Former Michigan head football coach Rich Rodriguez talked at length for the first time since he was fired from the program back in January.
↵Rodriguez expressed a desire to get back into coaching, but it will probably have to wait until after the next college football season. There were few head coaching vacancies when Rodriguez was let go, so instead he became a guest analyst for CBS. Rodriguez more or less called the move to Michigan a mistake:
↵↵↵You know that's a fair question, and I've been asked that before. I think it's easy to go back now and say, "Gee, made a mistake." And you can say that now because of hindsight. But at the time, some of the things I was looking to do and the opportunity that was there you kind of make the move. The frustrating part for us was that we thought we battled through the tougher times to get it to this point where we had a lot of the team coming back and we thought we were getting ready to take off, but you know hindsight is always easier to look back and say, "it was a mistake." Because we did have a good thing going at West Virginia, and we really enjoyed it. As you look back at it, wasn't the best move. Easy to say now.
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Rodriguez also discussed changes he would like to see in the game, notably compliance issues that coaches are getting punished for. Rodriguez as we all know was accused of not promoting "an atmosphere of compliance" in the Michigan football investigation last season. The NCAA later dropped that charge.
↵↵They need to have more coaches involved in helping them with the organization. It almost seems to me there's compliance officers of the NCAA, and then there's the coaches over here. It's almost like there's a mistrust amongst coaches and we need to communicate better. I think coaches need to get in the middle of it and say, "This is what's going on, let's help clean the game up."
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