Elegy Written in a Ford Escape

In the end, it's the strangest, the littlest things that end up striking you about the end of something, be it a relationship, an era, or a job. In this case, it was Frank Beckmann's pre-game interview with Rich Rodriguez on the radio side of the 2011 Gator Bowl broadcast; something that I only heard because I was driving home from Pittsburgh, trying very hard to get home before the game started. (I regret nothing!)

Beckmann's interview was formulaic, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. People have expectations for a pre-game show, particularly one before a bowl game. Beckmann asked questions like "How were the practices?" and "How do the younger players look" and "How has this week in Jacksonville been?" and Rodriguez answered them with some standard coachspeak. Anyone dying for a cutting insight into the state of the Michigan football program was going to be sorely disappointed. After a commercial break, Beckmann's interview shifted to the game itself, the opponent in Mississippi State, and what the Bulldogs brought to the table. Rodriguez's answers were what you would expect, not tipping the hand too much, but clearly someone who had watched a lot of film and knew what his team needed to do to be successful. But what struck me was the change in tone and tenor of Rodriguez's voice. It was confident; it was almost, if not giddy, certainly quite pleased.

The first half of the interview was perfunctory and it seemed to me that Rodriguez couldn't even bring himself to feign the enthusiasm one is supposed to bring to this kind of thing. The second half of the interview was technical, and genuinely, it was a little wonky to the point where I felt like I was only getting tremendous insight because I had just finished reading Tim Layden's Blood, Sweat, and Chalk (where Rodriguez's birth of the read option gets some love) and Ron Jaworski's The Games That Changed The Game if only because I now felt like I understood scheme, gap responsibility, and exploiting what the opposition gives you. The entire thing reinforced what I genuinely and fully believe. Rich Rodriguez is a great football coach, he is an offensive genius, but he is not a great head coach. Head coaches have to do more than just game plan. They are CEOs, they are spokesmen, they are the face of the brand. It feels now, and perhaps should have been obvious to us sooner that Rich Rodriguez accepted those additional roles but never embraced them.

It's like the story of Ted Williams, while managing the Senators/Rangers who, when told about the development struggles of his young pitching staff said "Aww hell, let's go hit." Williams knew how to hit as well as any person on the planet, it's what he cared about and it helped him make his hitters better. But hitting is but one aspect of being a manager, just like offense is but one aspect of being a head coach. You need to care about everything, or delegate to capable, responsible parties to do so and hold them accountable when they do not live up to expectations. Rodriguez is at his best when he is talking about scheme, about plays, as you might expect of someone who has been a successful offensive coordinator. But his lack of success at Michigan can be traced to many reasons, but one cause, he was not able to successfully juggle all of the facets of being a head coach in a way that translated to long-term success. This likely means the end of the Rodriguez era at Michigan and the start of something else. But that is where we begin to stare through a glass darkly, because it is a murky, unwritten future.