but that was a strategic blip.

Everything is fine. The infidels will be defeated.


*I do actually feel sorry for Al Golden. He took a seemingly good job that looks a lot less good right now and can't really bail without looking like the East Coast version of Lane Kiffin.

He's back, in Bear Down form

Rich Rodriguez is the head coach at Arizona. It's pretty weird to type that sentence and end it with "Arizona" instead of "Michigan." Watching his introductory press conference Tuesday was like watching ... umm ... man, I dunno. Something kinda awkward. The Arizona pin and red-with-blue-trim tie just seemed so weird.


I want to root* for Rich Rodriguez. I want to root for him for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I think he's a genuinely good guy who's a genuinely good coach and was just sort of in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong idea of how to handle a defense. Like I said yesterday, there's a lot to the RichRod-at-Michigan story that's not known (or not known correctly). At the bottom of every "Rodriguez hired at Arizona" story are a bunch of horrifyingly dumb comments that are causing me to have seizure-like flashbacks to every Michigan message-board discussion from 2008-10. I'd almost moved on.

Let's start with this: Arizona did pretty well for itself. Urban Meyer's not coming to Tucson to take over a program that's roughly the Pac-12 equivalent of Texas Tech or Purdue but with a tougher path to a conference title. Say what you want about the last three years, but when Nick Foles was a freshman, Rich Rodriguez had West Virginia at No. 1 in the country and within four points of the national title game the year after turning down the Alabama job that eventually went to Nick Saban. Saying his stock has dropped would be like saying (insert Enron joke here); that's a given. But he didn't get stupid the day he went to Michigan. Buying low and hoping to get the four-years-ago results instead of the Michigan results is a value** bet.

RichRod can flat-out coach a running game. I watched for three years as Michigan's ground game went from 3.91 yards a carry (about average for the previous decade) to 4.52 (the best Michigan season since before Carr) to 5.58 (basically Oregon). Some of that had to do with the quarterbacks and some of it had to do with the development of the offensive line, but a lot of it was just strategically manufactured via pulling H-backs and using the backside zone to destroy the scrape and embarrassing safeties who did anything other than hang out on the deep hashes. Everything had a purpose and played off of something else; hence my love for bubble screens and high-lowing corners who hang out in the flats. The passing game in general is somewhat rudimentary (it's pretty hard to compare that with what Al Borges is doing), but the aforementioned stuff worked because it was designed entirely to stop defenses from doing what they want to do to defend the spread 'n' shred.

One of the 47,000 soul-punching debates that went on every week in the Michigan blogosphere was whether the offense actually "worked" since most games against real teams ended with Michigan scoring nowhere close to enough points despite racking up a bunch of yards. I will argue until the day I die that the offense was never the problem. When the offense puts up 480 yards and 14 points because Tate Forcier throws three red-zone picks or Denard turns it over four times on the other side of the 50, that's not the offense; that's a first-year starting quarterback doing things first-year starting quarterbacks usually do. RichRod never had the benefit of a second-year starter or a good defense (you know there's more on that coming), which turned out to be a turnover-tastic combination.

The one concern I had/have about his offense is this: It seemed to wane in effectiveness over the course of the season. The passing game is dependent on fairly precise timing/accuracy on the short stuff (I bet Tate Forcier got told "THREE STEPS!" more times than my 4-year-old gets told to stop fighting), and the whole thing is pretty heavily dependent on the quarterback and a bunch of (typically) undersized skill-position guys. The inane "SPREAD DOESN'T WORK RABBLE RABBLE BIG TEN TOUGHNESS RABBLE" stuff came across as pretty dumb when Michigan was easily averaging more yards per carry than Wisconsin, but the passing game did seem to be a lot more closely related to the weather conditions than it should have been. Whether that was a real thing or just an experience issue is hard to say since most of his recruits at Michigan are just now juniors and are now doing entirely different things in the passing game. It also shouldn't matter at all in Tucson (which isn't exactly Madison in terms of November weather), so that's nice.

The transitions have never gone well offensively (first-year records of 2-8, 1-7-1, 3-8, 3-9), so anyone expecting to add water and get instant 2007 West Virginia is in for some serious disappointment. But I have little doubt that within three years, the UA running game will be one of the two or three best in the conference and the offense as a whole will be something of an Oregon Lite that puts up yards and points on the regular. This has never NOT happened at any of his previous stops. The offense will be good.

The defense ... ummm ... yeah. Rodriguez was a linebacker in college who stumbled into one of the brilliant offensive innovations of the past 20 years (the zone read) and apparently never thought about defense again. It's definitely not his specialty, nor should it be since he's the de facto offensive coordinator (he was also the special-teams coach at Michigan, although I have no idea if he'll continue that at Arizona). He won't spend much time on it and therefore lives and dies with the quality of his D-coordinator. At Michigan, he died.

Jeff Casteel could have changed that. A large part of West Virginia's awesomeness under RichRod was a kinda-unique 3-3-5 stack D that didn't get much recognition but was actually pretty good; they've now finished in the top 15 in total defense three times in the past six years and have been in the top 40 every year but one since Casteel became the full-time D-coordinator in '05. The guy knows what he's doing. He also had a deal in place with Michigan (just like every other member of that West Virginia staff other than totally illogical replacement Bill Stewart) before bailing at the last minute when Stewart offered him a significant raise and a three-year guarantee, something Michigan wouldn't match because Michigan is just so awesome that everybody should coach there for free (duh). If Jeff Casteel ends up at Arizona next year, there's a good chance I'll throw something at the wall and start questioning my existence. There's also a good chance Arizona will be really good in the near future.

Casteel aside, a lot of RichRod's defensive problems at Michigan were his own doing. His first outside hire was Stanford D-coordinator Scott Shafer, a.k.a. the blitz-happiest dude this side of Rex Ryan. He runs a 4-3 and brings pressure like a mofo. That's what he does; he does it well. That's also what Michigan did for the first half of '08, when the defense was OK and held a couple teams to less than a billion points. The week leading up to the Purdue game that year was kinda the turning point: Rodriguez somewhat infamously mandated a switch to a 3-3-5 (whether that was truly his decision or a caving to the defensive guys from West Virginia has never been made totally clear) that turned out to be a complete disaster. Proof: Purdue 48, Michigan 42. Shafer was rightfully pissed and demanded a switch back to the 4-3 for the next game, which not coincidentally was a 29-6 road pasting of a decent Minnesota team (this was before Minnesota fell off a cliff). Shafer "resigned" after the season. There's a widely circulated rumor that he agreed to take the blame for everything if Rodriguez would privately acknowledge that defensive backs coach Tony Gibson was "the worst coach in the country." True or not, this is the stupid stuff that happens when you hire a coordinator to do one thing and have a bunch of assistants who do something else.

Also, a picture says 1,000 words:

Y U SO AWFUL??? Hiring a guy who'd taken Syracuse from "bad" to "black hole" turned out to be not such a good idea. Also not a good idea: Forcing another 4-3 guy to run a 3-3-5 that he had no idea how to run (this is what the insider-y people were saying, anyway). The complete lack of competence in every area makes me skeptical that GERG could have produced a decent defense under any circumstances, so it's kinda hard to know exactly what role the force-fed system played. Everything about Michigan's defense the last two years was a complete and total disaster. This can't be understated.

I saw a thread pop up on MGoBlog the other day that was titled something like, "If RichRod learned at anything at Michigan, it's ____." To me, the answer's easy: Find a good defensive coordinator and get out of his way. He hired a pretty good coordinator in Shafer and screwed it up; he hired a bad one in GERG and never got another chance. He's got a fresh start now and a chance to prove that he knows what he doesn't know, if that makes sense. He knows offense and will have success there regardless of just about any/all variables. He doesn't know defense and needs to be find somebody who does. IMO, his ability to do so is what'll determine his degree of success at Arizona. Nobody wins big without a defense. That's the one significant difference between last year's Michigan that lost by five touchdowns to Mississippi State and this year's Michigan that's a win away from a BCS game.

And then there's the other stuff. I could write 3,000 words here just refuting all the garbage that's been printed in the last three years and rehashed in the last 24 hours. Following a team at a micro level obviously provides some perspective; when you see/read/hear everything, you have the context that most people don't have. I don't even know where to start, but I guess the logical place would be the NCAA stuff since that's what everybody seems to be throwing around as "baggage" or whatever.

Without getting into the "everybody does it blah blah" argument, anyone who thinks RichRod runs a rogue program or participates in Tressel-style rules avoidance is a moron and a MORAN:

Since you don't care as much about Michigan football as I do and therefore didn't follow all the small print regarding the NCAA investigation, here's what it boiled down to: 15 minutes of practice-time overage per day (this was due to Michigan compliance director Ann Vollano incorrectly informing the staff that pre-practice stretching was not countable time) and several graduate assistants improperly observing some gray-area 7-on-7 offseason stuff. The latter violation led to this legendary exchange:

Awesome.

Rodriguez reportedly submitted descriptions of the quality-control staffers' job duties to director of football ops Brad Labadie, but they were never actually turned in to the compliance office. If they had been, the compliance people likely would have recognized the problem with QC dudes being involved in voluntary workouts and nipped things in the bud.

The practice-time thing still makes my blood boil because (a) it was an unintentional rules misinterpretation that never should have approached "major violation" status and (b) it only became known because somebody in the athletic department leaked an internal report to the Free Press regarding missing practice forms. There's no good reason to do this other than (insert conspiracy theory here). Long story short: Labadie stopped turning in CARA forms (a Michigan-specific form that serves as a practice log) to the compliance office back in 2007, when Lloyd Carr was still coaching. The coach is not supposed to be involved in these, which seems obvious since he's the one person who might have some motivation to fudge the details. Anyway, this continued for about a year, at which point an internal review turned up a complete lack of football reports and something like 200 emails were exchanged between compliance, Labadie and assistant AD for football Scott Draper. My favorite:

Draper replies that Brad is acquiring the "last remaining signature[s]" from the seniors.

The forms weren't turned in until five months later. There were no player signatures on them. AAAAAARRRRGHGHGHGHGHGH. There's a reason Labadie was gone like a month after the NCAA penalties came down. There's also a reason Michigan successfully argued to have RichRod's "failure to monitor" charge dropped: The whole thing came about because the people in football ops (all of whom were holdovers from at least the Carr era) did absolutely nothing while raking in about $80K a year. West Virginia and Maryland ended up getting secondary violations for the exact same misinterpretations of stretching; the West Virginia thing makes sense since Rodriguez said he'd been using the same practice schedule all along and had never been informed of any issues.

Greg Byrne said this on Tuesday:

"He was very transparent with it, so much so that he said ‘We thought it was OK.’ We looked at it at West Virginia, and they were doing the same things there. Once they knew about it, they addressed it.”

It was painful to watch a guy who seemed to legitimately try to do things the right way get thrown under the bus by everybody with a working internet connection. Like I said earlier: wrong place, wrong time.

I should also go back a little to the unrelated West Virginia stuff. You probably don't care about all the stupid behind-the-scenes stuff that resulted in him bailing for Michigan less than a year after turning down a ridiculous offer from Alabama, but what you might be interested in is the lawsuit that added to the whole "DICKROD IS THE DEVIL" meme that might now be the West Virginia state motto.

Rodriguez had a buyout of $4 million. That's kind of a lot. Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman agreed to pay $2.5 million of it if necessary but wanted it negotiated down, and RichRod figured he could do so. He was wrong; West Virginia never backed down and eventually filed suit for the full amount, at which point Michigan said "oh poop" because Coleman had never told the regents that she'd agreed to pay a big chunk of it. RichRod was told to settle for the full $4 million (he had to pay $1.5 million) and not say anything. That was it.

It probably wouldn't have been an issue in the big picture if not for the other stuff, all of which sort of piled up to make things look a lot worse than they really were. Again, this is why I want to root for RichRod: He got buried in negative PR for a lot of stuff that either wasn't his fault or wasn't controllable. At the end of the day, he deserved/needed to be fired, but that's almost entirely because of the complete lack of progress on defense and the directly related inability to beat anybody decent.

A lot of people say he "never fit." That's true in a sense that the Michigan body rejected him like a mismatched organ from the beginning and made things excessively difficult. Whether he'd have won more games without all that stuff is just as unknowable as the question of whether he'd have kept his job with the same on-field performance but less off-the-field crap (my guess is he was getting fired regardless). I don't think Arizona will have that problem. The status of the program and the general expectations are a little different.

My expectations are what I mentioned before: a great running game (Mike Stoops says "what") and an Oregon Lite offense within about three years. The unknown variables are the defense and his ability to recruit the West Coast (a large majority of his recruiting connections are in the Southeast). That's why I'm so interested to see his staff; with the right people in place, he will win. Without them, he might be a run-oriented Mike Stoops.

*The only reason I'm saying "I want to root for Rich Rodriguez" and not "I'm rooting for Rich Rodriguez" is my mostly nominal allegiance to Arizona State. Dennis Erickson should have been gone a year ago and almost definitely will be gone at some point in the next 12 days; RichRod would've been a hell of a replacement. Alas. It's worth wondering if the Erickson situation gave Greg Byrne a little motivation to get RichRod locked up ASAP. If it works out, he deserves some serious props.

**I read once that every coaching hire is basically a gamble. If you hire Nick Saban, you're going in with pocket aces; that's as close to guaranteed success as you can get. If you hire Brady Hoke, you're going in with 10-9 suited; it's basically a coin flip because of the complete lack of a meaningful track record. I'd say RichRod is about a king-six; his offense alone puts him halfway to success, but halfway isn't all the way.