 | Pink Floyd - Hey You |  |
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 | Found at skreemr.com |  |
I'm not going to comment about Demar Dorsey. I'm not going to comment on him for a couple reasons: One, there is no coach in the country that deliberately seeks out bad character kids for their program, nor is there any coach in the country that doesn't do due dilligence when it comes to finding out about a kid's background. Two, I trust Brian at MGoBlog almost implicitly. If he says he has a source that told him Vance Bedford (two-time UM assistant under Carr) called Rodriguez and personally vouched for Demar Dorsey's character, that's good enough for me.
I'm also not going to comment (much) on people like Drew Sharp and Dave Birkett. Sharp is what he is - a miserable, trollish sonofabitch who has admitted he doesn't care what fans think. He's a megalomaniacal bomb thrower only interested in poking the hornet's nest and then laughing as the swarm futilely stings at his bee suit. His comments were stupid, ignorant and pompous - three character traits he is intimately familiar with. I will take pleasure in watching his industry continue to wither away into irrelevancy. If there is a God, he will sink with it.
As for Birkett, well...he writes for AnnArbor.com. Why? Because the Ann Arbor News went under. Wanna know a good way to accelerate your demise (aside from being an obsolete medium of news information)? Hire guys that loathe the biggest thing in the town you're based in. Guys like Jim Carty and Michigan State University graduate Dave Birkett. Birkett is insignificant. He was fishing at the Signing Day presser, trying to show the room he had the balls to stand up to the 8-16 Michigan coach. If Rich Rodriguez was 16-8 instead, he tells Birkett to shut up, and it's done. If Lloyd Carr was still the coach and he heard a question from Birkett he didn't like, he would give a glare, and roughly 3.9 seconds later, Dave Birkett hustles out of the room with a dark stain on the front of his pants.
A few things interest me. Like how the Free Press can have an extensive seven-page background check into a teenage kid's past completed and ready to go in a little over a day. I'm interested in that. I'm interested in how much longer it will take for someone - anyone - inside Michigan's athletic department to show some kind - any kind - of support for their coach. I mean, you hired the guy, and he's getting raked over the coals (again). Wouldn't it be smart business to fight back, to stick up for the man you picked to represent your biggest product? Unless...maybe after two years of horror on the football field, some people of importance have secretly decided that an awful mistake was made in mid-December 2007, and they're now subtlely feeding the beast intent on running the man out of here. Beats me. I'm just musing.
But the double standards are still piling up. Michigan State allows Glenn Winston onto the practice field the same day he gets out of jail, and someone at the Freep (it might've been Sharp, actually) says that might've been naughty. Michigan kicks a drug dealer off the team immediately after learning about his habits, and Rosenberg's got his "win at all costs" column ready to go. These "journalists" hide behind the charade of wanting to do what's right and maintaining a standard of decency and integrity at the University of Michigan, when in reality Rosenberg doesn't like Rodriguez because he (Rosenberg) is an elitist snob who can't stand seeing a "hillbilly" coaching his alma mater. When in reality, nobody would be saying anything if Rodriguez was winning. In the end, these "journalists" are just as shallow as the rest of us - they aren't looking out for core values like integrity and personal responsibility. They are interested in the darker sides of humanity. They're interested in advancing their own beliefs and interests at the expense of someone they passed judgment on long ago.
Just wait for it. If they succeed in their jihad, and Rodriguez is gone, wait for the reaction if Jim Harbaugh is hired. Wait for the media stroking about how Michigan righted a wrong and brought a Michigan Man back to Michigan. Watch as they gloss over Harbaugh's own run-ins with the law, as they conveniently forget the words Harbaugh spewed about UofM. They will burn Rodriguez about his recruiting methods, and will cover their ears when confronted with Harbaugh's practice at Stanford of blindly taking commitments from kids only to have to drop them in November and December because Stanford's admissions were too tough and Harbaugh never should've taken them in the first place. Harbaugh is no cleaner than Rodriguez, but because of the Detroit media's bizarre xenophobic attitude toward the latter, the former would be greeted like a king should he return to the place he spat on three years ago. It's selective memory and sleazy, irresponsible, bullshit journalism like that that is driving the newspaper industry into the ground, and I welcome it. I have true, genuine disdain (I won't say "hate", but it's probably closer to that) for people like Mark Snyder and Michael Rosenberg (along with the rest of them, really). Does anybody actually believe either of these "journalists" care about NCAA rules? They're both Michigan grads. Snyder has been to many, many Michigan games, not as a "journalist", but as a fan. Do you think he really would have a problem with Michigan players exceeding the allowed practice time to - gasp - improve as football players? No. Their issue is squarely with Rodriguez, and it's personal to them. Jim Schaefer, who apparently wrote the latest hit piece (I haven't read it, won't click the Freep links, etc)...he is an Ohio State grad. Letting an Ohio State graduate and two virulent anti-Rodriguez shills report on the ins and outs of Michigan football and Michigan recruiting...and Free Press editor Paul Anger lets it go on, even encourages it.
My endgame is this, and I hinted at it a while back, but sadly, I'm starting to firmly believe it: 2010 is starting to look like the end for Rodriguez at Michigan. Not because of one specific incident, but because of everything. The list is long, we all know what's gone on. But the longer we hear silence from the UofM athletic department, the longer we can only assume that it will take an enormous improvement in 2010 to save Rodriguez. Could it happen? Maybe. I could definitely see an 8-win team. Would an 8-5 season calm the storm? In a perfect world, yes.
But as we've all become painfully aware of, since we lost Bo in November 2006, nothing is perfect about this situation, this university, this athletic department, and this football program.
