umichgradfan
Well-Known Member
I figured this would be the overwhelmingly common response to this question. Although, I have to say that I think RR could've succeeded if he was more of a "michigan man". From what I've read, he was hardly given any sort of budget for his coaching staff. If you gave him this year's DC, he could've been good. They improved by nearly 10 ppg in his final season compared to the year before, but damn did you guys not have a defense.
You've got THAT right! A team can't survive (let alone thrive) in the B1G without a defense. I call Rich Rodriguez an experiment gone bad. He was just not a good fit for Michigan (or any team in the B1G, for that matter). I'm going to say that Denard Robinson was largely the reason the 10 PPG improvement you mentioned. But, no matter how good the offense is, a team can't have a defense (especially a poor one) on the field for the amount of time those defenses were. It just doesn't work. I also didn't see him doing a particularly good job of recruiting and developing prototypical B1G players.