A plea for sanity re the WVU investigation

Before everyone gets hysterical about the new splashy RR story, let's get a few things straight. 1. This cannot, and will not, add to any punishment Michigan may receive for violations in Ann Arbor. If violations occur, the school involved is punished. Sanctions don't travel with the coach. This impacts PR, not the bottom line with respect to the NCAA. 2. WVU will not be eager to serve up RR misconduct that occurred in Morgantown. Related to point 1, the fact that a coach has left does not insulate the school (just ask any school that employed John Calipari before Kentucky). WVU may not like Rodriguez but they're not stupid. I'm not suggesting they'll execute a cover-up but they will not manufacture evidence of misconduct just to stick it to us...because they realize they would be sticking it to themselves. 3. This fuels the "hot seat" only to the extent that Michigan's own base freaks out about it. Brandon will make a decision on retaining Rodriguez. His analysis will not be impacted by fans of other schools commenting at the bottom of news stories. 7 wins kept his job before this, and still does. Nothing new is coming to light. At both schools, RR thought stretching was not countable and trusted his compliance staff to ensure they were in accordance with the rules. Brandon will not be moved to fire RR if he learns WVU's compliance staff was as sloppy as ours. The actual charges with regard to RR have to do with inattention, not affirmative misconduct. If you've seen Brandon talk even once, you realize that we now have a strong, self-assured decision maker as AD. He will not panic because someone on ESPN looks gravely at a camera and says the coach "has got to go." Not if the WVU investigation simply yields more of the same parking ticket type infractions found at Michigan. 4. This is not evidence of a vast and sinister conspiracy. Does the attention to this story illustrate something lopsided in the coverage of Michigan and Rodriguez? Sure. If it was another coach or school it's not a big story. But that's the point. This is exactly the kind of story ESPN wants. Their reporter broke it, and everyone will talk about it. As we speak people are emailing the link around like crazy. Why? We, and RR, are big news. It's an unfortunate fact. This may have been leaked because somebody doesn't like Rodriguez, but that's not why ESPN has a story up. They have a story up because this item is absolutely perfect for a business trying to produce interest-generating content for a 24 hour news cycle (and trying to beef up the credentials of their in-house reporters). It sucks for us, but this is simply a matter of page views. You'll notice there are always links to nothing stories about Michigan's or Notre Dame's spring practices on ESPN NCAAF page, despite the fact that we're not particularly great teams right now. It's not due to a conspiracy to give our programs better exposure than others. People just eat up content about us (and ND). We generate interest. That interest is churning against us in a harmful way now, but it is simply the natural downside of our considerable stature and the nature of news in this era. We don't need to panic about RR's future. We don't need to write letters to an editor. We'll be ok. As every pundit has said (correctly) in his/her token offseason Michigan profle , it all comes down to our performance on the field this fall. And personally, I'm optimistic on that front.