Rodriguez Takes the Low Road Again

For someone who swears that he wants to put his less-than-graceful departure from West Virginia to Michigan behind him, former WVU head football coach Rich Rodriguez sure still seems to have a lot to say about it.

It's amazing, actually, that anyone can understand what he is saying, considering how much he talks out of both sides of his mouth.

We offer as evidence comments Rodriguez made in an article published in the Yahoo! Sports and Rivals.com 2009 college football magazine.

In a piece written in a question-and-answer format by Rivals.com's Tom Dienhart, Rodriguez insists that he was the target of a "smear campaign" by a cabal of WVU officials.

"The truth of the whole situation eventually will come out," Rodriguez says. "None of that stuff came out. All that came out was that smear campaign.

"It was a small mission of some people at the school, not the fans, to do everything they could to make me look bad," he says a few sentences later after denying he ever said anything "derogatory" about WVU fans. "It was like a political campaign. It caught me off guard."

He doesn't stop there.

"The only thing I regret is not addressing everything that's out there," Rodriguez says. "I've tried to take the high road and move on."

Oh, please, Rich, pardon us while we laugh.

You? The high road? You must be joking.

What high road was Rodriguez taking when he and members of his family falsely claimed that they received death threats from WVU fans? It's interesting that no one in his family filed a police report about those alleged threats, which one would think people would do if they actually got multiple death threats.

What high road was Rodriguez taking when he sent WVU assistant coaches to talk to some committed WVU recruits about going to Michigan instead of WVU, before he actually resigned from WVU?

What high road led him to drive to a Pittsburgh area high school playoff game to tell topflight quarterback recruit Terrelle Pryor - who Rodriguez was heavily recruiting for WVU - that he was headed to Michigan before he told his own team or the WVU administration that he was leaving?

What high road did Rodriguez take when he secretly went to talk with Michigan officials about moving to Ann Arbor before the 2007 regular season at WVU was over?

Maybe the preoccupation with that is why Rodriguez and his staff gagged against a 4-7 Pitt team the last game of that season and blew a chance at playing for the national title.

What high road was Rodriguez traveling with his answer after Dienhart asked why Rodriguez didn't coach WVU in the 2008 Fiesta Bowl against Oklahoma?

Rodriguez doesn't mention that he had no choice about whether or not he would coach the Fiesta Bowl because WVU officials told him to hit the road when he took the Michigan job. He does, however, devote several sentences to a politically correct - and unusually truthful - stance about how he would have been a distraction.

But Rodriguez can't leave well enough alone as he digresses into passive self-promotion.

"Before I left, the game plan and bowl preparations were done," he tells Dienhart. "We had everything in place. I told the assistants who were coming with me to not do anything but get the kids ready for the bowl, and they did a great job of that."

What?

It's hard to read this without suspecting that Rodriguez is making a shameless (or shameful) bid to take credit for WVU's impressive domination of Oklahoma in the game when he had little or nothing to do with it other than providing WVU players motivation to show they could win without him. Nothing high about the road Rodriguez took with those comments.

Was Rodriguez taking the high road when he and his agent/minion Mike Brown insisted that WVU reneged on contractural obligations to Rodriguez in an attempt to get out of the $4 million buyout he agreed to pay if he left WVU before the contract ran out?

Rodriguez made those allegations, mind you, only about four months after he signed the contract in August 2007, weeks before that football season began. Before the season was even over, in December 2007, he and Brown already were telling everyone who would listen that the contract was breeched.

The question was, and is, how was it breeched? It would seem that WVU officials didn't have time to renege on anything, even if they planned to do so.

We never have heard from Rodriguez or his camp followers how WVU was breaking the contract. All we have heard are glittering generalities, nebulous natterings about the alleged deceit and mistreatment thrown his way by WVU, but we hear nothing specific, nothing concrete.

Yet we are supposed to take his word for it on this and other aspects of his departure. We are supposed to take the word of the guy who said that West Virginia was the dream job that he would never leave; the guy who said that he would sign a 20-year contract on the spot if he could.

Of course, we now know that Rodriguez wouldn't have honored that contract even if he signed it.

If Rodriguez really wanted to reveal "the truth of the whole situation," he had a perfect opportunity to do so when WVU sued to force him to pay the buyout. It was a chance to set the record straight.

Did he do that? Nuh-uh.

Instead, he bailed out of the suit and agreed to pay the full buyout amount when it became clear that Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman and Athletic Director Bill Martin would have to testify.

Why was that, Rich?

If Rodriguez is so bent on getting out the truth as he sees it, one would think that he would have welcomed the well-publicized lawsuit as a bully pulpit in which to plead his case.
Instead, he has run and hid, and we're still waiting for enlightenment.

Somebody play the theme music to "Jeopardy."

Some of Rodriguez's version of the truth might have been fleshed out in the interview with gutsier questions from Dienhart, who throws Rodriguez a series of softballs with parachutes on them and seems to accept everything Rodriguez says as holy gospel.

The truth be known, though, it probably wouldn't have mattered what approach Dienhart took.

As with many a writer or broadcaster cooed by Rodriguez's slick Billy Mays-esque, aw-shucks demeanor, Dienhart was in over his head the nanosecond he sat down to interview Rodriguez.

Given time to prepare his story and his pitch, Rich Rodriguez is one of those people you meet in life who can lie with a straight face and charmingly convince the people to which he is lying to believe him.

Rodriguez seems to be able to first convince himself of his own distortions and accept them in his mind as the truth because he doesn't want to face the truth about himself.

Our version of that truth is that Rodriguez is a narcissist driven to control people and events, even if it means obfuscating the truth, telling lies or perpetuating myths, as he does in the interview with Dienhart.

Rodriguez can't stand the thought that he generally is persona non grata in the state of his birth and upbringing, the place where he played college football and where he was a favorite son until he decided to shun those that made him what he was and disrespect them in the process.

So as a defense mechanism he has put his trademark spread offense into play. That is, he offensively is spreading as much hooey and manure as he can in an attempt to portray himself as the victim, when in fact he is the perpetrator.