controversey

Bobby Deren, a senior writer for the Rivals Rutgers site, scarletnation.com has published Draft Season: Four Months on the Clock in which he chronicles the experiences of Morgan Trent, Kenny McKinley, Frantz Joseph and Lydon Murtha as they prepared for the 2009 draft.

This bengals.com story reports that Draft Season contains some sharp allegations about RichRod's evaluation of Trent in his communications with NFL scouts.

At the end of the book, Deren describes the scene with Lloyd Carr, the former Michigan head coach that recruited him to Ann Arbor, breaking the news to Trent that current head coach Rich Rodriguez did him no favors.

“Rodriguez had bad-mouthed him to every NFL scout he could,” Deren writes. “Rodriguez claimed that Morgan was lazy, he had an attitude problem and he was a big reason the Wolverines finished with a 3-9 record…”

Trent admits the words were “jarring,” and they were hard to understand given that he was so serious about his career that he actually moved in with his brother and sister-in-law and their two small children while going to Michigan.

...

[Bengals defensive backs coach Kevin] Coyle heard the rumblings, but he didn’t talk to Rodriguez and put more stock in other people close to the Michigan program that had been there before.

“When there is a coaching transition and the team ends up not having success, you have to step back and try to decipher what the truth really is,” Coyle says. “There was a lot of heat on those people and there was some pointing of blame. Plus, the players were somewhat chagrined, so you had to look at everything.”

Presumably this information has played a part in Trent's willingness to speak negatively about RichRod and the Michigan football program.

Predictably, to date this story has only been picked up by the Freep (print version link).