By Bob Hertzel
For the Times West Virginian
MORGANTOWN — So where were we when we last met?
Oh, yeah, I remember now.
Rich Rodriguez was shredding papers before he went out the back door of the Puskar Center and took his circus to Michigan with him.
Don’t you really wish right now, considering that RichRod (the emphasis on Rich) is knee deep in boiling oil and just getting deeper and deeper, that you knew just what he destroyed before leaving WVU?
Other than his reputation, that is.
Like if he could manage to go to as squeaky clean a place as college football has ever seen in Michigan — we will treat Chris Webber and the Fab Five as the dirty linen of the basketball program — and put in it into deeper trouble than it has seen in nearly 120 years, you just know he wasn’t shredding the list of his charitable donations while WVU coach.
That’s right, the man who brought us Pacman Jones and Chris Henry, bless his soul, has done it again and the more he talks — even without that silly southern accent he was using in these parts — the more he gets himself in deeper.
Here’s what ol’ RichRod had to say a day ago when the NCAA accused him of having failed “to promote an atmosphere of compliance within the football program and failed to adequately monitor” his staff and time restrictions on football-related activities.
Let me first interpret that mumbo-jumbo for you. Rodriguez is accused of having let his staff know it was all right with him to break the rules and turned his back on it to make sure he couldn’t be accused of doing the evil deeds.
Now for what he said when the NCAA announced that it was launching an investigation into the situation.
“It’s my job as a leader to make sure that our guys not only know what the rules are but what the possible interpretations are,” Rodriguez said. “And sometimes when you don’t communicate, or when you communicate, that’s not always coming across as the same. We didn’t have any issues in the past, but that’s not to excuse us for if we misinterpreted the rules. That’s still on us and it’s still on my staff.”
Taking a page out of Cool Hand Luke, RichRod was saying what we have here is a failure to communicate.
See, there was no intent, just a misinterpretation of rules that everyone else in college football seems to understand quite well.
Funny thing is, we thought RichRod knew the rules. After all, when the Detroit Free Press first made the accusations that have blown into this full-scale mess, this what Rodriguez said:
“We know the rules and we follow the rules.”
No one doubts that Rodriguez knows the rules, and every twist and turn of them that he can take advantage of.
Wasn’t that someone from his program in his wife’s car down at Marshall getting caught a few years back taking in-depth notes and carrying the names and private phone numbers of the WVU coaches on his person?
Now that may not be considered breaking NCAA rules — and, of course, Rodriguez knew nothing about it, just as he knows nothing about this, even though he is known as something of a control freak — and nothing much came of that.
The identity of that person was never revealed and he was immediately reassigned outside the football program, but you knew ol’ RichRod, he was just glad that they found that Mercedes for his wife.
See, here’s the thing that makes it all a farce, this investigation along with college football.
Say RichRod beats Ohio State …
I’ll give you a second to stop laughing.
Done?
Okay, say RichRod beats Ohio State and does it by getting away with knowingly having a 12th man on the field who catches the game-winning pass as the final gun goes off.
Know what?
He’ll be a hero at Michigan, because the way things are today winning is everything and coaches will do what is necessary to get there and it’s accepted by the fans, the administration, the coaching staff and the players. No one really cares how you get there.
If we’re going to change that atmosphere, sooner or later, someone is going to have to pay and pay a big price with their job and their future to get the point across that the rules are there to make the playing field level and bring some order to the chaos that exists if all that matters is who wins and who loses a child’s game.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
