… you default on a real estate development deal.

Believe what and who you want because, in truth, this is a typical, though high-stakes game of “my word against yours.” Players can say all they want about The Product ignoring the rules and The Product can reiterate behind however many tears he chooses to let flow he is innocent. For now, it just goes around and around until someone, either Michigan or the NCAA, reaches a conclusion.

It’s all just very hard to prove unless there is some tangible evidence of wrongdoing that wasn’t, ahem, shredded in an unsupervised office or boxed and carried away without permission.

I think what’s lost in all this is the presence of a basic and critical procedure: teams have to submit regular reviews of the work they’ve done. The coaches prepare them, the players sign them and the compliance office receives and files them. That all happened at UM and, apparently, there was never a complaint. And now there’s this happening at the school, which makes one side look suspect, to say the least. What side, we don’t yet know.

Obviously, there’s a “What about WVU?” question to be asked here. And it was. Again, choose to believe who and what you want, but WVU and former players say it never happened here.

“Based upon our looking back over the weekend, we don’t feel we have any concerns,” WVU’s Assistant Athletic Director for Communications Michael Fragale said Monday. “We have checked it out and there has been nothing flagged and nothing out of the ordinary.

“There were no student-athlete complaints during the time (Rodriguez) was here.”

Former players who agreed to speak to the Daily Mail anonymously after learning of the allegations first raised Saturday night said they knew of nothing similar happening at WVU during at their time with the team.

Rodriguez was 60-26 in seven seasons in charge of his alma mater’s program.

“Compliance was always around,” one player said. “You couldn’t do it even if you wanted to. There wasn’t any rule-breaking going on because you couldn’t do any of that with compliance around like they were.”

I like what Ryan Clarke’s done for himself — an impressive mental, emotional and physical makeover after reporting unprepared last summer and redshirting as a freshman. When the season starts Saturday and WVU finds itself in a third-and-1 early on — you know that’s happening — he’s the guy who will line up at tailback and get the ball to pick up the first down. In the spring and in camp, it worked fairly well.

That said, I like him even more as a fullback.

(No, I’m not ignoring it. I’m just figuring out how to cover it.)

P-Rod twists in the wind at 11 a.m. I’ve got a Big East teleconference to sit in on and DirecTV being installed in my house, so I won’t be able to watch or record this thing. If you don’t mind posting updates for me and for others who want to be kept in the loop, it’d be greatly appreciated.

But I guess I have to comment on this, right?

I don’t Twitter and probably never will. The whole Facebook thing is weird to me and I’m kind of weird about creating an invasion of privacy I’d rather avoid. I sometimes see things out there and wonder why others do, too. Also, I don’t think anyone, especially my friends, care what I’m doing. If so, we have cellular telephone with which we call and text one another — and texts give us 160 characters. Take that, Twitter!

That said, I love tweets and I’m finding out more and more about these Mountaineers I’m paid to know things about. Examples? Absolutely!

Welcome to a forgiving, though not forgetful edition of the Friday Feedback. I’m going out on a pretty firm limb, I feel, but the guess is Joe Mazzulla’s reinstatement is a timely topic. Just a hunch, but I doubt the penalty phase is over here and I highly doubt this was just a generic instance of coach penalizes player for infraction. The structure of Huggins’ quote and the time between plea and reinstatement makes me feel this was different — and, for example, we do believe Mazzulla entered counseling, perhaps of his own volition.

We all have our opinions on this matter — I haven’t hidden mine, you haven’t hidden yours — and now we have a conclusion, so we’ll volley more opinions back and forth. That’s the way these things go.

I know the cards some people will play — this is Huggins being Huggins; another athlete getting preferential treatment.

First, the latter: A guilty plea and a non-expungeable offense isn’t really getting away with anything. This is going to follow Joe from now until whenever. (Aside: Magistrate court told me and others it was a guilty plea to the original offense of domestic battery, WVU made an adamant round of calls to media Thursday saying it was a guilty plea to disorderly conduct … I know only a little about the legal system, but I think you’d plea to a lesser offense, yes? Also, it’s a guilty plea, not no contest. There is a difference.)

As for the former, OK, valid criticism. I can even let it pass. There is a reputation there and it was something we all felt Huggins could address in this case. That said, it’s a case-by-case deal. It would have been silly of Huggins and unfair to Mazzulla to treat this case as a way to alter perceptions of the past. What does Mazzulla have to do with, say, Art Long? If nothing else, Huggins has experience dealing with these matters, so he evaluated and adjudicated at his own discretion. I’m OK with that. If it fails to prevent a future incident — My boss called yesterday and said, “Did you hear about Mazzulla?” and I was afraid to say, “No, what about him?” — then there’s a more serious problem at play and a more finite resolution.

Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, never hit on 21.

P.S. Don’t forget the University Chapter’s “Countdown to Kickoff” Sunday. Doc Holliday has confirmed. 

…back again.

The Flames have decided on a starting quarterback and actually caused WVU more confusion in the process. The decision was to go with Tommy Beecher, a transfer who was once thought to be a part of the future at South Carolina, or Mike Brown, lightning-in-a-bottle who was the backup quarterback … and running back last season … and was fourth on the team in receptions and receiving yards.

Recruitniks will remember Asa Chapman, who could have rivaled you-know-who status had he done things a little differently. Namely, prolong the recruiting process.

Chapman, as far as we knew, was anywhere from 6-foot-4 to 6-foot-7 and somewhere between 360 and 390 pounds, but with size-defying athleticism. Bill Stewart, who was eyeballing Chapman and Brad Starks at the same Orange County High, said so himself.

Trouble was, Chapman couldn’t get into a school. He signed with UVA, was denied admission, went to a prep school, had ties cut by UVA, signed with WVU, was charged with felonious malicious wounding, prepped again while he said WVU waited for the air to clear, was let loose again, had the charge dismissed and spent a bit of time in limbo.

He’ll finally arrive at WVU in a little more than two weeks. Chapman is the nose guard for Liberty and his legend lives on.

An Inside Look from the Coaching Staff: Has unique athletic ability … can do amazing things for a man his size … brings experience and power … gives the Flames solid size in the middle of its defensive line.

You’ve got to give credit to Joey Madsen for two things:

1) He surged the final few days of preseason camp because he was never deterred by an offensive line that, despite some concerns, seemed set with a starting five. And if there was a vulnerable position, it sure didn’t seem like at center, where he was the backup.

2) The kid is honest.

“I never thought I could handle the responsibility of having the ball in my hands every play,” said Joey Madsen, a 6-foot-4, 290-pound redshirt freshman from Chardon, Ohio.

He took control of the position in the final days of preseason camp.

“I was so scared they’d be like, ‘Hey, you’re the center.'” Madsen said. “And then they threw me in at center. It was, ‘OK, here we go.’ I really had no choice.”