Rodriguez Recap

The Dear Leader has been on WTKA a couple times in the past few days, first with John U Bacon and then with Andy Evans. News has descended. Quotes that follow are very close but may be slightly off from what was said (in a superficial way, of course.)

Spring Game

It will exist, and will be at Michigan Stadium on April 11th. MGoBoarders are planning some sort of tailgate that will inevitably descend into a melee when a 14-year-old shows up and says "h1 evr1 whut u thnk bt 4cier"; sounds like a good time.

Also this will probably happen:

Most magnificent sex mullet gets a free copy of Hail To The Victors 2009, yo.

Recruiting

Not a whole lot, obviously, because Rodriguez can't mention anyone until they sign or are enrolled. He did say "the most you can have in a year is 25," but not mention the possibility of going to 27 or 28, which Michigan has the room to do because of the seven early enrollers.

"Never had this many" early enrollers, cited a Florida class with 7 or 8 a few years ago but gave the general impression

DC Situation

A "little bit of progress," but has spent most of his time on recruiting. Done research, talked to some guys. Floated the national coaches convention as a key opportunity to talk with people.

Andy Evans brings up Nick Holt's 700k DC salary, to which Rodriguez says "I didn't know that, geez" and says "we're nowhere near that, obviously." Boilerplate about Michigan opportunity follows.

Rodriguez is looking for the "right fit; the personality has to fit what we want." Chemistry amongst staff wanted—clear implication that Shafer just didn't get on with the other guys. "Whoever has the title of coordinator on defense isn't going run the defense himself… that's the #1 thing I'm looking for, someone to coordinate everyone's input."

Yeah, that Tony Franklin comparison is still looking pretty good.

Has "absolutely not" ruled out an internal hire, but "our schemes aren't going to be radically different from what they were last year," which follows up on his comment the day before saying they would be a 4-3 team with some odd front stuff sprinkled in.

Rodriguez went into more depth on the topic with Bacon:

“You can’t just be a 3-4 guy or a 4-3 guy. At West Virginia we ran a 3-3-5 base, which was a little different. We’ll maintain here the 4-3, 3-4 principle,” he insisted. “We did a lot of 3-4 stuff in our second- and third-down packages this year, and we’ll continue to do more four-man and odd front.

“I know what I want to do philosophically, but I don’t want to change everything because of what we have on our team and what we’ve recruited so far. Our full-time defensive coaches, Jay Hopson, Tony Gibson and Bruce Tall … I’ve coached with Bruce and Tony for several years, Jay this past year but I’ve known him for several years … all have been college coordinators, so they’ve got a lot of experience in the 4-3 and 3-4 packages. They get along great, they are good people and they are going to be involved in which direction we want to go.”

Sound like you can cease your panic about the 3-3-5, if you were one of those guys.

Beilein

Obvious parallel etc etc etc.

Open Date

"We're close" to filling the open date, but no names.

There conversation then went to Meyer and Stoops and stuff, both of whom Rodriguez is friends with and so forth and so on. One interesting bit in here was Rodriguez saying he doesn't get any negative recruiting when going up against either guy but "a lot of other schools do it."

Any interest in the NFL?

"This may seem crazy to people in West Virginia, but I've always taken the approach that you should look at each job as your last." Never coached in the NFL, a college guy, likes the 18-22 range (don't we all ZING!) as you watch the kids mature, etc.