Rich Rodriguez Gets the Last Laugh over Michigan

The irony was almost too much to handle. On Tuesday, Michigan officially announced what had been expected for some time: the firing of head coach Brady Hoke.

Earlier in the day, the coach whom Hoke replaced four seasons ago, Rich Rodriguez, won the Pac-12 Coach of the Year award after leading Arizona to a 10-2 record.

On Friday night, the No. 7 Wildcats will get a chance to beat Oregon for the second time this season in the Pac-12 Championship Game. A win over the Ducks could very well launch Rodriguez's team into the first College Football Playoff.

Rodriguez, of course, was fired as Michigan's coach in January 2011 after three seasons and a 15-22 record. He wasn't a great fit in Ann Arbor and it's impossible to know if he would still be the coach of the Wolverines today.

However, the benefit of hindsight suggests that he was fired too soon.

That's not to say the problems weren't numerous. The lack of a quality defense/defensive coordinator led to Michigan being ranked 107th in points allowed per game in 2010. 

Rodriguez never beat Ohio State, losing all three games against the Buckeyes by an average of 25 points. He only made the postseason once with the Wolverines: a 52-14 loss to Mississippi State, which was the worst bowl loss in program history.

There were also the NCAA sanctions over practice time for which the school received three years probation. Rodriguez was additionally hit with a "failure to monitor" charge.

Still, Rodriguez believes to this day that the program was close to turning a corner.

"People say, 'Why didn't it work?' Maybe it was going to. Maybe we didn't just get a chance to see it through," Rodriguez told Ted Miller of ESPN.com in October.

He may be on to something. Hoke went 11-2 and beat Ohio State in 2011, his first season at Michigan, with Rodriguez's players. Since then, Michigan's win total has declined each year, ending in a 5-7 effort this season. The Wolverines still fall short on a regular basis against Ohio State and Michigan State.

Coach	2011	2012	2013	2014
Rich Rodriguez (Arizona)	--	8-5	8-5	10-2
Brady Hoke (Michigan)	11-2	8-5	7-6	5-7

Maybe Rodriguez was never going to get Michigan back to the glory days. It's possible to be a great coach and not have the right situation or support to get things done.

Here's what is known, though: It sure wasn't going to be Hoke.

The fit between Rodriguez and Arizona is far better. Arizona isn't Michigan on the traditional scale of great college football jobs, but at the same time, the landscape of the sport is undeniably different.

Michigan, Florida and Nebraska have fired coaches in the same year that teams like Arizona and Baylor have experienced remarkable success.

Rick Dole/Getty Images

There's also a lot to be said for the current situation in Tucson. Rodriguez enjoys a great relationship with his boss, athletic director Greg Byrne. The school has made a commitment to football and upgraded facilities. The expectations, while high, aren't unreasonably so.

With only 20 seniors, Rodriguez has a fairly young team. Arizona's best football should be ahead of it. As Miller pointed out, Rodriguez's hard-edge style is meshing better with this roster than the ones he had in Ann Arbor: 

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Yet it's about more than X's and O's. It's about Rodriguez doing his thing without interference or second-guessing. For example, while it seemed that his tendency to use off-color language at high volume during practices offended Michigan players, it's not an issue at Arizona. For Rodriguez, it's a part of making his players 'comfortable being uncomfortable,' part of the 'hard edge' he wants his team to adopt, to take note of two oft-repeated phrases he and his coaches use.

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There's also great chemistry with the Wildcats' coaching staff. Many of Rodriguez's assistants were with him when he was the head coach at West Virginia.

"As much as the award says Coach of the Year, it's really a staff of the year and players of the year," Rodriguez told Pac-12 Networks, "I think I have the best staff in the country both on and off the field."

Michigan, meanwhile, is in search of a new coach and athletic director after the disaster that was the Dave Brandon era. According to Pete Thamel of Sports Illustrated, it could be a while before a new coach is named:

Michigan is still a premier job. Rodriguez is still a great coach. Just because it didn't work out between the two, even though it could have, doesn't make those statements any less true.

But for Rodriguez to be named Pac-12 Coach of the Year on the same day that Michigan basically admitted its mistake in hiring Hoke is a form of vindication all the same.

Ben Kercheval is a lead writer for college football. All rankings reflect the College Football Playoff standings. All stats courtesy of cfbstats.com.