Although they never foresaw a disaster of this magnitude, there are lots of people (pretty much everyone who is au courant, I gather) who foresaw a bad year for Michigan. After all, it lost three All-American or near All-American level seniors who joined the NFL (Long, Hart and Henne). It lost several other outstanding seniors. It lost some great juniors (Mannington and Arrington) who opted to go to the NFL, and, the Big Ten Network announcers said, it lost a total of seventeen players who had remaining eligibility.
Above and beyond all this, and I think perhaps far more important because Michigan always has, and I gather still has many terrific football players, it was known that the new coach would be bringing with him and would install a totally different offense, the spread formation, for which Michigan's current personnel, it was feared, might not be suitable or which they might find it hard to learn -- as indeed seems to have proven the case -- so that it would take a few years for Rodriguez to attain the success at Michigan that he had achieved at West Virginia.
These facts would seem to inherently mitigate Rodriguez's responsibility for the current disaster. Yet there are other factors which point in the opposite direction, i.e., which point to culpability. For example, though it was expected that the offense might find it difficult to learn and run its new system, it was also expected that the defense could be alright, even pretty good. But it stinks. It's just lousy. It is unable to stop other teams for the full course of a game, and correlatively and worse, it seems unable to tackle. When did coaches stop teaching players to wrap their arms around runners' legs and instead try to tackle them by wrapping their arms around the runners' torsos -- their upper torsos, no less -- so that the runners' legs can keep churning and they may well break the tackler's grip, as has been occurring all the time against Michigan? (Can you imagine trying to stop Jim Brown this way? Well, you can't stop far lesser runners, either, this way.) Incompetently tackling torsos instead of legs seems to be par for the course for Michigan these days. (So, incidentally, it is not surprising that Michigan tacklers too often get stiff armed (in the face, sometimes) and get knocked off their tackles.) Tackling torsos instead of legs is simply a result of bad coaching, if you ask me, and reflects badly on Rodriguez and his staff.
Then there is the question of fumbling. Michigan fumbles all the time. Too often, as well, and wholly aside from dropping any passes, Michigan's players seem simply to drop the ball out of their hands even though they are not being tackled at the time. (The Big Ten Network announcers claimed, if I heard them correctly, that Michigan had fumbled away the ball 24 times in eight of its games, or three times per game, which, I think, doesn't even count the times players simply dropped the ball out of their own hands but then picked it up.)
These fumbles and drops are simply nuts. They reflect horrible coaching. Good coaches won't put up with it. They would take steps to train people not to do it, and will bench people who continue to do it. Can you imagine what Schembechler would have done if someone kept fumbling? It wouldn't surprise me if minor physical violence could have resulted.
Then there are questions about Michigan's kick off game and its quarterback. As for kick offs, it seems unable to kick the ball into or anywhere near the end zone. Sometimes it squibs the ball, which doesn't even get into the air - - this is amazing. With regard to the quarterback, who transferred from Georgia Tech, he seems adroit at only two things: throwing a bullet pass directly into the ground three to five yards in front of an open receiver, and throwing the ball far over the head of a receiver who is wide open downfield. They should send him back to Georgia Tech. Of course, Michigan has nobody better, although one may question whether any other quarterback it has would be worse.
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