But then, I AM cynical

So.

Rich Rodriguez is puzzled how he could have “misinterpreted” NCAA practice time rules and why “we made mistakes." He and his staff and going to look into it, figure it out, get to the bottom of it.

This after the NCAA found the Michigan football players were forced to practice longer than the athletics ruling body allows. The school has 90 days to respond to the finding.

May I suggest to RichRod that he “misinterpreted” the rules and made “mistakes” because like many D-1 football coaches, he doesn’t give a rat’s rear about whether his “student-athletes” have enough study time or not. Because it’s all about the W’s and the money the W’s will bring — to the coach, of course, not to the players.

There I go being cynical, again.

Friday column: Some things you expect; others ...

You’re the Cincinnati Bengals (God help you).

You have a history of drafting athletes with “issues,” which helps explain your 46-49 record under Marvin Lewis. So you draft massive Alabama lineman Andre Smith, who has both character issues and weight issues.

Smith sits out all of training camp and most of the preseason before inking his contract, then shows up this week — all 335 pounds of him — and promptly fractures his left foot in a simple drill.

Surprise.

* * *

You’re a teenager in the little, nowhere town of Noosaville, Australia (pop. 6528), and you’re up to no good. You and a buddy enter a house at night and accidentally awaken what you take to be an old biddy.

No problem.

You just grab her by the throat and threaten her — that’ll keep her quiet, you think.

Only this biddy grabs you by the ear and strikes you in the groin — with her titanium knee, no less — then other people in the house show up and sit on you and your pal until the police arrive. Now you’re facing charges, as well as the ignominy of being taken down by a 72-year-old grandmother.

But this, you discover, isn’t your run-of-the-mill grandmamma. It’s Aussie swimming great Dawn Fraser, who won gold medals in three — count ’em, three — Olympic Games. And she appears to have taken umbrage at your actions.

“I was threatened by the way he spoke to me and I’d never been spoken to like what he called me,” Fraser said. “I think I lost it.”

Yes, it seemed like an easy score, but in life there’s always the unexpected.

Surprise!

* * *

You’re Michigan athletics director Bill Martin, the man who hired Rich Rodriguez to be the Wolverines head football coach, spiriting him away from West Virginia. (That's Rodriguez in the photo above, assuring somebody of something back in his Mountaineer days.)

When you employed him, you knew he’d once agreed in principle to coach Alabama, only to pull out at the last second, leaving the Crimson Tide red-faced.

You knew he’d promised Mountaineer recruits he’d be in Morgantown the rest of his career and had even signed an extension at West Virginia four months — count ’em, four! — before quitting to come to Ann Arbor.

You knew in West Virginia he’d agreed to pay a $4 million buyout to the Mountaineers if he broke his contract to jump to another school, then tried to weasel out of paying.

Now, your coach is flatly denying the charge by current and former players that he cut corners with the NCAA rules that limit the number of hours the student-athletes spend on football-related activities.

But the NCAA is investigating, and if it turns out Rodriguez’s word on this — as in so many other things — can’t be trusted …

Surprise?

Exactly what you DON’T want, Coach

Rich Rodriguez, coach of the 3-8 Michigan football team, thinks something’s out of whack. Some fans of the maize and blue, it seems, are taking the game much too seriously.

Rodriguez is displeased with the vocalizing that’s been heading his way as the Wolverines have lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost, lost and lost this year.

"It's amazing some of the things that people would say [on a message board] or yell at you of a personal nature," Rodriguez. "You almost want to tell them, 'Get a life.'

No, no, Rich. You don’t want them to get a life. If they have a life, they might not buy tickets to watch your football team and subsidize your $15 million, six-year contract. They might even object when the university pays your former employer, West Virginia, $3 million as compensation for your having broken your contract to come to Ann Arbor in the first place.

Trust me, Rich: You want those fans to avoid a healthy perspective at all cost. Verbal abuse might be difficult, but at $2.5 mil a year, you can afford a real good pair of noise-blocking earphones.

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3710474

All you maze-and-blue fans

Growing up a UCLA fan in Southern California, I didn't have a strong preference when it came time for Michigan and Ohio State to tangle in the Midwest, but I tended to root a little bit for the Wolverines during the Woody Hayes' era at OSU. In recent years, it may have been nothing more than Michigan conceit that the Wolverines football program was purer-than-thou, but I still leaned a bit toward Ann Arbor. No more.

Michigan fans who still want to imagine their program as a cut above, ethically, won't like the start of Rich Rogriguez's tenure in Ann Arbor with his selfish and unnecessary feud with West Virginia, and certainly won't like Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg's take on things. After detailing RichRod's $4 million settlement with West Virginia — $2.5 of which will be paid by the University of Michigan — Rosenberg concludes with the following:

"Rodriguez might win big at Michigan. But if he does, and he demands a big raise every year, or flirts with other employers, or ignores his contracts, or refuses to put the school’s interests ahead of his own, then Michigan fans should not be surprised. As we have seen in the last few months, this is who he is."

Wave those pom-poms high ...



http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080709/SPORTS06/80709105/1048/sports