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Let’s start with a pretty obvious positive: a few bumps in the road aside (which I’ll talk about later), it certainly looks as though Rodriguez can recruit at the level we have come to expect. While the 2010 class as a whole is going to be below-average (even with his usual strong finish), a down recruiting year in the season after a rough one - as we saw with Notre Dame and as Josh has asserted for years - is to be expected. Simply stated, a weak 2010 recruiting class (from an historical ratings-based perspective) does not by itself reflect poorly upon the recruiting ability of the staff. Now, some have asserted that Rich needs “system players” more than he needs 4* and 5* recruits to win -after all, they say, just look at the Slaton/White years at WVU. But it’s important to note that this was during a time where not only was the Big East the weakest of the six BCS conferences (to the point where some even spoke of them losing their BCS automatic bid), but additionally West Virginia played notably weak non-conference schedules… 2005: Wofford, East Carolina, Maryland 2006: Marshall, Eastern Washington, Maryland 2007: Marshall, Maryland, Western Michigan, Mississippi State And don’t get me wrong… you certainly can’t ignore those Georgia and Oklahoma wins ? those were big. But it’s hard to ignore that they had a really easy path to get to those games in the first place.

Moving on… the standard we demand from Michigan is: championships. At the risk of opening up the ever-present “star-gazing” debate, we need to ask if a coach exists than can take a roster laden with 3* talent and compete for national titles with regularity. So let’s look at the last ten teams to play for the national championship, and the collective star averages of their four classes prior to doing so: 2009 Alabama 3.79 2009 Texas 3.73 2008 Florida 3.85 2008 Oklahoma 3.67 2007 ULSU 3.74 2007 OOHI 3.64 2006 Florida 3.73 2006 OOHI 3.58 2005 Texas 3.77 2005 U$C 4.10 So, while you most certainly don’t want to use absolutes and say it can’t happen; teams to play for the national championship with a roster-wide star average any more than a hair under 3.60 are clearly outliers. I don’t believe we want to rely on being an outlier ? and for the most part Rich’s recruiting shows that he doesn’t want to rely on that either. So we simply can’t have more recruiting classes rated like the 2010 class if we expect to compete for championships. Of course, there are those outliers who have advanced to the brink of the title game: Rich’s West Virginia team in 2007, Utah in 2008 and Boise State/TCU/Cincinnati this year. Interestingly, they have all shared one common trait: weak schedules ? something a Michigan coach will NEVER have, courtesy of games against OSU and ND every dang year and PSU in most years. Think about it this way, if West Virginia has a dozen more 4* players on the roster, regardless of position, don’t they have a better chance to play over the Pat White injury in 2007? When LSU won the national championship in 2007, they had a 5* in Perrilloux to plug in after their QB went down, and they won the SEC title game with him. If Rodriguez had a 4* dual-threat QB behind Pat White, the odds are that they get by a sub-.500 Pitt team.

(While we’re talking about quarterbacks, many take it as fact that quarterbacks will develop into stars on Rich Rodriguez teams, citing the development of Shaun King and Woody Dantzler into Heisman candidates. But it’s important to note that Rodriguez developed both of them while he was an offensive coordinator, not a head coach. Typically, an OC is more hands-on in the development of a quarterback than a HC. Calvin Magee, a former TE, is hands-on with our quarterbacks now, and he has only shown he knows how to play with a RB at QB (Pat White). If you want to make the case that Rodriguez is a better OC than Magee, I’ll buy that. But that’s not his job now. And watching Tate Forcier get worse as the year went on was highly troubling ? even if we think (hope?) it was simply due to being a freshman.) Right now, our roster-wide star average for next year is under 3.10… not even in the same stratosphere as the teams that have played for the last five national titles. Now, this is directly attributable to a large incoming class with a high quantity of sub-4* recruits and a large amount of attrition. And don’t get me wrong, it’s hard to blame much of this on Rich. But it still impacts upon his chances of success. We as fans seem to want to think that Rich can spin gold out of straw and make water into wine. But to win at the level we expect from our team, against the level of competition our team faces… the coach who can do that simply does not exist. No slight on Rodriguez, but no one else has been able to break into the championship game with a lower-rated roster, so there’s no logical reason to believe he can do it either.

So what can or should we look at as Rich’s responsibility? What, if any, are the red flags we have been able to observe from him thus far? Any good organization, in any field, excels based on a strong attention to detail. There are many areas we have observed over the last two years where this staff’s attention to detail has been notably lacking… -Poor tackling. Tackling is coachable. Yet Michigan has been systemically bad in this area for two years. And if you look at the star average and experience of the starting defenses the last two years (suspend your disbelief in the star system for a moment as necessary), the results fall well short of what you would expect. In 2008, our starting defense had a 4.10 (!!) star average and started five seniors, two juniors, and a pair of third year sophomores. Only 2 of 11 starters were short of their third year. If that defense is historically bad, it can only be coaching. Even this year, we started a pair of 5* studs (Warren and Graham ? and they lived up to it) and five more 4*. This does not seemingly jibe with any “cupboard was bare” argument ? although admittedly the depth and experience behind them was weak. And while it’s hard to deny that these last two years would have likely been Lloyd Carr’s two weakest rosters had he stayed, and he certainly did not leave the cupboard fully stocked, he did leave the cupboard with enough in it to make a meal…yet Rich’s staff has left us hungry.

Fumbling. Among the many “pleasantries” espoused by West Virginia fans upon Rich’s departure for Ann Arbor, they told us to brace for fumble-prone teams They nailed that one. Look at Rodriguez’s 2007 team at WVU and his first two teams at Michigan: 2009: 13 (98th in the nation, out of 120) 2008: 18 (114th) 2007: 15 (105th) And really, it’s the 2007 WVU team that is so compelling, because that was a senior Slaton and a junior White primarily handling the ball. And indeed, WVU fumbled away a national championship that year, coughing the ball up 10 times (losing 6) in their two losses. The only common denominator between Slaton, White, Threet, Sheridan, McGuffie, Minor, Brown, Forcier, Robinson… is Rodriguez and his staff. Avoiding fumbles is another fundamental that can be coached, and has been done so inadequately by this staff thus far. That this issue transcends his last two jobs over three seasons points towards it being a pattern.

I remember fondly the “Lloyd can’t close” days on this board regarding Carr’s efforts on the recruiting trail. Well if Lloyd couldn’t close, then Rich seemingly can’t open. We’re looking at the third straight year of Rodriguez on the recruiting trail in December and January performing like Tiger Woods on Sundays (or at a Perkins) [admittedly not my joke, but a good one nonetheless]… the missteps borne of laziness for the rest of the year have been consistent, and again point towards a lack of attention to detail that is necessary for a high-performing organization. In that regard, this staff can’t seem to walk and chew gum at the same time. They can either coach their team or recruit…but not both. We have heard so many stories of disorganization at official visit weekends during the season. We have heard stories of losing contact with recruits - ones we clearly wanted like Cullen Christian - for weeks or months at a time. And in the early stages of filling a class, we seem very content to take kids who will commit regardless of need or where they fall on our staff’s “hot board”. I don’t know if Tony Drake or Drew Dileo will be awful or great at Michigan. What I do know is that we had four slot receivers in the previous two classes, plus we gave a spot to Kelvin Grady - and we usually only have one slot on the field at a time. Even if Dileo and Drake were 4*… they were dyed-in-the-wool Michigan fans who would have committed even had we offered late.

Now we’re closing strong, have acute needs at other positions, and don’t have room for all of them because we picked two pieces of low-hanging fruit that we just did not need. It’s as though we’re walking the first 20 miles of a marathon and sprinting the last 6; you’ll get there faster and easier if you jog the whole way. -Tom Lemming traditionally calls Michigan (and some other schools, I would assume) early in the process with a list of “high major” prospects who are showing some interest. This is pretty valuable to a coaching staff, as you can’t possibly know every kid all over the country who likes you, and Lemming casts a wider net by the nature of his job. So being alerted to a dozen or more really good players who want to hear from you is gold, Jerry, gold! When Lemming called this year… his call went unreturned. That’s unconscionable. And until recently, our staff wasn’t using Jim S’s service as many others do ? and Jim offered it to them for free. Examples abound of a lack of attention to detail. It doesn’t matter what you know about football or how persuasive you can be on the recruiting trail. If you haven’t hardwired attention to detail into your organization, you will be doomed to not maximizing what you have to work with.

Another quality of high-performing organizations is strong leadership, and this is another area where we have some examples of Rich coming up short. -That he allowed the Purdue Week Mutiny to happen in 2008 is very troubling and was an early indicator that maybe he lacked the leadership skills to win at a place like Michigan. Scott Shafer came to Michigan fairly highly regarded after fielding the nation’s #11 defense in 2006 at Western Michigan, running the defense at Stanford that upset USC in 2007 and then he went to Syracuse this year and fielded the #38 defense at a program that has been moribund for a decade. Yet put in charge of a unit whose star average and experience pointed towards it being one of the best in the conference, if not the nation, Shafer failed. Given what he has done before and after Michigan, it’s hard not to conclude that perhaps Shafer wasn’t the main problem. -Just as troubling were the circumstances surrounding the departures of Steve Threet and Sam McGuffie. In both cases, the player (and in Threet’s case, with his family) wanted to meet with Rich to clarify where they stood. In neither case did he take the meeting. In one case he simply let his consigliere, Gibson, handle it, and in both cases the handling of the situation played a role in the player’s departure. This type of dealing with players sends a poor message throughout the organization. Leading Michigan is a much tougher job than leading West Virginia is. On one level, football is football, but as a head coach - a CEO - you have instill your values across an entire organization, communicate your strategy and get everyone pulling in the same direction.This is not so hard to do when you're working at your alma mater in a small-town; where you are beloved and your credibility emanates from your being a favorite son. It's much harder to do when you come in from the outside, to a program in a major media market with all the scrutiny that brings, an "old money" football school perpetually on the national stage with a much wider array of stakeholders living in an entrenched legacy culture of which you have not been a part, with a bitter in-state rival just up the road, and two more titanic, historic rivalries on the docket every year. It's a dramatically larger ship to steer, with a more complicated array of controls on the bridge; and when you separate the football knowledge from the ability to lead and manage a whole program, some people are not going to be up to making that career jump.

Bo Schembechler came in from the outside and re-built a national power in part because he was, innately, a great leader, and in part because he embraced the day-to-day manifestations of the Michigan legacy, for better or for worse. He inherited a facility that was crappy even for that era, but embraced it because it was Fielding Yost's facility. He wore the mantle of the Block M, as heavy as it can be, like it was a part of him. Rodriguez does not seem to be a leader in the way that Bo was, and the Block M seems to be either a weight around his ankle or a hurdle between he and building what he envisions as a "Rich Rodriguez" program. Think back to when Charlie Weis took over at Notre Dame - it immediately touched a live wire to their offense and they went to two straight BCS bowls. We, as rival Michigan fans, mocked Domers' insufferable "Charlie and the Football Factory" “Return to Glory Again…No Really This Time” Kool-Aid drinking. And we rival Michigan fans actually turned out to be right. Well, look at us now. If we thought Domers were delusional for believing Notre Dame was “back” after 10 wins two years in a row, how crazy must we look to even the most neutral observers for expressing certainty and abundant optimism that Rodriguez is going to win here after 3-9, 5-7 and a seemingly endless succession of failures large and small, with red flags dotting the landscape like flowers in a field?

The bible tells us, and a humble scholar in East Lansing reminds us: the pride comes before the fall. It seems we felt that, after three decades of never having a bad season, we were entitled to winning. So it was easy to think we needed a whole new house when all we needed to do was remodel the kitchen and re-carpet the bedrooms. But most people never considered the possibility that a new house might not be as sturdy as the old one. Many Michigan faithful assumed that a new coach would simply augment what had been designed and built by Schembechler, and updated through the years by Moeller and Carr. But in reality, the end of that legacy meant that we were starting from scratch and the level of success we had come to take for granted was far from a guarantee. If you place all the negatives and all the positives of Rodriguez’s first 24 months here on a scale ? and there are some positives that I have not mentioned, like the development of the wide receivers and the fact that one of our eight wins was against Notre Dame - there has to be a serious concern that what we may have done is hire one of the best offensive coordinators in the nation... to be our head coach. Not only is his ultimate success not inevitable, but it is growing more and more difficult to sidestep the idea that it may not even be likely.