[billmac91]

Originally Posted by HailToMichigan

No, that's perfectly plausible, and I'd buy that, but Reynaud didn't mention that.


Here's where my own assumptions take over. Rodriguez started off in 1990 at dinky little Glenville State, in Division II. A decade later he was at the helm of a Division I-A, BCS team, with two other promotions in between. He then proceeded to take that team to the apex of its historical achievements - thanks to Rodriguez's coaching, the West Virginia Mountaineers have never been more successful in their history. What's the point? To me, that's not the career of a lazy person. People who work that hard don't suddenly get that lazy. And if he had been that way in the past, then it wouldn't be all that extraordinary for the practices to be shorter and the players wouldn't really have noticed.

To add to that, RR would have had to know he was taking the job, otherwise why risk botching a bowl you might be coaching in? He couldn't have known he was going to leave until the evening of the 14th at the very earliest, after his talk in Toledo, which would leave him only Saturday's practice to shorten up, because he was out the door by Sunday's practice.

Finally - and most blazingly important - you don't schedule practice willy-nilly the day before or the day of. Nor are the practice agendas decided as they go. The entire week's practice schedule would have been posted earlier. If RR had to go take care of business related to the job at Michigan, the obvious course of action is to turn to Bill Stewart and say "finish up here for me, I have some stuff to do." I believe it would have made the news before now if Rodriguez had repeatedly turned to his assistants the week before he left for Michigan and said, "OK guys, we're cutting this short, forget the wind sprints." Somebody would have said something. So clearly (to me), the practices were scheduled to be shorter - a schedule which would have been written well before there was any meaningful contact at all between RR and Michigan.

But Reynaud did say that....I'm not sure where the confusion is???

"We kind of figured he was going to leave because toward the end, things started changing around with him," Reynaud said. "We kind of figured something was up and we thought he was going to take the job at Michigan.

"Practice started becoming shorter. We weren't conditioning a lot. So we knew something was up."

Reynaud says he could tell Rodriguez was leaving b/c practices got easier/shorter. Posters point out htis may be a sleazy thing to do and you come in and defend Rodriguez on cue.

Reynaud is just one of the many who are going out of there way to paint Rodriguez in a poor light obviously....