MORGANTOWN — There’s an old joke that goes something like this:
A guy is wandering around Times Square in New York City, obviously lost. He stops a guy who looks like he knows his way around Manhattan.
“Hey, buddy, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?” he asks.
The New Yorker looks at him incredulously, and answers:
“Practice, practice, practice.”
Well, there’s a joke going around Ann Arbor, Mich., these days and it goes like this:
A guy is wandering around the University of Michigan athletic department, obviously lost.
He comes across Rich Rodriguez and stops him.
“Hey, buddy,” he says, “how do you get to the NCAA Championship game?”
Rodriguez looks at him incredulously, and answers:
“Practice, practice, practice ... practice, practice, practice ... practice, practice, practice.”
Wrong answer, Rich.
The NCAA has rules about practice, rules on how much you can practice, rules on who can attend practice.
It says you broke them and you have so admitted.
Oh, Michigan and your people are now saying you were ignorant of the rule that covered these matters.
That is partly right. It would have been correct if they put the period after the word ignorant.
It is impossible to believe that a man whose very existence is based on coaching football and whose entire life is centered around reaching the championship game doesn’t know the rules under which he must operate.
Rich Rodriguez had to know that rule, had to have people around him who knew these rules and who could have cautioned him.
But no.
Instead his lawyer put forth a statement that began:
“Coach Rodriguez is surprised and disappointed that violations occurred in his program. He has strived throughout his career to follow the rules.”
Statements like that have the nation laughing at Rodriguez and his defense.
This is what Mike Celzic, a veteran, highly respected columnist who writes for NBCSports.com, had to say about that statement:
“How can that be? One of the charges is that he made the team practice more than the 20 hours a week allowed by the NCAA. How is it that a coach doesn’t know how long his own team practices? The only conclusions are that he’s either lying or he doesn’t know the most basic things about his own program.”
Anyone who has ever worked with or for Rodriguez understands that he knows everything about his own program.
Everything!
Rich Rodriguez is paid handsomely — far too handsomely, when put in context to the mission of a great university like Michigan, that being producing educated, moral citizens — to not know everything.
The phrase “the buck stops here” fits football coaches better than any other job in the world, for they get a whole lot of bucks to contribute an 8-16 record into the proud history of one of the great programs in America.
The shame of all this is that Rich Rodriguez is a great football coach. He is innovative beyond imagination. He can charm a recruit and sell a case of sand to a man lost in the desert. He can inspire his team, drive them to heights they never believed they could reach.
His shortcoming and, we suspect, eventually his downfall comes in his misplaced priorities, where the drive to succeed is so strong in him that he can rationalize breaking rules in order to fulfill that drive.
If victory is right, then anything that can restrict victory must be wrong, is the rationale.
It is insane to believe that some of this didn’t go on at WVU when he was here, especially in the early phases of his career here when winning was the most difficult.
Add to his drive the ultimate failure he experienced in losing to Pitt when he was on the verge of winning a national championship, which no matter how you slice it is what drove him away from West Virginia, and you can understand that his thought process had to be warped and the emphasis on the final goal rather than the path to get there.
In many ways, what started out to be an inspiring story of a ambitious walk-on rising through the ranks to the top of his profession is turning into a tragedy before our eyes.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
