Michigan Coach Rodriguez…..I’m not buying it!

I saw the clips of the press conference with Michigan Coach Rich Rodriguez in response to the allegations by former and current players that Michigan went way beyond NCAA rules for practice or workout times, during both the season and off season.  I’m sorry, but I just didn’t buy his response.

Now let me say this up front.  I don’t know Coach Rodriguez or much about his background prior to Michigan.   And it might be dangerous to write this post without seeing the complete statement made by the Coach.

But I’m not buying it for two reasons.  First, why would the players come out and be this vocal after just one season under his coaching?  What do they really have to gain by going public?   To me, it would seem that possibly the problems are severe enough that they are concerned about Michigan getting extremely severe punishment and they figured that they better speak up now.  If it was just borderline or not blatent, they would probably just keep on keeping on and not worry about it.

And second, his comments just didn’t ring true to me.  He seemed to be trying to deflect the attention.  His emotional moments geared towards his “caring”for his players and the vague comments that they “supported” the players in “all of their” efforts to get better just seemed to be positioning to me.  Preparing for a defense of “the players really wanted to do it and the coaches were just supporting them”, or something like that.

Now I know that he issued a statement to a newspaper in which he denied the allegations, but why didn’t he come out strongly in the live press conference?   I guess I would have expected a stronger denial, some anger, confusion about how this even came up.  But I didn’t see any of that.  Now I could be way off base here, but just watching the clips on Sports Center and reading the papers today, it just seems to smell of something to me.

I hope I’m wrong,  it would be a shame for a program with great history like Michigan to get hit with a major scandal like this.   And like I said, I really don’t know Coach Rodriguez, so if you’re a Rodriguez supporter,  prove me wrong on this one.