It just keeps getting better for Michigan and Rich Rodriguez haters. Michigan keeps losing, RichRod is losing his cool, players are making noise about leaving and former players are dissing their alma mater on the record.

Former Michigan star and Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard laid the wood to Rodriguez and the Michigan program on a Columbus radio show this past Monday.

Question: In your post-Michigan career, have you ever dreaded a Michigan-Ohio State game more than this one?

Howard: “That would be the popular thinking after watching them lose eight games this season, and the way they’ve lost some of those games. I made a comment (Sunday) on our show that it’s not like they were trying to learn a spread offense (as much as) like they were trying to learn how to play football in some of those games, they looked so bad. This isn’t Michigan, this is like Michigan Tech.

Howard went on to say that he saw their potential for mediocrity before the season started. He also thought their bowl streak would be in jeopardy.

RichRod (or DickRod to West Virginia fans) could lose the fans and his job if things don’t get better next year. However he says Desmond and the rest of the Michigan faithful need to get a life. There are things that are more important in life. He should know since he’s obviously not focused on football. Alabama head coach Nick Saban suggests looking for a new employer and making them buy you out.

Don’t act like a small (or large) part of you didn’t smile or nod with approval when Charlie Weis was dropped like a sack of potatoes during the Michigan-Notre Dame game. Let’s relive one of the few Michigan highlights from their wonderfully expensive failure of a season.

Perhaps some of you simply enjoy seeing horrific injuries and people in pain. Most of you probably harbor some sense that Weis is a douchebag and he had it coming. Everyone’s a big winner today. It’s official. He excels at being an asshole.

When [Jeannette Coach Ray] Reitz told Weis that [Terrelle] Pryor might attend a USC quarterbacks camp, he remembers Weis replying: “Why send him there? If he’s with me for one day he’ll be good, two days he’ll be great and three days he’ll be incredible.”

Later, unprompted, Weis asked the Jeannette coaches if they wanted to take a picture of his Super Bowl ring. “I did it, just to be polite, and then gave [the picture] to one of the kids,” Reitz recalled.

…”Here’s the best part,” Reitz recalled. “He says to Terrelle: ‘Call me tomorrow at 6. I’ll be watching where Brady Quinn gets drafted.’ “

Pryor never called. He chose Ohio State.

Weis is so good at being a jackass that former players and alums remember Gerry Faust with fondness when compared to him because “he was a nice guy”.

Weis celebrated barely beating Navy on Saturday as though he won the Fiesta Bowl. Congratulations on making a bowl. If that’s all Notre Dame wanted, mission accomplished. As pointed out by Teddy Greenstein and numerous others, Weis’ best season was with Tyrone Willingham’s players and their records are comparable. His players are nothing special and there’s no reason to think there will be significant improvement next season.

Notre Dame has no one to blame but itself for the sham that is the Charlie Weis era so far. He received an absurd contract extension without the results to back it up. It couldn’t wait to bend over for him and now it would look stupid canning him especially after George O’Leary and Willingham who most agree was given the shaft. Make no mistake. The school isn’t getting rid of Weis due to the contract despite what they say. Let’s not even talk about the money they would owe him.

Notre Dame fell for the three Super Bowl ring monte and Terrelle Pryor didn’t. That tells you everything you need to know about Notre Dame football. At this rate, even hoodlums and thugs wouldn’t play for Weis. So far his tenure is failure for a program as storied as Notre Dame and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.

Terry Bowden says Tommy Bowden had it coming.

Everyone in Michigan thinks Rich Rodriguez has it coming. The Les Miles Countdown Clock is a nice touch.

He’s in Michigan, Chief. Michigan fans and some neutrals refer to Michigan head coach Rich Rodriguez as RichRod while people from West Virginia and East Lansing prefer DickRod. At the risk of enraging Bucktown Skins Fan, we’re going to go with DickRod. I’m not sure if he’s at the Petrino-Saban level but he’s pretty close.

If it were up to Rodriguez, he would probably say he’d like to be called Coach Messiah or RichGod. He recently had “the apostles” over to his house for a little bonding session.

“I had a handful of players that we call ‘the apostles’. It is a group of guys that the players pick as their leaders, some from each class … we always do that in the summer. I will meet them every week and we talk about issues and things that they would like to see and all that. It is really a kind of communication not that you have to be one of those guys to talk to me, but those guys are kind of the voice of players on certain things.

The apostles aren’t supposed to be a religious thing.

“It’s not in biblical nature,” Rodriguez said. “The definition of an apostle is one that leads a new way. I’m not looking for them to change the world. That’s a description of it. … I don’t want anybody to take it the wrong way.”

“Since I was at West Virginia,” he said. “I had a version of it, too, at the small school, Glenville State. I’ve always had a group of leaders that I let the players pick. We had a lot of fun with it. Sometimes it’s as simple as picking pregame music or that kind of thing. It’s not like they’re making major decisions. They’re not going to say, ‘Coach, we’re going to run the wishbone this week.’ They’re making suggestions, not decisions.”

The word apostle can mean one who pioneers an important reform movement, cause of belief. Those don’t sound like apostle-like activities. What exactly is the reform, cause or belief that makes the chosen players apostles? Shouldn’t Rich/DickRod lead by example since he is the head of the Church of Blue? If we had to guess, it would gimme the money or fuck the kids.

Players were not allowed to participate the annual Heroes for Kids benefit last Wednesday. The benefit “raises money for Saginaw youth recreation”. The team used the excuse of a mandatory strength and conditioning workout.

“It’s a big disappointment for all of us,” [Event Director Larry] Preston said. “The (U-M) players always have said how much they enjoy Heroes For Kids, and the strength and conditioning coach (Mike Barwis) said he wants to work with us on this next year.

“But this workout is mandatory, and all players must attend. It’s coach Rod’s call on that. This is his first year (at U-M), and he’s doing everything he can to make sure his team is successful.”

Doing everything like not even waiting until the season starts to start violating NCAA rules?

(2) Summer Conditioning Period. [FBS/FCS]
In football, between the start of summer conditioning and the start of preseason practice period, an institution shall conduct its out of season conditioning period as follows:
(a) Institutions shall count back nine weeks from the first permissible reporting date for preseason practice. During this nine-week period, institutions shall designate one week as student-athlete discretionary time.

(b) During the remaining eight weeks of the summer conditioning period student-athletes and prospective student-athletes who have signed a National Letter of Intent or, for those institutions not using a National Letter of Intent, a prospective student-athlete who has signed an institution’s written offer of admission and/or financial aid, may be involved in non mandatory weight training and conditioning activities that are conducted by the institution’s strength coach for no more than eight hours per week.

The charity event was scheduled months in advance. Was it really that hard to reschedule the NCAA rule violation to a different time or day?

Michigan State players attended the event in force and were autographing everything in sight including babies.

Go Blue finally claimed that the players “didn’t inform [DickRod] about participating in [the event]“. Blame the players for the mandatory workout which I’m sure we’ll find out wasn’t mandatory after they realize they messed up.

It’s going to be even easier to root against Michigan this year.

Maybe it’s the sweater vests that get it done for Michigan fan John McKay. He likes to stalk Ohio State head coach Jim Tressel wherever he goes under the guise of hating Ohio State.

”I have a history of denigrating Coach Tressel,” McKay said. ”He cheats everywhere he goes, and he’s holier than thou. And he’s yet to beat an SEC team. I’m not impressed.”

There’s no word on whether Tressel is considering a restraining order or showing McKay his version of the Dirty Horseshoe. For the record, McKay was born and raised in Georgia and went to Georgia for college.

In other Michigan news, Go Blue! has new uniforms and it’s national news. The new jerseys include a quote from Bo Schembechler, “Because I couldn’t go for three”. Oh wait, that was Woody Hayes. Never mind.

Former Michigan and current Indianapolis Colts running back Mike Hart just doesn’t know when to be quiet. He should have learned his lesson when he called out Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh for criticizing Michigan’s low academic standards for athletes.

“He says we don’t have great student-athletes, but he just accepted one of our transfers,” Hart said. “What kind of sense does that make? Obviously, he wants guys like us at his school. I don’t know how he can say that. He’s not a Michigan man. I wish he’d never played here.”

Just think. Michigan might have beaten Appalachian State if Harbaugh played there last season.

It turned out Harbaugh was telling the truth for the most part. The Michigan football team was all about general studies and not communications. According to Pat Forde, “only one junior … declared a major, according to the guide (in movement science)” in 2007. “In 18 years of covering college athletics, I’ve never seen virtually an entire junior class without a major.”

Now Hart’s gone and done it again. The sixth round pick is claiming that the NFL isn’t as hard as he thought it would be.

“It’s a little different,” Hart said Saturday at Randy Wise Chevrolet in Flint, where he signed autographs. “The only surprise is it’s not as tough as I thought it was going to be, as far as practice and those type of things,” he said. “It’s more laid back.”

Hart was selected in the sixth round of the April draft by the Indianapolis Colts. He said: “Indianapolis is a different organization. You watch ‘Hard Knocks’ on HBO and you expect to be hazed and a lot of those things, but the Colts are a lot different. It’s not as bad as I thought — we don’t get taped, we don’t get hazed with the Colts.”

Hopefully Hart thinks OTAs are similar to training camp. The coaches and veterans must love hearing him say practice isn’t that hard or that he’s not getting hazed. It’ll be interesting to see if he thinks the same way when he’s duct taped to a bed while getting teabagged by a camel during training camp. Then again we probably have it wrong. Tony Dungy probably has his players read his book and go out on the town to haze gays while Marvin Harrison shoots off his guns like a Palestinian prisoner release celebration.

Timeless? What’s timeless? Nothing happened.

Michigan alum and current Phoenix Sun Jalen Rose bought a billboard to honor the Fab Five the season after their 15-year anniversary.

“The motivation for that speaks for itself,” said Rose, who didn’t tell the
other guys until after it was up, wanting it to be a surprise. “Being this
(2006-07) is the year of the Fab Five 15th-year anniversary, people nationally are talking about it — about how we changed college basketball and the landscape of the sport. We have no banners and representation at U-M, almost like we didn’t go there.”

Perhaps he’s forgotten about the illegal loans to Chris Webber and other players that resulted in penalties for the university in addition to the removal of all banners commemorating their achievements from Crisler Arena.

Former Michigan AD Bo Schembechler threw them under the bus as well.

“They were five really fine basketball players. But what did they do?” [said] retired Michigan football legend Bo Schembechler, the university athletic director in 1989, when he fired Bill Frieder and promoted Fisher to head coach on the eve of the 1989 NCAA tournament. “They never won the national title, and frankly they had enough talent to do it. Did they win any Big Ten championships? What did they bring us?”

That’s some cold shit, Bo. They did bring increased visibility, more applicants and huge merchandise sales in addition to tripling athletic royalties.

Rose had the billboard placed in Detroit near the area where he and Webber grew up. He said he didn’t want to cause any distractions.

“Unfortunately, what a couple players were accused — never proven — of doing, our banners got taken down so our memories aren’t as fond as they should be,” Rose said. “There’s no hard feelings and I think some good eventually will come out of it. But, especially when, being in broadcasting, I see what (former Ohio State running back) Maurice Clarett was going through, and they didn’t take their (championship) banner down. I see (former USC running back) Reggie Bush and what he’s going through. And I see what (former UCLA basketball coach) Jim Harrick goes through, and I notice it’s original and unique how our situation is handled.”

Rose can’t be blamed for being bitter and he does have a point but it seems as though he absolves Webber of any guilt in the situation. To their credit, Rose and Jimmy King have continued their association with the basketball program.

** Ray Jackson is living in Austin, TX running a moving company and Rise Up, Inc., a non-profit that mentors kids on and off the court. I always wondered what happened to him.

“No one can ever remember a bigger upset. I know in Columbus it’s the biggest selling shirt and everywhere else it’s, ‘Ha-ha, hee-hee.’ This might sound funny, but Appalachian State sounds like a funny name, and it’s a name people can kind of laugh at, so everybody is going, ‘Hee, hee.’”

- former Michigan quarterback John Wangler.