Dear assistant coaches:

Merry Christmas!

I am,
Rich Rodriguez

Look, I’m not a football coach — though at the tortoise rate at which we proceed, I’ll probably get an interview — and you may call me crazy or plain old soft…couldn’t this have waited? I mean, what would have been so bad about firing everyone on, say, Dec. 26? What was accomplished by firing them before Christmas? Or maybe even Jan. 2? The coaches will still coach the bowl game, but now, I guess, can do so with the piece of mind they won’t have a job afterward. Well played, yes?

Welcome to the University of Richigan. It’s the first act he’ll uses to place his stamp upon the program and it will be followed by others. He ended with lies at his old job and and let’s agree to say he’s starting his new job with variations of the truth. Remember his press conference Monday?

“I know you all will ask about my plans for the staff, the on-field coaches and other staff, and obviously this all happened very quickly, so I’m still in the process of getting that all together. There will be several WV people obviously coming as part of our staff. There will be several outside I think that we will look at and there will be also several that will be re-hired — I don’t call it retained, I call it re-hired — that will be part of our staff.”

That’s rich! Actually, that’s Rich and one need not wonder how this first act will go over in Ann Arbor. Running back Mike Hart made that perfectly clear.

“That’s 128 years of history gone, with no one (on the new staff) with any recollection of that and the tradition. If these guys get to know the history and tradition, they will learn that Michigan is a lot different than any other place. I just hope they learn Michigan and what it’s all about.”