UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

Right now, tOSU is at the top of the Big Ten, without any question. While Indiana is having a nice season, they're still a good notch or two (or three) below tOSU in terms of talent. They've had top tier coaching throughout those years (Tressel and Meyer, and arguably, now Ryan Day), and those guys knew how to bring in NFL talent to their rosters, while also developing them.

Those coaches also knew how to adapt their schemes to best fit the talent they were given. They were also fortunate that they had plenty of talent to choose from when they started.

Michigan is about where we were in 2008 / 2009. Still undergoing the rebuilding process and despite a bad year, showing improvement, but the natives are certainly restless.

Hiring Rich Rodriguez was the lynchpin here, where he ran that program into the ground. While some may say that he was their equivalent of Tyrone Willingham (and I don't disagree at all), at least Rodriguez wasn't lazy when it came to recruiting, that he pulled in some pretty good talent throughout his time there.

Lloyd Carr left a roster stocked very nicely with talent, including one of the top QB prospects groomed to play in a pro-style offense (Ryan Mallet), and a pretty good pro-style QB in the way of Steven Threet. When Rich Rodriguez came in, he basically tried to fit too many square pegs into his round hole scheme by forcing a roster full of pro-style players to play a run-first, spread-option offense. Putting in Nick Sheridan (the worst passing QB on the roster) as the starter made things worse.

The offensive line was a group of big earth-movers, who weren't designed to be used in the same way that smaller, more nimble linemen were, and Threet was a bad match for a run-first spread-option offense. Those guys would have done just fine with the 2007 pro-style scheme, since it was based on precision pocket passing designed to setup the run, and that they had a conservative, but effective, zone-blocking scheme that worked well enough.

When Rodriguez made all of the wholesale changes, including changing the blocking scheme to an aggressive hybridized man to man blocking / zone blocking mixture, you saw a lot of offensive linemen whiffing on their blocks, because they weren't very good at being able to switch between schemes on the fly.

By the time Rodriguez adapted the personnel of his team to his run-first, spread-option scheme, the Michigan faithful were already tired of him, and gave him the boot.

You could easily say that Rodriguez being there basically set up Brady Hoke for failure, since he tried to turn that team back into a pro-style offense with no real throwing quarterback on his roster.

Don't get me wrong. Brady Hoke wasn't a good coach at that level. He also made the same mistake that Rodriguez did, by trying to turn Dennard Robinson into a pro-style quarterback, as well as doing the same for Devin Gardner, and he didn't exactly do a good job of bringing in offensive linemen. Devin Gardner and Shane Morris basically got turned into paste, which was quite a shame for Morris, seeing how he had all of that talent.

Still, if they had hired Hoke in 2008, instead of Rodriguez, I think you would have seen a much better run of years, since his methods were a much better fit for the talent on that roster.