The Media Made Me Do It

There's a theory floating around out there that applies equally to deposed Cleveland Browns head coach Eric Mangini and deposed Michigan Wolverines coach Rich Rodriguez. It was the media, in the back, with a word processor.

Neither Mangini nor Rodriguez were particularly successful in their most recent jobs, mind you. Both had showed some progress but in an era where the average person gets frustrated when his email goes unanswered for more than 5 minutes, progress is now measured in weeks and not years. Yet apparently there is a vocal minority out there, including several columnists, that are trying to advance the theory that the firings of each were media inflicted..

If this were 30 years ago there’s every reason to believe that both Mangini and Rodriguez would have been retained for another year. The pressure management in each case felt from a disgruntled fan base would have been far less. People got their news at 6 and 11 and read one newspaper a day. But information and speculation these days is instantaneous and it takes almost no effort to inform and incite a fan base.

That’s not to say, though, as the vocal minority still pining for the halcyon days of Mangini and Rodriguez are suggesting, that either was fired as the result of a lynch mob banging at the doors of each entity’s athletic facilities. But it is to suggest that a large part of the downfall in each case was media related, just not media inflicted.

Remember this. The local media serves as the proxy for the fans. Treat them poorly and it’s as if you’re treating the fans poorly. Treat them well, take the time to get to know them and work with them and you’ll be viewed in a far different light.

You don’t need to take that as a leap of faith. Consider Mangini’s interview published in Friday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer where he admitted that one of his major shortcomings was the fact that he didn’t take the time to explain his vision or the process he’d go about to achieve that vision.

Well, duh. If that’s Mangini’s mea culpa for treating the media with contempt, then we’ll accept the apology and hope that if he ever gets the chance again he’ll do better in that regard. But there can be no doubt that this was in fact a major shortcoming and one that significantly handicapped his ability to connect with the fan base that Mangini claims to love.

It’s puzzling, actually, why Mangini chose to be so truculent with the media instead of using it to enhance his status. If he’s really the engaging person that others claim him to be, then the task would have been rather easy. Bill Belichick was an ass (and mostly still is) to the local media in his tenure here and Mangini was on hand to witness it and the attendant fall out. Belichick’s relationship alienated the fans from the team they loved and to this day it still informs how the locals feel about Belichick despite his success elsewhere. It’s fair to suggest that this widening gulf was at least partly responsible for the Browns moving in the first place. The fans were that fed up.
In much the same way that will be Mangini’s legacy as well and for that he only has himself to blame but at least he recognizes it.

In Michigan, Rodriguez will eventually come to the same conclusion. By all accounts he wasn’t a Mangini-level jerk to the local press, but neither was he forthcoming with them about all the various issues surrounding him and the program. But where Rodriguez fell short was in failing to better manage the perceptions about him. That would have required a level of maturity he doesn’t appear to possess, but it was still something within his grasp to control.

Sure, there are those that are at least trying to put a positive spin on Rodriguez’s time in Ann Arbor. But it’s mostly being done by minimizing his missteps and focusing on barely discernible progress, much the same as it is with Mangini.

But just as with Mangini, there’s no reason to be revisionist. It’s been theorized that Rodriguez didn’t connect with Michigan fans because he wasn’t a “Michigan Man.” Well, either was Bo Schembechler, who played at Miami University and first coached at Ohio State. But a career of doing the right things in the right ways turned him into a Michigan man, even if he never did win a national championship. The same easily could have held true for Rodriguez.

The reason Rodriguez didn’t connect with Michigan fans had everything to do with the way Rodriguez came in, a carpetbagger mentality intact, and his continuing inability to appreciate that Michigan wasn’t a weigh station to the next job but the end of the rainbow.

Rodriguez didn’t just engage in missteps. He made major errors. First of all, he absolutely stiffed the administration and the players at West Virginia, his alma mater in bolting for Michigan. He had just agreed to a new contract with a hefty multi-million dollar buyout and then tried to wiggle out of paying that exit fee by claiming that it was West Virginia that actually breached its agreement with him. Talk about not managing your image.

It was a thin, lawyer-concocted argument that didn’t wash and ultimately forced Michigan to step up and pay the buyout. But of course there was more.

Next was the classless way Rodriguez left in the first place. His first words weren’t to the players he had recruited to West Virginia that he was now abandoning. It was to Terrelle Pryor, then the hottest recruit in the country and someone Rodriguez was first trying to lure to West Virginia and then, of course, to Michigan. That worked out when Pryor chose Ohio State instead.

Then, like a petulant child, Rodriguez couldn’t just say bygones and move on. Instead he destroyed all of the records of his current players at West Virginia, making it tougher on the next coach, a former assistant of Rodriguez's, who then had to create the records from scratch.

There was the shady real estate venture that Rodriguez got himself roped into that caused another distraction, but that was minor stuff compared to the first institutional violations in Michigan football history. Michigan apologists like to call these much ado about nothing but they were major violations mainly because they were committed with the intent to give Michigan a competitive advantage.

Throw in all of the defections and recruiting mishaps and Rodriguez pretty much demonstrated in virtually every step he made as Michigan’s coach that his hiring met every definition of a mistake that there is.

So before we start getting all weepy for Rodriguez or Mangini, let’s not forget that most of their mistakes were self-inflicted. The on-the-field record was certainly important, but far more detrimental to their job security was the image they conveyed to a media sitting there to record every painful second along the way.

Self-Flagellation, Michigan Style

It used to be that the biggest thing the University of Michigan football program worried about was whether or not it had enough firepower to compete for a national title. Now its chief concern is whether it can effectively stay one step ahead of the law.

After the Detroit Free Press last fall published a series of stories about various potential NCAA infractions within the Michigan football program under new head coach Rich Rodriguez, followed by the usual official but vague denials and the requisite teeth gnashing by the Michigan faithful, it turns out that the smoke really was coming from a fire blazing inside the program.

After conducting its own investigation, the University of Michigan slapped its own self on the wrist with a bunch of mostly meaningless “sanctions” as a way of wiping away the mess that Rodriguez visited upon its football program starting about 20 minutes after he got the job in December, 2007.

The story started when some of Rodriguez’s own players outed him and his staff for a variety of matters including having them practice in excess of NCAA imposed time limits. Once the NCAA got done with its preliminary investigation, it determined that Rodriguez exceeded the number of authorized coaches by 5, permitted staff members to monitor and conduct supposedly voluntary summer workouts, and had a graduate assistant coach lie to NCAA investigators about his role. The NCAA also accused Rodriguez of not monitoring his program closely enough and for essentially bullying the university’s compliance staff into not nosing around.

At the time the university promised to investigate but mostly downplayed the seriousness of the inquiry despite recent violations by its basketball program that threatened to turn the football allegations into a loss-of-institutional-control case. Rodriguez, ever the smarmy ne’er do well, admitted to nothing and said that hypothetically if violations occurred then it was all just one big misunderstanding.

Some misunderstanding. Fulfilling the prophecy of its knee-jerk reaction to the allegations in the first place, the university admitted that indeed infractions occurred, several in fact, but it’s all pretty minor stuff. Now a cynic might suggest that Michigan is downplaying the seriousness of this all because it doesn’t want to be labeled a repeat offender by the NCAA. But why be cynical? Let’s just give the big fat benefit of the doubt and let the facts do most of the talking.

At the very least, the investigation Michigan conducted revealed some sobering realities. Michigan has never had any allegations in the 100+ years of its program, that is until Rodriguez arrived. Moreover, it’s not as if Michigan admitted only to one or two items. There were multiple violations on a whole host of issues ranging from improper conduct of assistant coaches to poor recordkeeping to an internal compliance department that was subservient to the football program to an assistant who lied during the investigation. For all that to surface in the less than two years under Rodriguez doesn’t speak well for anyone associated with the university no matter how minor you think the violations might be.

As a result, Michigan self-imposed a variety of very minor penalties such as cutting practice time, cutting the number of assistant coaches and putting itself on probation. What exactly probation means isn’t quite clear because the university didn’t bother to explain it any better than that. Let’s just say that they didn’t vow to keep themselves out of any bowl games or cut scholarships or do any other kinds of acts that are usually the hallmarks of substantive probation.

The problem with the university’s response is that they are so busy detailing the differences between each cattail that they don’t realize they are in the middle of a swamp that Rodriguez brought to them. There’s a lot of “everybody else does it” to their defense even as they disclaim any attempt to justify their actions on the basis of other programs’ alleged violations.

They talk about how Rodriguez has increased the number of so-called quality control coaches (essentially paid go-fers) from what is was under Lloyd Carr but then say, hey, every team has lots of them. Then conveniently buried in a footnote is an acknowledgement that virtually none of these quality control types have had the requisite training or certifications they needed to be engaged in the activities they supposedly were responsible for.

It begs the question, what were they really doing? The university doesn’t address this point despite how central that really is to the underlying allegations that these go-fers were essentially spies for Rodriguez and the rest of his staff when NCAA rules won’t allow them to be around, such as during supposedly voluntary summer workouts or extra film sessions.

Something that’s bound to get the notice of NCAA investigators reading the university’s response is how quickly the university was willing to throw its own compliance staff under the bus in favor of trying to preserve Rodriguez’s credibility, a nearly impossible task at this point. The university acknowledges that its compliance staff asked the right questions of Rodriguez when it inquired about what exactly these quality control coaches were supposedly doing and why certain forms weren’t getting filled out but then blames that same quality control staff for not following up when Rodriguez and his staff stonewalled them for answers. That’s like blaming an assault victim because the 911 operator forgot to dispatch his call to the police.

The university’s considered decision to blame the compliance staff and not Rodriguez is all part of the larger defense of Rodriguez. Specifically the university goes to great lengths to deny any allegations that Rodriguez failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance within the program despite the numerous violations it admits to.

The university attempts to reconcile the conflict between the numerous violations and their belief that they nonetheless don’t have a culture of non-compliance by essentially admitting that instead they merely have a culture of stupidity. They suggest that the NCAA rules are just so gosh darn hard to understand sometimes and that Rodriguez is trying, he really is.

I’d say the university is completely tone deaf both in its official response and in what it said during its recent press conference as to the seriousness of the allegations but they are abject apologists compared to Rodriguez. Forced by the NCAA to issue his own response to the allegations made against him, Rodriguez goes to great lengths to put it all into his version of context. And that version? Compliance isn’t a one person job. A lot of people didn’t do their jobs and poor Richard was just one cog in that wheel of misfortune.

Rodriguez tries to distance himself from most of what occurred by saying that heck he didn’t even know that people weren’t counting training hours correctly and gosh he had no idea that his staff wasn’t responding to the university’s compliance staff or geez he was completely unaware that the NCAA had a rule about that, go figure.

He essentially paints himself as a well-intentioned babe in the Michigan woods caught wholly unaware by all the intricacies of the NCAA’s reach. That would have all played better if Rodriguez was a first-time coach. He wasn’t and spent much of the introduction to his response trumpeting his Division I experience, pre-Michigan.

For all of that the university did issue Rodriguez a written reprimand, a copy of which wasn’t included in the university’s response. I assume, however, that as Dean Wormer would say, this isn’t going to look good on his permanent record.

The university’s athletic director, David Branden, was asked at a press conference recently whether Rodriguez would be terminated. Branden acknowledged that violation of NCAA rules could be grounds for termination but said that in this case it wasn’t warranted because the infractions, essentially, weren’t all that serious.

There’s probably some justification to that position. Yet a more compelling case can be made the other way. In his two years at Michigan all Rodriguez has done on the field is shame the program. Now he’s shamed it off the field as well. I understand trying to make something work. But eventually Michigan will tire of trying to force this square peg into a round hole and Rodriguez will be gone, off to somewhere that should be more used to NCAA violations. Maybe they’re all just waiting for the USC job to open up again.

Another Stain on Michigan

There will come a point when the University of Michigan acknowledges that the hiring of Rich Rodriguez as its head football coach was an abject mistake, but apparently that time is not right now.

On the heels of the NCAA issuing a notice of five potential major violations committed under the auspices of Rodriguez, all incoming athletic director David Brandon can say of relevance at the moment is that Rodriguez will remain the football coach. We’ll see.

To put these allegations into context, remember two salient points. First, the University of Michigan football program had never previously been accused of committing NCAA infractions. Second, Rodriguez has been with the Wolverines for a mere two seasons. As the kids like to say, you do the math.

That means, of course, that in his two short seasons, Rodriguez has dropped the program to historic lows both on and off the field. Ohio State fans can surely gloat because, well, it is something to gloat about. Watching Michigan get its comeuppance will always be satisfying. But at a much different level, seeing a storied program like Michigan sink to its current depths tarnishes the greatest rivalry in college football. That’s to neither Ohio State’s nor the Big Ten’s benefit.

The allegations against the Michigan program and Rodriguez in particular are serious stuff. Let’s run down the list:

1. From January 2008 through September 2009, a time period which essentially covers the moment Rodriguez stepped on campus to the moment the Detroit Free Press outed him, the Michigan program exceed the permissible limit on the number of coaches by 5 when quality control staff members, supposedly noncoaching staff members, were actually engaged in on-and off-field coaching activities. The NCAA gives 4 specific instances. You could, maybe, rationalize exceeding the limit by 1, but 5?

2. From January 2008 through at least September, 2009, the football program violated NCAA legislation governing playing and practice seasons when it permitted football staff members to monitor and conduct voluntary summer workouts, conducted impermissible activities outside the playing season, required players to participate in summer conditioning activities or face discipline and exceed time limits for football-related activities. The NCAA lists 10 separate incidents. One might be a misunderstanding and two a mistake but 10 sounds an awful lot like a pattern.

3. A graduate assistant football coach under Rodriguez, Alex Herron, allegedly provided false and misleading information to both university and NCAA investigators about these incidents. In particular, the coach in question claimed he was only briefly present at the beginning of certain “voluntary” summer conditioning sessions but in actuality monitored and conducted the activities. When the dust settles, it will be Herron will become the convenient scapegoat, just watch.

4. The allegations in #1 and 2 above demonstrate that Rodriguez failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance within the football program and failed to adequately monitor the duties and activities of the quality control staff members and various assistant coaches.

5. Based on the allegations in #1 and 2 above, the athletic department failed to adequately monitor its football program to assure compliance with NCAA requirements. The NCAA gives two specific examples, the most damning of which is that shortly after Rodriguez was hired, the university’s compliance staff became aware of and concerned with the employment of the so-called quality control staff members but didn’t adequately follow up.

When you look at the last two allegations it makes you wonder how Rodriguez can survive the inquiry. Not only is he personally attacked for running a program that plays fast and loose with NCAA regulations, but he also is attacked by implication for essentially running roughshod over the university’s compliance staff so that they wouldn’t inquire further about their concerns.

The usual disclaimers of course apply. These are only allegations and neither Rodriguez nor the university has been found guilty of anything at the moment. But given the specificity of the allegations and the fact that the university has tacitly admitted, though downplayed, certain key aspects of the allegations, it’s fair to say at this point that there is more than smoke emanating from the Michigan campus at the moment.

Following the release of the allegations, university president Mary Sue Coleman said all the right things about taking the allegations seriously, but you have to wonder if that’s really the case.

According to the Associated Press account, Brandon admitted that mistakes were made though he didn’t get specific and seemed to take comfort, oddly, in a kind of “the sun will come out tomorrow” sort of way, that the university at least wasn’t charged with a loss of institutional control. But given that a few years ago the basketball program was found to have violated certain NCAA regulations, it basically is charged with being a repeat offender. I guess it’s a fine line between the two but it doesn’t seem like anything Brandon should be bragging about at the moment.

Rodriguez wouldn’t even go as far as Brandon, couching his remarks in the hypothetical, as in “if violations were made” it was just, essentially, a silly misinterpretation of the rules. In a nutshell this is exactly why Rodriguez shouldn’t be allowed any where near a college football program, let alone a storied, tradition-rich program like Michigan.

In short, Rodriguez just doesn’t get it. He would have people believe that his reading of the rule book allowed assistant coaches to oversee supposedly voluntary summer conditioning drills while letting players know that if they don’t volunteer for these drills there would be consequences. These are about as basic as the rules can get.

If the various Michigan Wolverine blogs are any indication, Michigan fans have already sloughed this off as much ado about nothing. They’ve parsed the allegations, concluded that they sound worse than they really are and, hey, doesn’t everyone do the same thing? Well, no, but I understand their point of view. It’s why they’re fans.

When the Maurice Clarett allegations hit, almost none of which ever panned out, Ohio State fans went into the same bunker mentality. But there is a difference and it is the difference between Jim Tressell and Rich Rodriguez and that’s the larger point.

Standing outside a maize and blue haze a much more reasonable conclusion to draw is that immediately after arriving Rodriguez looked for every shortcut to success he could find. Maybe that’s exactly what Justin Boren meant when he left the Michigan program for Ohio State shortly after Rodriguez was hired citing, essentially, an abandonment of values. From this vantage point, Boren looks positively prescient in his description.

The hard truth that Michigan hasn’t yet faced and apparently Brandon doesn’t want to face even as he awaits his first official day on the job next month is that hiring Rodriguez was a mistake of colossal proportions and that’s never going to change. Rodriguez has an ugly course of conduct that’s firmly established. He stands for nothing, falls for everything and as he’s done so, he’s taken the university down the same drain.

And while apologizing and minimizing every transgression from Rodriguez might feel good, all the university and its fans are really doing is becoming complicit in putting the university and the football program in further jeopardy. Mark my words. If Michigan continues to stick with Rodriguez, whatever success he might find on the field (and he’s found none yet) will come at a huge cost. They may escape this time with a hard slap on the wrist but the next time, and there will be one, Brandon might not get to brag that at least the university wasn’t charged with a loss of institutional control.

Ignoring the Red Flags

Maybe winning will change the conversation, but if you’re University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman, that can’t be the best way to solve this problem.

The Wolverines football program has been steadily disconnecting from the larger core values of the university since the day head coach Rich Rodriguez showed up on campus. The program may not be on the verge of imploding, but Rodriguez has brought the kind of scrutiny to the program and hence the university that Coleman likely didn’t envision when she approved the hiring.

When Michigan athletic director Bill Martin coerced Rich Rodriguez into breaching his contract with West Virginia University in order to hopefully return the Wolverines to the throes of glory past, it had to occur to him that he wasn’t exactly getting in bed with a virgin. If it didn’t then, he has to know it now and if he doesn’t know it his boss has to be on the verge of figuring this out. In truth, the evidence was there all along.

Rodriguez abandoned a program he built in West Virginia and a program that he had just re-committed to with a multi-million dollar promise, in favor of another program that he felt would fatten his wallet more at the same time it also was fattening his huge need to be recognized as a genius. Rodriguez isn’t the first to do that and he won’t be the last. Basketball has its Larry Browns and college football has its standard-bearer in Nick Saban.

But these kinds of coaches come with built in warts. As an athletic director you have to always keep an eye on them because, frankly, you can never be confident that they are going to be there when you wake up in the morning.

In the case of Martin, he may put on a good public face and may have actually convinced himself that Rodriguez is a decent, hard working, stand up guy who will uphold the values that Michigan stands for, but when he lays down at night his head movies about the direction of his program have to make his eyes rain.

In almost every way you can imagine, Rodriguez was a bad hire. To get him, Martin and the athletic boosters ended up bailing him out of his financial mess with the Mountaineers. It wasn’t the most elegant entry into a program with such a rich and storied history. It merely served as the first red flag Martin will eventually admit he missed.

The second was the inglorious way Rodriguez left Morgantown. Eschewing any loyalty to the players that helped him parlay his status as a coach on the come, Rodriguez first broke the news of his departure to Terrelle Pryor, Ohio State’s starting quarterback now but then the most highly sought after recruit in the country.

That was a pretty damning statement on Rodriguez’s values that Martin had to swallow. But it was nothing compared to the way Rodriguez and his staff literally trashed the Mountaineers facility as they packed their bags. Nearly anything of value to the next coaching staff was tossed out, including the files on the existing Moutaineer players.

Ok, so Martin knew Rodriguez didn’t have much class, but maybe Martin felt in some small way responsible as well. He helped broker the break up and thus maybe felt like the ensuing bad blood was in part attributable to his own underhanded activities.

Martin missed the next set of flags that came in the form of a loss of recruits that Michigan had secured as well as the transfer of players already on campus. Martin ignored them because he was likely busy rationalizing it as the collateral damage that resulted from to the drastic change that Rodriguez’s philosophies were bringing and the notion that the players that left probably didn’t think they were suited for those philosophies.

On that score, Martin may have been mostly correct. But then how did Martin rationalize the transfer of Justin Boren to Ohio State. Boren, an Ohio resident, was a Michigan legacy. He had a family connection to the program. It’s one thing for someone like that to transfer, it’s another to transfer to the enemy. That’s rubbing it in your former team’s face. How could Martin not see that as a problem?

All of which had led to the problems that Rodriguez has visited upon the program in just the last week. A Detroit Free Press investigation uncovered multiple current and former players complaining that Rodriguez and his staff routinely violated NCAA rules regarding workouts. It was a story Martin couldn’t ignore because one of the keys to avoiding serious problems with the NCAA is to self-investigate and then self-report. The Free Press story would make its way to NCAA compliance headquarters in Indianapolis. Martin had no choice but to launch an investigation.

Whether Rodriguez and his staff actually violated NCAA rules is hard to say. Given the nature of these rules and the amount of gray in trying to determine whether a player volunteered for extra work or was coerced, trying to establish an actual violation may be difficult. But that doesn’t obscure a far bigger and overriding problem: the fact that multiple players complained in the first place.

Flash back to the Boren transfer. At the time, he said that he was leaving because he perceived Rodriguez as lacking in family values. On the surface that sounded like the earnest but perhaps uninformed words of a college kid looking to rationalize his actions. Now it looks positively prescient.

Maybe it says something about the mentality of kids, generally, these days, that they don’t want to work as much as their predecessors. But doesn’t it also say something specific about what kind of values underlie Rodriguez’s Michigan program that several current and former players would complain to the media about the way he runs the program? Problems are going to arise between a coach and a player in any program. But the fact that these players, in such a short period of time, felt they couldn’t handle the matter in house does say something about what they must feel is a lack of trust between themselves and their coach. And isn’t that the core family value, trust?

As if that wasn’t enough, word now comes that Rodriguez is being sued for $3.9 million over a default on a loan stemming from a failed real-estate venture in Virginia. And that may not even be the most startling revelation about the issue. That would be the fact that the center of this controversy is a banned Clemson booster with whom Rodriguez became friendly while on the staff at Clemson.

It may be that Rodriguez himself is a victim in this as one of the allegations is that Rodriguez and other investors gave money to the booster and he in turn used it for his own purposes instead of repaying the underlying loan. But to a certain extent Rodriguez brought at least some of this on himself by doing business with someone whom he already knew had been discredited for other reasons, namely providing illegal benefits to Clemson recruits while Rodriguez was on the staff.

Rodriguez took over a Michigan program that was slightly a mess and has made it worse, and that’s without even commenting on the pitiful team he put on the field last year.

While Ohio State fans are undoubtedly finding some glee in Michigan’s on-going problems, the truth of the matter is that this ultimately does not benefit either Ohio State or the rest of the Big Ten. The conference is suffering at the moment in large part because the Michigan program is a mess. Both the Big Ten and Ohio State need Michigan to be good. It’s fun to beat your rival, but it’s more fun to beat them when you know they are a team worth beating.

There’s no doubt that Rodriguez will survive these latest two scandals. Martin is a skilled apologist and has gotten so good at it when it comes to Rodriguez that he probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing it any more. But the sad truth is that even if Michigan wins enough games to get to a bowl game this year, it will do nothing to alter the simple fact that no amount of wins is ever going to change the underlying character flaws they bought into when they hired Rodriguez. That will only come when Rodriguez is sent packing.

Martin may never have the courage to pull it off himself, but given the rich tradition of Michigan and all the good things it really does stand for, Coleman or her successor will eventually come to the conclusion that the ends in this case can never justify the means.

Recruiting Wars

When Don Nehlen, the former West Virginia Mountaineers head coach, joked that Terrelle Pryor going to Michigan was probably more important than the Wolverines securing Rich Rodriguez as their next head coach, few figured at the time that it really was one of those “funny because it’s true” kind of jokes. Now they know.

The news that Pryor, the all everything two-sport star from Jeannette, Pennsylvania has chosen Ohio State as the next stop on his athletic journey had to be a bit of a tough pill to swallow for both Rodriguez and for Wolverines athletic director William C. Martin, even if they won’t say so publicly.

To say that Martin hired Rodriguez on the premise that Rodriguez would deliver Pryor to Ann Arbor may be a bit of an overstatement. But anyone who doesn’t believe it wasn’t a factor is being naïve. Rodriguez’s pursuit of Pryor as the perfect specimen to execute the spread offense was relentless and that was before Rodriguez ran out on the Mountaineers when he suddenly decided he didn’t like the color scheme in the locker room or whatever other trivialities he concocted to get out of one contract to sign another.

To gauge the importance that Rodriguez placed on getting Pryor, the only thing you really need to know is that it was Pryor whom Rodriguez first called with the news that he was heading to Michigan. Not his current players that he was abandoning. Not the Mountaineers president or the athletic director who had rewarded Rodriguez far more than he ever deserved. But an 18 year-old high school student in Pennsylvania. That may also be an indictment on how sordid and misguided athletic recruitment has become, but as surely as anything else it tells you something about Rodriguez and his priorities.

Maybe that’s exactly what Pryor saw as well. And if that didn’t have much of an impact on the young man, then maybe what Pryor saw was the three-ring circus that Rodriguez created by his rather messy departure from West Virginia. Maybe, too, Pryor figured that it might be kind of hard to get the ear of his new head coach when he’s busy giving a deposition or attending a court hearing over his refusal to pay the Mountaineers the money he owes them. Ohio State head coach Jim Tressel doesn’t come similarly encumbered and the contrast between the two couldn’t be more striking.

Having thrown most of his eggs in that one basket only to see them break in the process, Rodriguez is now left to actually build a program without the quick fix he and Michigan so coveted. It’s one thing to have to do that in Morgantown where the scrutiny will be less and the fans a bit more forgiving. Having to essentially start over under the white-hot glare of fans of a program with such a storied tradition is quite another. If Rodriguez really is the coach that Michigan thought it got, then in a few years his inability to sell his brand of snake oil to Pryor will be forgiven.

For now, though, there is a healthy group of fans of both programs that will see Pryor’s decision as a continuation of Ohio State’s recent dominance of Michigan. Even the Detroit Free Press headline was “Tressel 1, Rodriguez 0.” It’s a fun thought to Buckeyes fans, but until Pryor actually puts on a uniform, makes some plays and wins a few games, that’s all it will be.
As for the Buckeyes and Tressel, securing Pryor is only the first step in a far longer journey. Much work remains, starting with the fact that they will be dealing with a young and probably still immature athlete who already has attained a certain mythical status.

To date, the only athlete that came with the same level of hype out of high school and actually lived up to it has been LeBron James. For now and evermore, James will serve as the benchmark against which every other super-hyped athlete will be measured, not just in terms of performance but also in terms of ego management. For reasons as unexpected as they are joyous, James has become a global mogul and icon with the demeanor of someone who understands that he plays a team sport. Pryor says the right things right now, but the crush of everyday life will make it much harder to live up to the words.

To his credit, Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith already is fully aware of the challenge that Tressel and the team face in this regard. Smith told the Plain Dealer that the template they’ll follow will be the one they had in place for Greg Oden last year. Said Smith, “we’ll talk to him about decision-making. He’s a pretty mature kid, more mature than people realize, so that conversation I think will be easy. And Jim [Tressel] is very good with making sure that someone like him surrounds himself with the right type of people. I think he’s coming into a good environment where he'll be OK that way. But there’s no doubt we have to do something at the front end to help him understand, when you go to a restaurant, when you go pump your gas, what it will be like, and I’m sure he knows it because he’s going through it now.”

That’s a nice bit of proactivity, but the support system better be awfully strong. Because college football players are denied the ability to get to the pro level as quickly as their basketball counterparts, the leaches and other assorted blood suckers that lurk in the shadows around every major program have that much more time to tempt a player to cross over to the dark side.

Any number of examples exist. Maurice Clarett, Reggie Bush, and Michael Vick come immediately to mind. But if Ohio State is of a mind to scare Pryor straight from the outset, it should probably bus in Art Schlicter from whatever outpost or prison camp he may be at these days. Schlicter was Pryor some 12 years before Pryor was even born. Schlicter was an amazing two-sport star at Ohio’s Miami Trace High School; a big, strong-armed quarterback who would single-handedly modernize Woody Hayes’ three yards and a cloud of dust offense.

In some ways, that ended up being the case, although Hayes wasn’t around for most of that time. Schlicter played well enough for the Buckeyes and still owns a variety of passing records, something that is somewhat unimaginable actually given that era and what has come since. But Schlicter had demons at the outset that went undetected despite the warning signs that were conveniently ignored. How much that ultimately impacted his performance is hard to say but Schlicter never quite instilled in anyone complete confidence and he never did lead the Buckeyes to a national championship, even though he came close in 1979.

That’s not to suggest in any way that Pryor has any similar demons or any demons whatsoever. But it is to suggest that whatever accomplishments they may have or whatever potential is yet to be realized, athletes suffer from the same human frailties as everyone else. And when you’re a college kid like Pryor upon whose shoulder rests a considerable amount of pressure already, it’s very easy for the coping mechanism to become dysfunctional.

Having already built an elite program, Tressel is free to operate at a higher level. With the self-created mess he has at Michigan and a less than stable program that he inherited, Rodriguez has much more primal tasks to tackle. Tressel has the ability to work directly with Pryor in a more meaningful way than Rodriguez could initially have offered. It helps, too, that Tressel is uniquely qualified for that task while the jury is still out, literally and figuratively, on Rodriguez.


In the end, and stripping away all of the other reasons both real and invented, it’s this difference that Pryor probably most saw when he placed that Ohio State ball cap on his head and declared his allegiance to the scarlet and gray.

Quite a Character

For all those Ohio State fans still lamenting head coach Jim Tressel’s second straight loss in the national championship game, I have two words for you: Rich Rodriguez.

Rodriguez has barely been head coach of the Michigan Wolverines for a month yet in that short period of time he’s created enough adversity for himself that the Michigan administration might as well fly a red flag permanently. And with each passing day, Buckeye fans discover a new reason to appreciate what they have in Tressel as the contrast between him and Rodriguez couldn’t be starker. As Tressel might say and probably has, adversity doesn’t build character it reveals it.

The first indication of the kind of person the Wolverines got with their third choice was the fact that Rodriguez didn’t have the guts to deliver his resignation personally. He wrote it out and had his graduate assistant deliver it to West Virginia University athletic director Ed Pastilong. Good message that out to grace the entrance of the Michigan weight room: “When the going gets tough, get a graduate student to do your work.” If that’s the kind of toughness and courage that Rodriguez will bring to the Michigan program, it won’t be long before its fans are screaming for Lloyd Carr to come out of retirement.

Rodriguez’s cowardly resignation may be partially explainable, however, by the next sign of his questionable values. Before either Mountaineers administration or players knew of the resignation, Rodriguez was on the telephone with highly-prized recruit Terrelle Pryor of Pennsylvania to tell him that he was leaving for Michigan. Now word is trickling out that Rodriguez didn’t just call Pryor, he may have also called two other recruits while still technically employed by West Virginia. The West Virginia administration has gathered Rodriguez’s cell phone records and is still investigating.

Rodriguez at present is denying the timeline although Pryor’s statement at the time, as reported by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, certainly indicates otherwise. But the fact Rodriguez put himself in this position peels away still another layer of what’s turning out to be a quickly rotting onion. One would think, for example, that Rodriguez might be more concerned about the reaction his leaving might have on the players he had already personally recruited and coached for several years at West Virginia. Instead, he seemed much more interested at that moment with trying to lure Pryor to Michigan, almost as if his hiring there had depended on it. Hmm.

More insidious, though, as reported by the West Virginia Gazette-Mail, is that Rodriguez’s call to Pryor may also have simultaneously prevented West Virginia from making a call to a recruit who had publicly announced that the Mountaineers were high on his list of possible choices. At the time of the call, there was a so-called quiet period with respect to recruits in effect under the NCAA’s rules, meaning that coaches could only contact a potential recruit once a week. Since Rodriguez was still technically in the employ of West Virginia at the time, that prevented anyone else from the West Virginia program from contacting Pryor for the rest of the week. One wonders whether Rodriguez, on behalf of the Michigan program, called Pryor again that same week after he officially became Michigan’s coach. Hmm.

If Pryor ends up in Michigan, the Wolverines athletic director, William C. Martin, should probably expect a friendly call from an NCAA investigator. As Desi said to Lucy, there will be some splaining to do.

As it turns out, the calls to recruits is turning out to be the least of the issues. Underlying this whole mess is the little matter of the $4 million that Rodriguez is trying to deprive West Virginia for ditching the program just one season into a multi-year extension he had signed last August. Rodriguez, through his lawyers, has rattled enough sabers to make it pretty clear that the administration shouldn’t expect a check anytime soon, so much so that West Virginia filed a pre-emptive lawsuit to ensure it would be able to collect.

The $4 million is owed under what is referred to as a liquidated damages provision in Rodriguez’s contract. In simple terms, when a person breaches a contract, he will owe the other party damages or money in an amount that would make that person whole as if the breach had never occurred. The nature of some contracts makes it difficult to measure the amount of the damage. This is particularly true with coaching contracts because a coach of a successful program that quits while under contract can devastate his former program. There is potential lost revenue from season tickets and loges, lost recruits, lost booster and advertising income and the like, all of which is very difficult to calculate. Consequently, the parties often will add a liquidated damages provision to basically define up front the monetary damage that they believe the school will incur if the coach leaves. Courts will generally enforce a liquidated damages clause unless they believe it is a penalty in disguise. That is because courts will not typically impose a penalty, in addition to damages, against a party for breaching a contract.

This is the rub in the Rodriguez case. Through intermediaries Rodriguez has made it known that he believes that West Virginia breached its contract first and thus the liquidated damages provision doesn’t apply. When that argument doesn’t work, and it probably won’t, his lawyers will turn to their best argument, that the $4 million doesn’t represent damages but instead is a penalty because of the amount. This, too, will be an uphill battle given the unique circumstances of this case: a popular relatively long-term coach who has brought a program twice to the brink of the national championship game. It’s fair to say that West Virginia will suffer financially and for awhile. Whatever one thinks of Rodriguez’s successor at West Virginia, one thing is clear he has a lot to rebuild in the wake of this mess.

Rodriguez didn’t help himself by taking a shredder to all of his files, the latest questionable act of his that West Virginia is now investigating. Whether the files were official files of a state university and hence public records is a legal matter still to be sorted out. If they were, Rodriguez may have some legal trouble to boot. But even if they were not, they clearly had some value to the program and will be difficult to re-create, meaning that Rodriguez unwittingly enhanced the cause of his former school in its quest to enforce the $4 million liquidated damages clause by causing damage that’s difficult to calculate. Moreover, yet to be answered is whether Rodriguez’s little Enron incident was done out of simple spite or to hide some unflattering truths about the program he ran. Hmm.
With the controversy intensifying each day, you would think that Rodriguez and his new employers would try to make it go away. Instead, Rodriguez has fanned the flames by laughingly claiming to the Toledo Blade that he can’t understand why he’s being smeared by the West Virginia administration. After all, he says, he’s tried to take the high road. If Rodriguez defines the high road by his conduct, from how he hid his interview from his employers, to how he then denied it took place, to how he then delivered his resignation, to how he then called a recruit before telling his own players, to how he then shredded his files, then the bar truly has been lowered to new depths in college athletics.

Fortunately, that’s not quite the case. Though Ohio State, like virtually every program, has had its share of athletes in trouble, no one has yet to question the ethics of Tressel. The national media may complain about the Buckeyes playing the lower-division Youngstown State, but what they miss is Tressel using that game as a way of repaying a debt of gratitude he feels he owed to the school and the program that gave him a chance. Right now, Rodriguez won’t even pay the debt he actually owes to West Virginia.

I suppose there are coaches who have had worse starts to their new jobs than Rodriguez, George O’Leary at Notre Dame comes to mind, but not many. If he’s going to overcome these self-inflicted wounds, Rodriguez better hope that recruits and their parents do not put much stock in the questionable backgrounds of the coaches they let into their living rooms.

The success Tressel continues to have in recruiting each year says otherwise. But if Rodriguez is banking on parental indifference to cover his sins, then the good news for Buckeyes fans is that their team should continue to enjoy the competitive advantage they currently hold over the Wolverines for at least as long as Tressel remains in Columbus.

Welcome to the Dark Side, Wolverines

There is a Chinese proverb that says in desperation, a dog will leap over a wall. Over the many decades of its existence, the University of Michigan has attempted to build a certain wall of elitism around its school, effectively telling everyone in the world that it is a different and better place, academically and otherwise, than say the Ohio States of the world.

Well, that wall not only just got jumped it got torn down and all it took was Michigan selling its soul with the hiring of a coach who couldn’t close the deal in a game he needed to win in order to gain a berth in the National Championship game on the line. Rich Rodriguez meet Lloyd Carr.

It’s hard to know, of course, how the Michigan’s hiring of the former West Virginia Moutaineers coach ultimately will play out, though its fun to speculate, given Rodriguez’s continued inability to actually win really big games. What isn’t so hard to know, of course, is that Michigan fans better get used to two things: their school is no longer an above-it-all institution of higher learning and their football program is now being led by a coach with one eye always firmly trained on the next opportunity of a lifetime.

Former Louisville and Atlanta Falcons coach Bobby Petrino has been getting a tremendous amount of abuse from conveniently high-minded types like former players and ESPN talking heads for supposedly running out on a hapless Atlanta Falcons team and franchise but Rodriguez’s similar move in West Virginia has been met with mostly a shrug. Hard to figure, particularly as the facts continue to trickle out about Rodriguez.

Make no mistake about it, Rodriguez is running out on his team in much the same way Petrino ran out on Atlanta. Keep in mind first that the ink on the contract Rodriguez had signed just this past August with West Virginia is barely dry. Second, West Virginia’s season isn’t over. They have a little matter of a Fiesta Bowl game on January 2nd against Oklahoma before the season is over. Arguably, that game is far more meaningful to West Virginia and its program than the three remaining games that were on the Atlanta Falcons schedule when Petrino abruptly quit.

Maybe Petrino should have stuck around the hopelessness that is Atlanta these days, but no one has yet come up with a plausible reason why Rodriguez shouldn’t be similarly criticized or chastised. If Michigan truly wanted Rodriguez, which is somewhat questionable since he was, after all, their third choice, why couldn’t they wait until after the Fiesta Bowl?

Actually, there is an answer to that question. It’s tied up in the engine that really drives the college football machine these days: recruiting. Rodriguez met with Michigan representatives last Friday in Toledo. By Saturday morning, according to published reports, Rodriguez had made his decision. How do we know that? Well, it appears that one of the first persons told about the decision was not his team, maybe not even his wife. It was Pittsburgh Jeanette high school player, Terrelle Pryor, who just happens to be one of the most highly sought recruits in the nation.

According to a story in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Rodriguez called Pryor Saturday morning, just hours actually after the Toledo meeting, to tell Pryor he was headed to Michigan. Pryor’s immediate reaction was to take West Virginia off his list of schools under consideration and to add Michigan to it instead.

Pryor is so highly sought, including by Ohio State, because he runs the spread offense, which just happens to be Rodriguez’s specialty and is the current rage in offensive schemes. In fact, while Ohio State is one of Pryor’s top choices, along with Oregon, Penn State and Florida, Pryor has openly mused that Ohio State’s offensive philosophy may not be the right fit for him.

But now that Rodriguez has taken his act to Michigan, Pryor now has three Big Ten schools on his list. Given how quickly Rodriguez called Pryor with the news, it is fair to ask (though no one seemingly has) what role the potential to land Pryor in Michigan played in Michigan’s decision to offer Rodriguez the job. In fact, if Pryor does end up at Michigan, those questions shouldn’t just be asked on the internet, the NCAA should actually investigate.

It’s doubtful that anyone officially associated with Michigan would actually admit that the chance to lure Pryor to the Wolverines in order to resurrect a program in sore need of resurrection played any role whatsoever. But if anyone officially associated with Michigan denies that Pryor’s name ever came up, then the last piece of Michigan’s so-called mystique—credibility—will have been forever compromised. Welcome, Wolverines, to the dark side.

Another aspect about Rodriguez’s hiring, which not only reflects poorly on Michigan but also tells you a great deal about Rodriguez’s ethics, is the little matter of the pesky $4 million buyout in that flimsy contract he signed last August. According to a story in the Charleston Daily Mail, it sure seems like Rodriguez is trying to avoid paying the penalty he voluntarily accepted without so much as a gun to his head just eight months ago if he ever quit and went to another school.

No one actually expected Rodriguez to pay the penalty personally. These things are usually handled by a combination of the school and its boosters that lured him away. But $4 million is actually one of the bigger penalty clauses that you’ll see in a contract and neither the University of Michigan nor its boosters seem all that keen on paying an extra $4 million just to buy their third choice.

Attempting to escape the obligation, Rodriguez has done a couple of things, on the advice undoubtedly of his attorneys. First, he’s actually intimated that he’s not leaving because of the great opportunity that Michigan supposedly presents but more so because West Virginia wasn’t meeting its contractual commitments to him regarding the completion of an academic center and an upgrade to the locker room. In this battle, he’s enlisted some alums to spread the word while remaining oh so distant from it personally. Coward.

Apparently, the Mountaineers academic center was completed, just a little later than planned. The locker room upgrade is supposedly on schedule. If this all seems more than a little trivial, just remember the two great adages of most major college coaches these days: Greed know no bounds and no amount of money is too small to quibble over when it’s mine. Remember, too, that all this is really just an attempt to insert leverage into a discussion on how to reduce the $4 million to, perhaps a more manageable number. In that regard, it’s also instructive to remember that this is the same tactic that Michigan and John Beilein used just last year when Beilein, too, bolted the Mountaineers for the sunny shores of Ann Arbor and sought to reduce his $2.5 million buyout penalty. It worked. He paid only $1.5 million. Cheapskate.

Second, the effective date of Rodriguez’s resignation letter is January 3rd. The point here is to try and encourage West Virginia to actually fire Rodriguez before that date, which, too, would avoid Rodriguez having to pay the penalty.

If all this seems just a little underhanded or a little sordid, remember that Michigan could make this all go away by simply paying the penalty in the first place. Of course, they didn’t do that in the case of Beilein when the stakes were less, so why would anyone expect anything different here? You may rightly surmise that this is the least that this supposedly stand-up institution could do, but you’d be wrong. Doing the right thing always has its price and, in this case, we now know that at Michigan, it’s less than $4 million.

Eventually, you do reap what you sow and all this will someday come back to revisit Rodriguez and Michigan, and probably at the least opportune time. In the short-term, though, Michigan and its fans can go off and celebrate this hiring and all that it will supposedly bring to the program. But as they’re drinking themselves giddy, no amount of alcohol can hide the fact that as of now, the only differences between themselves and Arkansas are geography and conference affiliation. And when their heads eventually clear, maybe then they’ll awake to the reality of the permanent damage they’ve done to the school and its reputation.

Lingering Items--Bills Edition

One of the great things about playing a football game in adverse conditions is that it tends to expose whatever flaws your team may have. Indeed, in some ways, adverse conditions can be the best way for a general manager to judge the relative strengths and weaknesses of his team.

Thus, equally as important as the Browns victory Sunday was against the Bills was the fact that it highlighted where both teams need work if they have hopes of becoming among the elite in the NFL. But since this isn’t a site dedicated to the Bills, we’ll let that team and its fans figure out its shortcomings, but here’s a hint: defensive line. Here’s another hint: offensive line.

As for the Browns, Sunday’s game revealed the same litany of strengths and holes that, frankly, have been present all season. On the plus side, as good of a season that quarterback Derek Anderson has had, his passing success owes a debt of gratitude to the continued threat of a strong running attack, led by Jamal Lewis. Dumping Reuben Droughns, who is now mostly an afterthought with the New York Giants, has turned out to be a brilliant move.

Droughns certainly isn’t a bad running back, but he simply never seemed to possess the combination of speed, strength and toughness that made opposing teams respect the Browns running attack week in and week out. I suppose, too, that it’s a fair point that Droughns ran behind an inferior offensive line while in Cleveland. But there’s no question that neither Denver, which did have a good offensive line and from whom the Browns acquired Droughns, nor general manager Phil Savage felt that Droughns had that “it” factor, even if running behind the kind of line Lewis now has.

But Lewis is a much different story. Even before coming to the Browns, he had compiled enough credentials to qualify him as an elite back. But the way he was seemingly cast aside by a Baltimore Ravens team desperate for offense fed the common perception that Lewis was an “old” 28 years of age whose better days had passed. In fact, the whispers were that Lewis had basically turned into a back like Larry Brown, the former Washington Redskin from the early 1970s who was a Pro Bowler three of his first four seasons. At that time, Brown seemed well on his way to a Hall of Fame career, but just as suddenly fell off the map as the result of all the hits he had taken during those early seasons. He had been prematurely beaten up and rendered ineffective.

What the Bills game proved in particular and the season has proven in general is that Lewis is far from being done as a running back and is, indeed, with the season he’s put together this year is unquestionably a legitimate Hall of Famer when his playing days do end. The conditions on Sunday begged for exactly the style of running that Lewis has perfected. The fact that he delivered so impressively leaves no doubt that teams cannot simply key on one aspect of Rob Chudzinski’s offense. In other words, the Browns already clearly have a playoff-quality offense.

The defense, though, is a much bigger story. The fact that Marshawn Lynch had 82 yards rushing wasn’t much of a surprise for two reasons. First, the Bills mostly ran until the last drive. Second, it’s not as if the Browns defensive line has been able to really stop anybody all year anyway. On the year, they are giving up over 128 yards rushing per game. Saying, again, that the defensive line needs to get fixed is as obvious as noting that there are some parental issues that need to be addressed in the Spears family.

But a disturbing trend of the last few weeks most certainly was how the defense, collectively, seemed to nearly fall apart with the game on the line against beaten teams with inferior offenses. Both were remarkably similar. Two teams that hadn’t been able to do much over the course of 55 minutes suddenly turned into the New England Patriots in the last 5. Passes suddenly got completed, running lanes opened and the defense seemed helpless, missing tackles and blowing coverage.

It’s too easy to simply conclude that a lack of talent is responsible and time to focus at least some attention on defensive coordinator Todd Grantham. The schemes he’s calling late in the game, which feature three down linemen rushing and maximum protection back in order to stop big plays, aren’t working. By getting absolutely no pressure on the quarterbacks, even the likes of Kellen Clemens can eventually find someone breaking open. And when you get to the playoffs, the quarterbacks won’t be stiffs.

But if this trend continues, the only real hope that the Browns have of advancing in the playoffs is if they are clicking on offense and doing just enough on defense to keep the game from getting out of control. Unfortunately, of the potential teams they might meet in the playoffs, all have defenses that are in the top half of the conference, which makes that a difficult task. Further complicating it is the fact that the converse is true as well; of the potential teams they might meet in the playoffs, all have offenses that are in the top half of the conference. In other words, this is the time of year when the biggest flaws get revealed. The Browns lack of balance between offense and defense is the threat to whatever comes next.

***

In case anyone was looking for additional reasons why at least one if not more of the Browns offensive linemen should have been in the Pro Bowl, consider how little Anderson has been sacked. He’s started 14 games and played half of another and has been sacked only 12 times. That ties him with Drew Brees for the least sacked starter, just ahead of Brett Favre.

Plenty of credit for this goes to Anderson because of his quick release. The ability to make a decision quickly is the key to avoiding sacks. Quarterbacks looking to always make the perfect throw tend to find themselves picking themselves up off the turf more often than not. For proof, look no further than Charlie Frye. In one half of one game, he was sacked five times, with the same offensive line that has basically kept Anderson’s uniform clean all season.

But as much and probably more credit for the lack of sacks goes to the offensive line. If not for Frye’s five sacks in the first game of the season, they would be tied with New Orleans. Yet, no offensive lineman from the Browns made the Pro Bowl while Alan Faneca will start at guard and Jonathan Ogden will start at tackle. Clearly, those are reputation picks because the performance this year is clearly lacking. Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger has been sacked an astounding 43 times, second most only to Jon Kitna in Detroit, while Ravens quarterbacks have been sacked 35 times. It’s always difficult, of course, to really know how well an offensive lineman is performing. But this certainly looks like a good place to start looking.

***

While were measuring the effectiveness of the Browns offensive line, take note of the story in Wednesday’s USA Today where Sean Leahy writes that 60 different players have started at quarterback in NFL games this year, the most in the 32-team era. The Browns contributed to that statistic when they sent Frye off to Seattle to carry a clipboard, but that’s misleading.

Most of the changes that have come across the league relate to injuries, naturally. The rest relate to ineffectiveness. Ultimately, though, it all traces back to the offensive line. When your quarterback isn’t constantly being harassed, he’s less likely to get injured. And if he’s not getting harassed, he has a decent chance to be effective. It’s really a pretty simple, tried and true concept, which has taken the Browns only about two decades to learn.

***

Proving that players can learn from other players, the kneel down by the Eagles Brian Westbrook at the one yard line late in the fourth quarter Sunday against the Dallas Cowboys demonstrates clearly that sometimes scoring isn’t always the right play. Indeed, it almost cost the Browns against the Jets.

As I noted last week in the Jets edition, the chaos near the end of that game was due, oddly, by Jamal Lewis’ terrific 31-yard touchdown run. Had he not scored but rather been tackled after gaining the first down, the Browns could have run out the clock since the Jets were out of time outs.

The exact same scenario developed in Dallas. Westbrook, like Lewis, broke through and was headed for a touchdown. But instead of scoring, he dropped to the ground at the one, allowing the Eagles to run out the clock because the Cowboys likewise had no time outs.

It was a heady play by Westbrook, no doubt, but that doesn’t mean that Lewis made a bonehead play either. Given how the defenses were playing in both those games, a touchdown at that point, with just over a minute left, should have closed out the game anyway. The fact that the Browns defense fell apart, while predictable in theory, didn’t seem possible in context. Live and learn.

***
Proving that coaches don’t learn from other coaches, in that same game Eagles coach Andy Reid called a time out to determine whether or not he wanted to challenge a play. He did and lost. Two time outs blown. Fortunately, it didn’t cost his team like it did Browns head coach Romeo Crennel. Live and don’t learn, I suppose.

***
Questions to ponder: Why is Rich Rodriguez, who ran out on his team, his alma mater, with a BCS bowl game to play, not being raked over the coals in the same way as Bobby Petrino?
The New York Yankees on Tuesday fired traveling secretary David Szen. Does that mean that George Costanza will finally get the promotion he’s so richly deserved?