UM Investigation: A Necessary Waste Of Time

On Saturday the Detroit Free Press wrote published an article accusing Rich Rodriguez of violating NCAA practice rules. The article was a horrible fumbling of investigatory journalism, it misquoted players from the current team, and took the majority of its information from disgruntled transfer students.

The article took quotes from UM freshmen about how much they were working, what it failed to do is put those in context. the reporter failed to any real investigation outside of asking freshmen vaguely skewed questions in order to drive answers that could be easily slanted to fit their bias.

"The Free Press cornered Stokes on media day, apparently, and asked him about the workload.

'Hooooo!' Stokes said. 'A typical week is working from 8 a.m. to 6 or 7 at night, Monday through Saturday. ? We do the weight room at least three times a week, and seven-on-sevens and one-on-ones. Speed and agility on the other days. Every day we have something new to get ready for the season.'" (http://michigan.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=982680)

However the rest of that story goes a little more like this, Je'Ron's Father had this to say;

"'They took and twisted and misconstrued [his quote], when Ronnie was just simply saying he's doing the regulated hours required by the coaches within the rules. There are two sessions, and he might have been part of the morning group, like 8:30 to 11. The second group might be 1-3. The voluntary workout would be like 3-5 or 5:30 with the quarterbacks or other players. He might go to rehab, take a shower or take the initiative to go up and look at some film, might not leave Schembechler Hall until 6:00 or 7:30. But that was taken out of context.'" (http://michigan.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=982434)

Rosenberg went on and quoted some disgruntled transfer students. But if you want to get the truth, disgruntled transfer students are about as far as you can go considering their obvious bias.

On Sunday Bill Martin announced that the University would launch an investigation. One of the few right moves involved in this entire ordeal. Without an investigation this story would never die and would plague Michigan for the remainder of Rich Rodriguez's career, and would haunt Michigan Football until the day of Judgement.

Once this investigation is finished it will undoubtedly conclude that there was no violation as far as practice time is concerned.What must be taken into account are certain athletic activities that don't count against the 4 hour days or 20 hour weeks. These are as follows:

• Training-table or competition-related meals;
• Physical rehabilitation;
• Dressing, showering or taping;
• Athletics department academic study hall or tutoring sessions;
• Meetings with coaches on non-athletics matters;
• Travel to and from practice and competition;
• Visiting the competition site in sports other than cross country, golf and skiing;
• Medical examinations or treatments;
• Fund-raising activities;
• Recruiting activities (e.g., serving as a student host for prospective student-athletes during official visits);
• Public relations activities related to the student-athlete's sport (e.g., media days);
• Participation in regular physical education classes, with or without credit, that are listed in the institution's catalog and open to all students;
• Voluntary individual workouts, provided these workouts are not required or supervised by coaching staff members, except that such activities may be monitored for safety purposes or conducted by the institution's strength and conditioning personnel who have department wide duties.
• Individual consultation with a coaching staff member initiated voluntarily by a student-athlete, provided the coach and the student-athlete do not engage in athletically related activities;
• The provision of videotapes to a student-athlete by an institution's coach that include a personalized message and athletically related information (e.g., discussion of plays, general workout programs, lectures on strategy related to the sport), provided the viewing of the videotape by the student-athlete is voluntary;
• Use of an institution's athletics facilities (which may be reserved) during the academic year or summer by student-athletes, provided the activities are not supervised by or held at the direction of any member of an institution's coaching staff.

(http://mgoblog.com/diaries/athletic-department-release-practices)

Together these activities can clearly take up a significant part of your day, and they will play a huge part in this investigation. What would be great now, is a swift investigation; I for one want to put this controversy to rest and watch some Football.