Nice bulletin board material
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Tuesday, August 26, 2008 9:48 AM
Look who’s wearing the lamp shade now.
It was bad enough that disgraced Michigan football coach Gary Moeller — last seen in Ann Arbor getting pink-slipped after drunk and disorderly conduct — refused to acknowledge Ohio State as a bigger rival than Michigan State.
Worse, Rich Rodriquez, entrusted with making the Wolverines more than a chew toy for the Buckeyes, is now spouting the same sacrilege, insisting the circle around OSU on the calendar isn’t any bigger than the one around Notre Dame or Michigan State.
“We’re unique for our fans in that we have three huge rivalries,” Rodriguez said at Big Ten Media Days in Chicago this summer. “To me, we even take it a step further. I always say your rivalries are your league games, because that’s your goal every year — to win a conference championship.
“The fact that Michigan State and Penn State are just up the road adds to the intensity a little bit. I don’t have a countdown to a particular game except the next one.”
Jim Tressel started counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the Michigan game on the January afternoon he was hired as Ohio State’s coach in 2001. Given his 6-1 record against the Maize and Blue, Rich Rod might want to find out where Tressel purchases his watches and clocks.
While he’s at it, there was a poll by ESPN in 2000 he should research. It ranked Ohio State-Michigan as the greatest rivalry in sports.
Bigger than Yankees-Red Sox.
Bigger than Ali-Frazier.
Bigger than Lakers-Celtics.
Bigger than Army-Navy.
Yes, to be parochial about it, even bigger than Browns-Steelers.
It’s too late for Moeller to buy a clue. For him to downplay the OSU-Michigan rivalry was especially unforgivable since he had seen the game from both sides as a Michigan coach and OSU captain. Maybe because he was 3-1-1 against Ohio State, with wins of 31-3 and 28-0 (thanks, Coop), he didn’t see it as that big a deal.
But what’s Rich Rod’s excuse? Is he waiting until he has the manpower to contend with Ohio State before he builds up the rivalry? Is he afraid of morphing into predecessor Lloyd Carr, who embraced the rivalry right up until Tressel’s grip squeezed the remaining breaths from his career? Is he playing it down for fear someone will check his track record in rivalries? (He was only 4-3 against Pitt as head coach at West Virginia, including a gag job last season with a trip to the national championship at stake.)
Or is he just ignorant?
“We have so much on our plates as coaches and players, we have to focus on getting Michigan better,” Rodriguez said. “That’s just me. That’s been my philosophy ever since I’ve been a head coach. Focus on ourselves. We understand the rivalries, but winning a (Big Ten) championship is our first goal … and then you take it from there.”
Beating Ohio State should have vaulted to No. 1 on Rich Rod’s to-do list, if only because the Buckeyes are already winning at his expense. He listened as disgruntled offensive lineman Justin Boren ripped his staff’s lack of “family values” and then watched as Boren transferred to Ohio State. But that loss of a returning starter paled to losing the nation’s No. 1 recruit, quarterback Terrelle Pryor, to the Buckeyes.
Rodriguez had called Pryor to tell him he was taking the Michigan job before he told his old team. So losing him to his arch-rival — err, one of the 12 teams on Michigan’s schedule — had to be devastating to him, not to mention costly to Michigan, whose transition from a pro-style offense to Rodriguez’s vaunted spread option attack would have taken a quantum leap with Pryor at the controls.
How costly? The $4 million Rich Rod and Michigan had to pay West Virginia to settle a lawsuit over his buyout looks like chump change by comparison.
“There has been a little bit of drama going on,” he admitted.
Too much for Rodriguez to wrap his mind around the fact that the last six Michigan coaches, going back 70 years, won in their first try against Ohio State.
“I can see people bringing that up, especially since this is my first one,” he said. “But did you see ‘The Lion King?’ A monkey hits a lion over the head and the lion says, ‘What did you do that for?’ And the monkey says, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s in the past.’