Fire Rich Rodriguez « The Quick and the Ed

Fire Rich Rodriguez

University of Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez was profiled over the weekend:

He arrived on the tradition-rich Michigan campus last year and glumly kicked off his tenure with a 3-9 season. It represented the most losses in a season in the program’s 129-year history and the first year without a bowl game since 1974.

All along, Rodriguez said the first season would be the toughest.

“I wish I could sit here and say I know that we’re going to do this and that this year, but I’m still a little nervous because we’re going to have a lot of youth still there,” he said. “The vision of this program is taking steps each and every year. We’re on track.”

I went to graduate school at Ohio State. As such, I’m legally required (as enumerated in binding language included in the standard OSU diploma) to hate the University of Michigan, particularly the football team. This is a golden age for Michigan haters–recent years have featured a humiliating home defeat at the hands of a Division 1-AA team, five consecutive losses to OSU, and the catastrophic nine-loss season. To put that in perspective: the last time Michigan lost as many as seven games was 1962. Ohio State has never lost more than seven football games in a year, and it last happened in the 19th century. OSU coach Earl Bruce was fired because he only won nine games for six consecutive years in the 1980s.

The point being, winning in college football is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You assemble a dominant program that always wins, and so all the good recruits want to go there, and so the program always wins. Managed correctly, this can continue more or less forever–OSU hasn’t had a losing season since the Johnson administration. But a key part of that management is psychological, creating an iron-clad expectation of permanent victory. “We don’t rebuild, we reload,” etc.

And here Rich Rodriguez is talking about “taking steps each and every year”? Why not just call them baby steps and be done with it? Pre-excusing another season of mediocrity by blaming the “youth”? If you’re going to coach in the Big House, you are required to promise greatness. And if you don’t deliver, you get carried out on your shield. As an Ohio State fan, the only thing more painful than a resurgent Wolverine squad would be a team that’s not good enough to be worth hating.

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One Response to “Fire Rich Rodriguez”

Will Johnson says:

December 8, 2009 at 6:58 pm

In your article, you say that Ohio State hasn’t had a losing season since the Johnson administration. However, in 1988, they went 4-6-1 in John Cooper’s first season.