Unbelivable: Former head coach for Wolverines Michigan, Rich Rodriguez, has announced his return to the team
Most Michigan football fans would prefer to forget Rich Rodriguez’s three years as head coach during that period of time.
However, that period of time is now in the past since Brady Hoke has done an outstanding job of bringing back some of the glory that the Wolverines’ football team once possessed. In his first two seasons, Hoke has won 19 games, including one in 2012 that ended Michigan’s four-game losing run versus Michigan State. Rodriguez has won four times as many games as that in the last three years (15–22).
Hoke’s 2013 class was ranked No. 5 in the country by 247Sports.com, and his 2014 class is ranked No. 1 and features Jabrill Peppers, the class’ top athlete. This is a far cry from Rodriguez’s mediocre recruiting classes.
Michigan’s standing among elite programs has been restored thanks to the outstanding work of Hoke’s staff. Rodriguez couldn’t sell the Michigan name well enough to make it into the top 10 on 247Sports.com, placing it at No. 11, 16, and 26 in the rankings from 2009 to 2011. Despite this, the Michigan name usually sells itself.
It’s reasonable to believe that Rodriguez wouldn’t have done much better in 2012 and 2013 based on that tendency. The Wolverines’ roster most likely would have been full of similar talent unsuited for the kind of power football that has made Michigan a household name, rather than elite collections.
Following a change in coaching, transfers are not unusual. And once Rodriguez arrived, Ryan Mallett, the quarterback, and offensive guard Justin Boren both moved on to better things. Boren became an All-Big Ten lineman at Ohio State, while Mallett, the No. 2 quarterback in the 2007 class, according to Rivals.com, joined Arkansas before making his NFL debut.
What would happen if Mallett stayed? Would his presence have drawn elite wide receivers to the field, igniting Michigan’s offensive potency again?
Although Rodriguez didn’t exactly scout unknown players, his spread offense and preference for quicker, smaller defensive players ultimately proved to be his undoing. Not everyone on Carr’s team was happy about the new way of doing things, either on or off the field.
In a 2008 interview with the Associated Press (via ESPN.com), Boren voiced his dissatisfaction with Rodriguez’s strategies prior to leaving for Columbus:
From [former] Coach [Lloyd] Carr on down, Michigan football was a family, based on mutual respect and support for one another.It is quite difficult for me to accept that those family values have diminished in a matter of months.
Would players like quarterback Shane Morris and linebacker Derrick Green, who were top recruits in 2013, be discouraged by the absence of “family values”? What about standout performers from 2014 like Drake Harris, Peppers, and Lawrence Marshall?
