Universities Weblog

With the regular season over in college football, the big news of course is the move of West Virginia Coach Rich Rodriguez to the University of Michigan.

The Charleston, WV, Daily Mail ran a story this week about Rodriguez. Some of the details are beginning to come out. and just about everybody in the state from the governor on down is unhappy with someone over how the situation was handled.

I got to listen to most of an insightful radio talk show Wednesday. Hoppy Kercheval interviewed two WVU donors who were friends of coach Rodriguez. The Daily Mail story covered the show in more detail, but the short version is that (according to the two donors), WVU made promises to Rodriguez last year that it evidently decided not to keep and Rodriguez left because he didn't feel like he could truth the school any longer.

You may recall that a year ago Rodriguez was mentioned for the job as coach at Alabama. The story seems to be that WVU sat down with him then and asked what they needed to do to keep him. Rodriguez gave the university a list of things he felt would make the Mountaineers a competitive football team year after year. And they agreed to do those things. (Of course he wanted a pay raise, too, I think.) Now, a year later, WVU was back pedalling on some some of those promises. And Rodriguez left as a result.

Of course, the WVU administration has a different story. But what that story is isn't very clear at the moment.

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