OT - Was there something wrong with RR's personality?

I really don't have any first hand experience with RR. To me (watching interviews) he seemed to be very passionate about the game and cared about his players. He didn't come off as the warmest of people I guess, but not a bad guy by any means. I guess we'll find out in time.

Anyway, people saying someone they heard from someone that he wasn't that nice of a guy just sucks. I'm not saying that he was definitely a nice guy., but someone having an unpleasant experience with him doesn't really mean much. Everyone has bad days, especially someone who's in a 3-year battle for job security.

have ever deserved the character assassination they've regularly been subjected to over the last three years, and in Carr's case, even longer. The fact that partisans in both camps have routinely played a role in hurling the insults is incredibly unfortunate. The extent to which RR and LC themselves played a role, if any, in perpetuating the negative stereotypes, is something that many seem determined to speculate on, with nothing more than hearsay and rumor to go on.

College football coaches aren't godly saints or Mother Theresa. They're normal human beings like the rest of us, with personal failings and wonderful attributes. I should think that the amount of volunteer work that both Carr and RR did for Mott and other charitable causes would be enough for people to conclude that they're both fundamentally good people, but unfortunately many seem to need a cast of villains in their lives. I don't know why people need to psychoanalyze RR in particular, when it's basically a simple case of him not doing a good enough job of being a head coach to have succeeded here. People everywhere in every field fuck up, make mistakes, step on their dicks, and they move on. Humans are fallible. That's certainly the case for every MGoBlog poster and commenter, too.

I don't know.  I will say that I honestly was surprised that more players didn't publicly defend RR at the end of the season and lobby for him to be retained.  And by and large, they didn't really seem to have taken the news of his firing that hard.  I think back to when Tommy Amaker was fired; his players were devastated.  Maybe there was some of that and it just didn't get reported.  Whatever the case, the players seem to have taken a shine to Hoke, which is a good thing.   

All I want to do is wish RR well.  He should be welcome here in the future.  I hope he does well wherever he finishes up.  Like many of you I did not know him personally but I'm sure he wanted what was best for the players and the program.

I don't have anything to add about Rich Rod's personality.  I was a big supporter of his and passionately believed that under Rich Rod 2011 would be a great season... until the Gator Bowl.  Then I no longer believed.  Just as the Gator Bowl gutted the pro-Rich Rod community, it seems to have gutted the last of DB's hope in the regime.

for football season to begin.

I think RR's biggest problem might have been that he was from an environment where he had to built the entire program. WVU is right at .600 for winning over their entire history and RR had them at 11-1 and winning BCS games. He was the focus of their program. Here he was just the 18th Michigan football coach and not really the focus. He basically went from being WVU's Bo to the new guy.

Whenever somebody talked about Rodriguez, they said he was a truly upstanding guy, a great guy, wanted to win as much as anybody, etc,

In my experience, when I hear these sorts of things about a person, they're not often true.  I'm not saying anything about RR, but the comments that people have made about them struck me as such.

Rich using the word "tremendous" very often. That couldn't have helped the transition.

If anything, the man was stubborn and guilty of not doing due dilligence on things. He had no idea the situation he was walking into and he made some very poor choices in recruits with personal issues. Making us sit through watching Steven Threet try to run the zone read was just ridiculous and not something we should have had to put up with. That burned whatever capital he had right there.

The way he was treated here will be a blueprint for how not to treat a new coach though. Good god. Undermined from the word go.

I may as well join the party here ...

* I think RichRod could have been more politically savvy at key moments.  Maybe when he saw his offensive set-up in early '08 he could have kept his shock and horror to himself.  A memorable Rivals posting (which was copied to the 'blog) from a guy named JIzzard19 (or something) suggested that he did NOT keep it to himself but loudly bemoaned his bad luck.  I'm sure that pleased all Lloyd's minions.

* Remember all the talk about how Lloyd was running a "country club" during his last years?  There might have been some truth to that.  I've wondered whether Rodriguez bothered to talk to a handful of older players to get a sense of how Barwis et al. would be received.

* He lacked poise under pressure.  His sideline demeanor and behavior in press conferences could have been better IMO.

* Sorry to bring Rita into this, but can you imagine how the plump Midwestern gals (painting in broad strokes here, of course) received her "Miss West Virginia, 1982" look?  Must have been awkward!  In contrast, imagine how warmly they received Midwestern-cute Laura Hoke and her daughter.  Ahh... much better.  Small potatoes, but that probably matters to the little gnomes in the athletic department.  I'm sure the wine-and-cheese crowd had trouble with Rich & Rita, too.

- - -

He had a tough row to hoe.  I'm guessing he couldn't have done anything more to keep Mallet, and I'm also guessing that Michigan was never seriously in play for Pryor.  That left him with Threetsheridammit behind a line of mostly second-stringers.  Sorry, but no way is Lloyd going to a BCS bowl with that crew.

Did he have a personality that ingratiated him to anyone? In case you don't remember him, he was the head basketball coach at Indiana and the answer is no; his personality grated on people, he was combative (literally) but the man won. And he stayed to become a legend at Indiana. If he hadn't won, I'm sure he would of been out the door right pronto; folks might of been bringing up the same question with Coach Knight.

In the end, it's all about wins and losses.

I don't buy that the fan base had anything to do with Rodriguez's lack of success at Michigan. When Nick Saban went to LSU, they lost to UAB in their first season and LSU fans were calling for his head. When Saban went to Bama and lost to Univ of Lousiana Monroe (possibly the worst D1-A team that year) people were calling for his head too. Every coach has deals with angry fans when they don't win.

 

Michigan wasn't even close to competing with good teams under Rod.

Since Vince Lombardi who in many ways is archetype for modern coaches gets dragged into the discussion of the RR era, I went and looked up some of the primary sources, e.g. Lombardi on Football (2 volume set and also a neat series of VHS tapes where his actual chalk talks are filmed). Luckily these are still widely available.

1. His defensive coordinator (don't think that term was used then but the equivalent) was Phil Bengston. He is said to be brilliant at that job. Later when elevated to HC, he was only a 50/50 coach lacking Lombardi's fiery ability to inspire his team - even the veterans noted that "something was lacking." So Lombardi had a good DC.

2. But despite being a "offense guy" Lombardi had several observations about defense. Granted this was from the dawn of what we would call modern defense (late 1950 and early 1960s) and because he looked from the perspective of someone who attacked defenses, he saw weaknesses in his own team and made moves to correct them. One point was that he didn't believe in the "bend but don't break idea." He was more concerned about limiting the gain on each play to 3 years or less. He wanted as many 3 and outs as possible to get his defense off the field and his offense back on. This notion that you'll tolerate giving up yardage because it is unlikely the other team could string together 6-8 consecutive plays without an error, penalty or turnover was not in his way of thinking. He wanted a stout defense - didn't believe in outscoring the opponents.

3. He made the most of his personnel - when he got there he realized that Starr was his QB and made Hornung his HB rather than tinker around with using him as a QB or WR. He realized that Dowler was a much better and elusive reciever than as a pure runner so he made him a flanker. He adapted his system to the available players.

4. He paid a lot of attention to detail. Each year, he would go over the play book from the beginning. Even plays the team of returning starters had run thousands of time would be broken down and rediscussed from the beginning. The famous power sweep to the strong side was reinstalled each year as if from scratch. Attention to detail, focus on getting the basic stuff right and the complex stuff will all fall into line.

Invoking Lombardi was probably not a good idea for anyone trying to defend RR. I know RR was trying to ease the tension when he made that quip and I don't hold it against him.

RR made other PR blunders. Errors which would have been OK and forgotten had he won. On the field and off the field as it relates to football, he didn't seem to have a good read on the situation. He overestimated the tolerance for losing. He underestimated the need to have a good defense. Things piled up which suggested a lack of attention to all three aspects of the game (don't know if this was true or not, but it was an impression). His luck was bad (even his harshest critics have to acknowledge a number of injuries to the secondary).  The whole Lombardi thing was just one more thing he did NOT need and unfortunately he himself called it up.

I hope he has good luck in the future. I do believe he really tried and wanted to be successful here. I suspect he'll be more careful next time. I hope Brady Hoke turns the team around.

Go Blue!

Reading between the lines DB obviously felt that RR was too much about himself and not enough about the kids or the school.  Many of DB's comments at various press conferences discussing what he was looking for in a coach seemed to me to hinge around this issue. 

I think our previous poster CRex said it best as:  WVU is right at .600 for winning over their entire history and RR had them at 11-1 and winning BCS games. He was the focus of their program. Here he was just the 18th Michigan football coach and not really the focus. He basically went from being WVU's Bo to the new guy expected to build on what was here.

That basic change and the baggage that came with it points out what kind of happened here with RR and is the starting point for everything that went wrong, both on RR's part and on the Michigan communities part.  RR thought he was brought in to do what he had done at WVU and become the next Bo, and those already here in terms of alumni and players and athletic department staff and what not expected him to come in and honor the previous regime and the "Michigan Way" and maybe make some modifications but not blow the whole thing up. 

Bill Martin and Mary Sue Coleman, in essence, brought RR in to blow the whole thing up and then sat back and watched as it all unfolded without providing the proper guidance and support to RR and the proper instruction to all the involved parties on all sides as RR lacked the political savvy and experience to understand the camel through the eye of a needle experience he was undergoing. 

It took everyone involved to get us here, and while some are more to blame than others, no one is blameless from RR to Carr to Bill Martin to Mary Sue Coleman to some of Carr's players and beyond.  The lack of a top leadership person that made both RR and the rest of the actors in this drama work together and bring them to a mutual understanding led most directly to this entire failed episode.   With the former football coach emeritus gone (Bo), and the hire of a man brought in to blow up what had been established by the remaining football coach on the scene (Carr, who rather quickly departed), and a lame duck AD focussed on building a stadium improvement, this is what we got from that leaderless ship.

 

did not like the guy.  Personally, I liked Coach Rod, outside of the W-L record, but then again I've never met him.  Apparently he made a little bit of an ass of himself after he first got hired by getting wasted (as did his assistants) in front of a bunch of former players.  Even then, most of them didn't have a problem with his West Virginia lineage, it was more that he didn't seem to care about Alumni and didn't take the time to get to know much about Michigan's traditions.  If you asked most of them, I think their biggest complaint would be that he was sloppy and careless, especially when it came to practices.  Multiple times guys commented on how our players would act like thugs, cursing non-stop while no coach addressed the  lack of focus.   To them, that mentality pervaded the program and was why we could never seem to execute in big game situations.

Again, these are not my opinions, I've never been to practice, but just what I heard whenever I would defend Rodriguez to those guys. 

Rich Rodriguez was loved in WVU.  I'm mean, they loved the man because he was one of them - local product, prodigal son come home (Harbaugh!!!) and compared to Bobby Bowden, Frank Cignetti and Don Nehlen, wildly successfull in the win column.  The players he didn't recruit hated his guts. The players he did recruit  would have gone to war for the man.

As for the MSM, I don't understand it. Until the improbable thumb injury to Pat White and resulting 2007 Pittsburgh loss, I think they didn't pay enough attention to do reporting on Rich Rodriguez.  There was the Alabama thing, but that blew over pretty quickly all things considered.

Now add Michigan into the mixture and things got weird all around really fast.

Here's what I mean by weird: To have the Detroit media or any Michigan alum or former player "upset" by a coach using profanity and "belittling" a player - well, I think those people have very, very selective memories or a very limited understanding of just how in-your-face, belligerent, and trucker-mouth Bo Schembechler and his staff was.  They were visciously demanding and perfectionists. 

Yet Rodriguez, who swears like the best of truckers on I-80, was made out to be some sort of ignorant, undermining, rebel outsider planting dynamite and C-4 charges under Michigan's Massive Tradition! bridge.

Oh well.  That whacky MSM.

Hoke already praised Rodriguez and his staff for their "tremendous" dedication so that's all you need to know. Right?