College Football: Rich Rodriguez Buyout Buffoonery Shows His True (Cl)ass!

Rich Rodriguez has been a recent poster boy for a lot of what is wrong with college football these days.  It's turned into a big business. 

Coaches fancy themselves as CEO's rather than mentors of students and athletes.  Who can blame them? 

With the media on them constantly, the money being thrown around, the corporate sponsorships of everything from uniforms to stadium names, it only seems fitting that one would start to look at the university's upper administration as sort of a board of directors, the team as employees, and the fans as consumers. All are playing their roles. 

To further back up this corporate analogy, RR's agent even admitted to "shopping Product Rodriguez" to Arkansas, Alabama, LSU, and Michigan. Had Michigan not taken the coach off West Virginia's hands, the agent was going to keep on shopping him.

But in this saga over this buyout, the wheels fell off the wagon long before it went over the cliff.  There is plenty of blame to go around, and all the parties look pretty bad.  So let's take a look at what we now know and where things went wrong.

West Virginia

West Virginia fans, and the rest of the college football following public along with them, found out that their governor has WAY too much influence into non-political things.  This guy was personally contacting RR, was on the University's "board," personally appointed the school's President, and was actively in the middle of the action at all times. 

He was instrumental in keeping RR from running off to Bama the year before.  He was playing a prominent role in the late days of the RR era up until the time he left.  This is not healthy for the University of West Virginia.

I would surmise that it isn't healthy for the State of West Virginia, either, as I've always viewed the job of a governor to be sort of a "full time" gig, not leaving time for such pursuits as these.

Furthermore, Ed Pastilong, the AD, seemed at times like he was nowhere to be found.  It's not that he was "taking a powder" during some of the most important happenings in Mountaineer history as much as he was being crowded out by all of the other people with titles after their names (or buildings named after their money) who were attempting to do his job.

The AD wasn't allowed to be the AD here, and the proverbial "buck" never seemed to stop at his office.  Now that he is in his mid-60's and there are rumors of an impending retirement, let's hope that the new AD (or Pastilong for as long as he is there) will be able to actually execute some of what an AD is supposed to do.

Michigan

Michigan erred big time in this brouhaha.  They didn't seem to realize that RR not only didn't care about his own name but didn't care about the Michigan brand name either.

AD Martin completely botched the Les Miles hire and turned right around and botched the Greg Schiano situation.  Then, once in dire, desperate straits of his own doing, he makes a panic hire in Rodriguez.

When he flew to Toledo to meet with Rodriguez and his agent that fateful day in December, he wasn't going for an interview.  He was going to make an offer.

Michigan fans rightfully see their program as one of the elite in college football.  Yost and Schembechler earned that for Michigan. They are college football's all-time winningest program, for God's sake.

But Martin's missteps allowed them to get desperate where they needed Rodriguez more than he needed them, and there is NO excuse for that when you are Michigan.

Every good negotiator knows that the party that can walk away from the deal the easiest is in control of the agenda.  Rod knew WVU fans would clamor to keep him (because they didn't know then what they now know) had he needed to back out.

Michigan was past the point of being able to withstand the negative PR that surely would have come their way with the embarrassment of yet another back-out.

But if Michigan blew it on the front end, they certainly didn't help matters when they allowed their good name to be dragged through the mud with this lawsuit.

Can anyone imagine Bo as AD letting that go on?  No way in Hades would that ever happen.

A lot has been made of RR not being a "Michigan man."  But you get what you are willing to enforce in this game, and RR should have been made to go above and beyond to earn the trust of the Wolverine nation.

As an "outsider," to start one's career by making the school and its coach the object of daily scorn and second guessing is no way to endear yourself to the fan base.  If stronger people with higher character were leading Michigan right now, it would not have been allowed to happen.

But there is another problem here with Michigan.  Every coach has a buyout.  Even Temple's coach has a buyout.  When a school looks at hiring a coach, they must be willing to pay the buyout and they know this up front.

Arkansas was set to have some of it's many big-money people (Walton family, Jerry Jones, etc.) pay Tommy Tuberville's expensive buyout, but then decided it wasn't worth it and never offered him. 

But that just shows you that schools always know there is a buyout.  To let RR even try these shenanigans to save what ended up being $2.5 million is just silly. 

That sum is small to a powerhouse like Michigan and should have been expected from day one, so why not just pay it? I'm sure Michigan expects their contract's buyouts to be paid.  Why hold double standards?

Rich Rodriguez

Finally, there is Rodriguez himself.  Here's a guy that is supposed to be a "West Virginia" guy.  He grew up there, played there, got his first coaching job there, married a girl he met at WVU, and the greater part of his family still lives there.

There should be no one in college football with any more loyalty than this guy.  Sure, he wasn't making the kind of money that they make in the SEC or at some of the big schools in other conferences. 

But after so many millions, there's no need for any more money.  It just becomes a "pissing match" of keeping score.

As Terry Bowden said in an interview when he was actively courting the WVU job (before they hired Stewart), "they may only pay a little over a million at WVU, but back when I lived in Morgantown, I remember that that sum of money goes a lot further than it would in most other places."  In other words, adjusted for cost of living, Rodriguez probably was being paid in the upper tier of college coaches.

But in the end, there was no loyalty.  In his deposition, President Garrison said that he tried to appeal to how special his situation was given his background.  At that point, RR bristled and said something to the effect that he didn't think it was all that (expletive) special.

I can only imagine how hurt and angry that made the proud and fiercely loyal West Virginia fan base.  At this point, it's probably a good idea that RR fly his family to Ann Arbor when he wants to visit them.  Either that or he should show up in the middle of the night when no one can spot him.

So, what really happened was that this was about a spoiled child not getting his way.  They didn't appreciate him enough.  They didn't acquiesce to enough of his demands.

They criticized him too much when he blew the biggest game in their football history.  Of course, that's all bunk, but that is the way RR saw things in his power stupor.

It wasn't enough to leave in the way that he did, but he used school-provided resources (his "company" cell phone) to call recruits to persuade them to back out on their commitments to West Virginia and to come to Michigan instead.

This was before even informing his staff and his own players that he was leaving them.  He then sent a note with a grad student as his "resignation" notice.  How ridiculous is that?

It doesn't end there.  There are the attempts at smearing the good name of Bill Stewart who, while he may have discussed a job on RR's Michigan staff, would have only done that because most observers thought it was a foregone conclusion that Jimbo Fisher or Terry Bowden or some other bigger name was going to be named the new coach.

There are rumors of document shredding.  There are the lies about his family's safety being threatened, which are patently untrue because early on (until the facts all became clear in hindsight) most West Virginia people thought that the University was the one that dropped the ball, not RR.

Michigan deserves a better coach, but until they get a better AD and President, the fanbase will have to endure what they have.  As an admirer of Michigan (at least the classy Michigan of days gone by), I hope that Rodriguez fails on the big stage and leaves college football altogether.

It's not just college football that would be better without people like him.  Earth would be a better place without people like him.