Mike Celizic

When the news came down that Michigan had finally broken a major NCAA rule after 104 years of trying not to, my first reaction was to feel sorry for a really fine school that has some very fine fans, one of whom I’m married to.

I got over it.

It didn’t take much time to realize that my compassion was misplaced. Michigan football brought this ignominy on itself when it hired Rich Rodriguez.

Folks in West Virginia, the program Rodriguez abandoned to nuzzle up to the maize-and-blue feeding trough, said Rodriguez was a weasel’s weasel when he left two years ago. It turns out they were right.

Michigan ignored the warnings, just as most schools do when they’ve got their hearts set on a particular conquering hero. He was, after all, a premier football coach, a natural-born leader and a bona-fide winner.

So now the school is busy slapping its own wrists for committing five major rules violations under Rodriguez’s brief watch. And although it’s proposing its own punishment, its athletic director, David Brandon, and Rodriguez himself are saying they’re sorry, but it wasn’t any one person’s fault, and besides, they’ve been good for 104 years and are entitled to a little naughtiness.

It remains to be seen if the NCAA will add more penalties. Although I think Michigan’s remedies are reasonable, I think the school should be made to suffer further humiliations simply because of the way Brandon and Rodriguez have gone about not accepting responsibility.

And don’t tell me they both said they accept the blame. They said that because they had to, and the words hadn’t even faded away before they were in full spin mode, blaming everyone. They even fired someone. It wasn’t anyone important, just a graduate assistant, but the body still made what they felt was an impressive splash when it was tossed overboard.

"I don't think this is a black eye," Brandon told reporters. "This is a bruise."

This is beneath the dignity and honor Michigan had built up over more than a century of academic and athletic excellence. Rodriguez is an embarrassment to the legacy of Fielding Yost, Bump Elliott and Bo Schembechler.

Guys such as Rodriguez love to talk about leadership. They charge thousands of dollars to give speeches on the subject, their eloquence inspiring audiences of middle-aged college football junkies to reach for their Visa cards and contribute to the cause.

People such as Rodriguez tell you that leaders don’t just accept responsibility, they embrace it like a lover. They cherish it, treasure it, adore it, send it chocolates on Valentine’s Day. And they don’t make excuses when things go wrong. 

Excuses are for sissies. They’re for guys who use pink golf tees and drink wine coolers; for guys with beards who read books, speak in complete sentences and still have “Kerry 2000” stickers on the bumpers of their Priuses.

So what does Rodriguez do when his football program gets hit with charges that it committed five major violations against NCAA rules? He offers excuses.

First, Rodriguez released a statement through his lawyer, who referred to the coach in the third-person jock.

“Coach Rodriguez is surprised and disappointed that violations occurred in his program. He has strived throughout his career to follow the rules,” the statement begins.

How can that be? One of the charges is that he made the team practice more than the 20 hours a week allowed by the NCAA. How is it that a coach doesn’t know how long his own team practices? The only conclusions are that he’s either lying or he doesn’t know the most basic things about his own program.

“... [E]nsuring compliance with complex NCAA bylaws is not a one-man job. It requires a diligent commitment from everyone with responsibility for compliance oversight,” his attorney said for him. “That is not to deflect blame away from Rodriguez, it is simply stating a fact and putting Rodriguez’s culpability in the proper context.”

In this case, “proper context” means, “It wasn’t my fault!”

Rodriguez is not the first coach to use that defense. It’s a cop-out and a lie. The truth is that when there are systematic abuses in a system, it starts with the guy at the top of the pay chain.

There’s a reason Michigan went from 1906, when the NCAA was founded, until now before it was charged with its first major violation. It’s because coaches, athletic directors and university presidents made sure that everybody on the staff, from the offensive coordinator down to the kid who washes the jock straps, knew that there would be zero tolerance of rules violations. You tell people they’re dead if they cheat, they’re more likely to be honest. Then you watch what they do. You count how many coaches you have, for crying out loud. Rodriguez didn’t even know he had too many people on his football staff. That’s somebody else’s fault? What, he’s too busy to count how many employees he has and check that against how many he’s allowed to have?

It’s his fault first for not checking himself. It’s his fault second for not having somebody whose job it was to make sure everybody was following the rules; somebody who counts the hours of practice, the size of the staff, or what the staff was doing when it wasn’t supposed to be doing it.

But Rodriguez, who accepts all the blame, also excuses himself by saying, “I didn’t know it was wrong.”

This is the very definition of a weasel. He starts by saying it’s his responsibility, then says it was somebody else’s fault.

This is the work of a leader? No wonder Michigan has lost twice as many games as it’s won in his two years as coach. No wonder people are saying this could be the end of Rich-Rod.

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No fear of that. Michigan’s not populated by fools. They know it will cost $4 million to buy out Rodriguez, which is considerably more than it cost to sack a graduate assistant, and they hope that he will yet work his magic on the football team. So they’re willing to give him another chance. What other choices do they have? They couldn’t find another top coach at this late date no matter how much money they had to throw at him.

Plus, Brandon went out of his way to defend Rodriguez. When a reporter suggested that Michigan cheated, Brandon fired back: "Bad word, inaccurate word. We made mistakes and where I come from, a mistake is different than cheating."

I’d say Rodriguez’s leash just got a lot shorter, though. This season, he’d better at least win more games than he loses. This year, he better count how many people are on his staff and how long the kids practice. This year, he better make sure he knows what the staff is allowed to do before they do it and not after.

And most of all, this season, he should lay off the leadership speech at those booster-club dinners. Better to stick to a subject Wolverines fans really want to know about, such as, what, exactly, makes him worth $2.5 million a year?

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