Jim Tressel's next bee-yotch will be Les Miles

By Rick Morris

Any Michigan fan will tell you that the process of rationalizing losses to Jim Tressel is painful though necessary because of the repetitive nature of those results (every year since 2001 except '03). Fortunately, the Wolverines' leading coaching candidate comes ready to spin any ugly occurrence!

Les Miles actually bragged in a press conference that his team did not lose in regulation this season! Unfortunately, for Coach Les "Results Relative to Talent and Expectations" Miles, the NCAA engages in the goofy habit of counting ALL game results in the won-loss columns -- even the games that stretch into one or more overtime periods. Imagine that!

Buckeye fans probably thought that nobody could be more entertaining-in-a-surly-way in defeat than the departing Coach Lloyd Cooper. But apparently the real comedy will enter the OSU-Michigan rivalry in the coming years when the new whiny underachiever for That School Up North starts dropping his excuses for the continuing domination of The Sweatervest.

Lllllloyd Carr drives into the sunset

By Rick Morris

Some of the Detroit Red Wings blogs I enjoy reading have a fitting nickname for Detroit Free Press columnist/author/talk show host Mitch Albom: The Delicate Genius. His writing talent and creative abilities are beyond dispute, but he doesn’t have an internal meter to keep his tendencies to become overwrought and maudlin in control. Witness his piece earlier this week bemoaning the circumstances surrounding the departure of Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr.

It is quite possible to buy into one of the larger points of Albom’s column: that Carr is a much nicer guy than his gruff public persona would indicate and that he is a rare figure in the sports world with a sense of perspective about the place of his profession. Certainly, Carr’s insight about the worth about sports vis-à-vis the rest of the world is refreshing and necessary, especially in a week when a jerk like Nick Saban wallows in self-pity and compares a football loss to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. But Albom, unsurprisingly, let his fondness for Carr take him too far in this article as he basically suggests that Carr was too morally pure for college football:

"Say good-bye to the good guy, maybe the last of them. Whoever coaches Michigan next will have to be more about business than Carr was, more about national titles, less about hospital visits, more about recruiting, less about philosophy. It is just the way the world works, and the world has moved quickly on Carr. In recent years, you could see the weariness showing on his face, in his jowls, in his eyes, which became steelier and angrier as the silliness grew in college football ... Remember, this is a guy who started in Ann Arbor in 1980, when ESPN was just a Connecticut cable experiment. In his time, he has seen the Big Ten grow to 11, the Rose Bowl go from Granddaddy to group member, and the goal of college football go from playing on Jan. 1 to playing on Jan. 7 ..."

True, Carr’s career coincided with the period in which big money (TV deals, endorsements, sponsorships, alumni organizations, etc.) really ran amok. Point well taken. But to suggest that Carr might be “the last good guy?” What hyperbole. What garbage.

Frankly, one need look no further than Michigan’s archrival to disprove this idiocy. Jim Tressel has worked every bit as hard to uphold academic standards as Carr and has done every bit as much for charitable and educational organizations (both of his parents were heavily involved in education, as is one of his brothers) and has been equally concerned with trying to uphold a good image for his university. Granted, Tressel has suffered his share of off-field embarrassments from his players over the years. But Carr has had a number of wanna-be Terrell Owens types with big mouths over the years (i.e. Mike Hart, Braylon Edwards, Charles Woodson) and he never suffers in some quarters the way that Tressel does for his players’ failings.

Again, I don’t have a problem with what the main thrust of Albom’s column seems to be. College football has become a lot sillier and more like a circus in the last quarter-century – although some coaches have continued to thrive in this climate without selling their souls. And Carr has probably been one of the good guys in the game and has a record better than many. But Lloyd Carr, when it was all said and done, was unable to be any better or worse than a mirror of what was happening in Columbus. When they had a horrible big-game coach in John Cooper, he thrived. When they had a great big-game coach in Jim Tressel, he folded. Frankly, it’s very unfair to the rest of college football to find in Carr’s failures evidence of his nobility. Whether Mitch Albom believes it or not, Lloyd Carr is not a better man than Jim Tressel just because The Vest has pounded him year after year.

When it's obligatory to root against your team

By Rick Morris

As previously bemoaned in this space, the NFL saw fit to victimize the Cleveland market (where I live) by denying us access to Super Bowl 41 1/2 last week. As such, other FantasyDrafthelp.com and SportsTalkNetwork.com luminaries and I were forced to watch the game and the very excellent contest with our Cleveland Browns at Harpo's, an outstanding sports restaurant with the biggest combination of many TVs and large-screen TVs this side of a Las Vegas sports book.

As the Browns were wrapping up an improbable victory, one seemingly destined to be remembered as the turning point away from the misery of their first seven years back in the league, I got into an impromptu debate with my friend Dave Adams. Dave is a gentleman who used to be a part of the old "Reality Check" show on STN with myself and Ron Glasenapp and his brother Jon, who was also present, is a contributor to FDH. In the fun days when we used to do the show together, the struggles of the Browns under Butch Davis were a frequent source of debate. Dave and I had, and have to this day, different ideas on how to show ultimate loyalty to a team.

Dave believes that a fan should always root for his team, no matter what. Even if your brain tells you that the team is on a dead-end path and destined to crash and burn, you should hope against hope that the the team could win games regardless of that.

I don't subscribe to this school of thought at all. In 2003, when it became clear that "Botch" Davis was putting the agenda of pushing Kelly Holcomb ahead of the success of the team, I became one of the first commentators in the Cleveland market to call for his head. For me, it was a frightening case of deja vu, as Bill Belichick was up to similar tricks a decade earlier when he mandated bootlegs for Bernie Kosar so that he could dump him notwithstanding a 2-0 start to the season.

In both instances, I began to root for the team to lose every game so as to end the misery quickly and be able to start over as soon as possible. By 2004, I was calling for Phil Savage's installation as Browns general manager on "Reality Check," a year before the Cleveland organization decided to do just that. While Davis and his stooge Pete Garcia seemed to staff the team with a shoebox that held the names of players Davis had once recruited at the University of Miami, Savage was one of the league's premier personnel experts and a tireless researcher of talent. I opined that the team needed somebody like Savage who operated from a scientific standpoint free from personal agendas and biases that interfered with team success.

To Dave, rooting for the team to lose in the short term for the necessary "enema effect" was disloyal. The concept of being a "fan in exile" for any period of time was, and still is, completely unacceptable to him.

As the Browns were completing the signature victory of their 2007 turnaround, I was motivated at the end to take a victory lap with Dave (proving once and for all that I am the same guy off-air and away from the FDH media family that I am when you see, hear and read me!). After the Pittsburgh debacle in the season opener, Dave cornered me at one of his poker games and asked me if I still thought the team was better off than they were under Davis. I answered firmly that they were, the same sentiment my partner Jason Jones and I were propagating on STN while all around us were panicking. For those who were actually bothering to look, the 2007 roster was light years better than what had been inherited by Savage after the 2004 season. So after the win over Seattle, at a time when the progress of this team could finally no longer be denied, I said to Dave, "See, if the team had listened to me and fired Davis a year or two earlier, look at how much further along we'd be!" Dave, naturally, begged to differ!

It's an interesting debate and unsurprisingly, it's one where I think I'm in the right. Where would Ohio State be if John Cooper hadn't finally hit rock bottom and kept limping along as he had been doing? There would have been no Jim Tressel era, no national championship, no reversal of the domination at the hands of Michigan -- in short, no return to glory. Rooting against one's team should never be done lightly, but I maintain that sometimes it is necessary for the greater good and the ultimate restoration of success down the road.

"LLLLLoyd" Carr strikes again

By Rick Morris

In the biggest choke job in college football history, #5 Michigan got rolled by Appalachian State in "The Big House" yesterday, 34-32. To my fellow Ohio State fans rejoicing in the ultimate humiliation of a hated foe, I caution you thusly: Carr is Michigan's John Cooper and this game will be the tipping point in his firing (or "retirement") at the end of the season. The devil you don't know on the Wolverine sidelines could be their version of Jim Tressel, so beware the hubris of Michigan's downfall -- because in it could lie the seeds of their revival.