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Rich Rodriguez has made peace with a lot of things over the years, but he’ll tell you straight up now: taking the Michigan job was a mistake.
“Was it a mistake going there? Yeah. It’s easy to say that now,” Rodriguez said this week on Next Up with Adam Breneman. “But I also learned a lot from coaching at Michigan. My kids made their best friends to this day, they made a living up there. I made some great friends that I still have to this day.”
The numbers tell a brutal story. Rodriguez went 22-15 over three seasons in Ann Arbor, posting a .405 winning percentage that remains the worst of any head coach in Michigan history. He went 0-6 combined against Ohio State and Michigan State. For a coach who had just delivered three straight top-10 finishes at West Virginia, that kind of record was simply unacceptable.
The biggest issue, by his own admission, was how fast he said yes.
Rodriguez never visited Michigan before taking the job, and he thinks that single decision changed everything. He walked into a situation he hadn’t fully evaluated, and the gaps were obvious almost immediately.
“I would never take another job without visiting it, probably. Because if I would’ve visited there, I would’ve realized we had some better stuff here, like in the weight room, than they had.”
A Hire That Never Found Its Footing
When Rodriguez arrived in 2008, the move felt like a landmark moment in college football. The spread offense was taking over the sport, and Michigan, one of its most storied programs, had decided to modernize after Lloyd Carr retired. Rodriguez had built West Virginia into a legitimate national contender using tempo, quarterback runs and explosive skill players. On paper, it made sense.
It just never worked.
He inherited a roster built entirely around a pro-style system and tried to flip the identity overnight. Michigan dropped to 3-9 in his first season, the worst record in program history at the time. The culture shock didn’t fade; it got louder.
There were flashes. Quarterback Denard Robinson became one of the most electric playmakers in the country running Rodriguez’s system. But the defense was consistently overmatched, and the Wolverines never finished better than seventh in the Big Ten standings during his time there. Their only bowl appearance under Rodriguez was a loss in the 2010 Gator Bowl.
The external noise didn’t help either. NCAA allegations related to practice violations created negative headlines early in his tenure, and his relationship with Michigan’s old guard grew increasingly strained. He was dealing with political resistance while simultaneously trying to rebuild the roster from the ground up.
Rodriguez later put together strong runs at Arizona and Jacksonville State, which proved the Michigan situation was more about fit than ability.
The Detail That Still Stings
Rodriguez was fired after the 2010 season, and his successor Brady Hoke took largely the same roster to the Sugar Bowl the very next year. Rodriguez watched the players he recruited make big plays in a game he wasn’t there for.
“I still feel, as tough as it was, had we had a chance to maybe finish it out — because the third year, we got better and got in the bowl game, then the fourth year when we weren’t there, they got to the Sugar Bowl and all the guys that were making plays and stuff are the guys we recruited, so that was hard to watch,” he said.
He also pointed to one specific factor that may have changed everything: the retirement of athletic director Bill Martin, the man who hired him, just before he was let go.
“There was a lot of really good people there. The athletic director who hired me, Bill Martin, was a great guy. I’d like to think if he had not retired, I would’ve still been there and had a chance to get it going.”
Back Where He Started
Rodriguez returned to West Virginia in Dec. 2024, re-taking the job at his alma mater after leading the program from 2001 to 2007 and winning four Big East titles. His second stint is off to a slow start; last season’s 4-8 record wasn’t what anyone in Morgantown was hoping for.
But he’s rebuilding again. There are more than 60 newcomers on the 2026 roster through recruiting and the transfer portal, and Rodriguez seems to have a clearer sense of what went wrong the first time he left.
“What I kind of learned is that I probably didn’t evaluate what we had at West Virginia as well,” he said.
Whether that self-awareness translates into wins in the Big 12 is the next question. His first real roster overhaul is done. Now it’s time to see if it works.
