Getting Familiar With Rich Rodriguez!

My first reaction to Rodriguez's hiring was one of disbelief and then of a beaming warm feeling. It was like, "Holy shit! Significant Value Over Brady Hoke!" But then I reflected that I had always been sort of dismissive of West Virginia, because of their crappy conference and, probably, a jealousy toward their progressive thinking coach. The result, though, is that I really don't know much about how Rich Rodriguez coaches, other than by having guys with jet packs take hand offs 60 yards to the house. Using, no doubt, one of those newfangled spread option-type offenses. All I'd seen were 15 second Sports Center clips.

So I scrambled for evidence and found the terribly abridged version 2006 Sugar Bowl on iTunes. It's basically just 15 minute long SportsCenter bit, complete with cuts to spinning logos, so I can't say it's the best introduction possible, but I want to go over my thoughts having watched it and hopefully tie it all back in to an estimated VOBH score.

In General There is a lot of Beilein in what Rich Rodriguez is doing. He realizes that he doesn't have access to much size at all nor overwhelming speed. He's lucky right now to have Noel Divine to add to White and Slaton, but the overwhelming majority of his players are mostly small and mostly slow. In order to win, he needs to have shrewd talent judgment and he needs to figure out how to distribute the talent as efficiently as possible. I think that his system does just that.

The lack of speed was really obvious on defense. They played a legit 3-3-5, with a lot of strange fronts and odd-angled blitzes. Whenever there were times they had to hunker down and stop the run, they were actually decent and had an important stop in the game on 3rd and 1. Georgia was playing spread and you could see that Rodriguez understood where to put his players. They almost always had 7 in the box and stacked them particularly in the middle of the field. When they got beaten, it was usually a matter of physical talent rather than bad positioning. With better athletes, the scheme would be even more impressive. If it's possible in a game when the defense gave up 35 points, I came away reassured. Browse their cfbstats page and you can't help but be impressed with their numbers having seen their players speed and size on that side of the ball.

The offensive side featured mostly plays where impeccable blocking led to big holes on astroturf: White and Slaton ran all day. But that's what I wanted to see. Georgia has plenty of big and fast guys that the smaller WV offensive line neutralized frequently. That allowed their deep set backs to pick through and find holes. I think if Manningham had gone to West Virginia, Rodriguez would have made him a running back. The faster you are, the closer he wants you to the ball on offense. I'm definitely going to the spring game.

Oh, and this was the game he authored a fake punt in order to cement the 38-35 victory. Late in the 4th quarter, his offense was stopped on their 48 with 1:45 left on the clock. The fake punt gets the first down and it's effectively game over. That was brilliant.

Well? Obviously a gigantic highlight is going to underline the best of a team, but even when Georgia was scoring on their defense, I thought they were getting their players where they should be. When watching Michigan this year, I often thought to myself, "How can this possibly work?" Sometimes it does anyway, but again: let's remember the Minnesota 2005 game. I just feel like maybe we can hope for a time when that weirdness is behind us. It's enough just having to deal with Tressel and his inordinately high winning percentage. But Appalachian State (aka THE HORROR)? Oregon? The Year of Infinite Pain? The Angry Michigan Safety Hating God? Michigan football of late has incited the spread of a fan-demic fatalism. Rich Rodriguez may just be the light.

What I really want to know is who made this happen and how? I really wasn't expecting competence after what had happened to this point. Maybe we should just conclude that things of this magnitude are always going to be strange and embarrassing. I think we're a strange and conflicted institution and a position in that hierarchy as important as head football coach is just going to make those odd filters evident. Put together and given some time, this is the outcome. I guess we can't be too mad, can we?