Now that's Rich: 'Get a life' Rodriguez bites hand that feeds him

Rich Rodriguez has played this year as about as poorly as a fella can. And we don't mean season. We mean year, from the start of his infatuation with the Michigan football job.

Listen to Meyer Lansky, Rich Rodriguez: This is the business you've chosen. (AP)

Tuesday, though, might have been the capper, and that is despite the fact that he neither lost a game nor got sued by a former employer that day.

He suggested that people who yell and message scurrilous things about him and his family "get a life." He said this as though he has been coaching in a hermetically sealed booth all these years.

To which we can only respond, "Rich, buddy, if people had a life, you wouldn't exist, and certainly not at these prices."

Rodriguez is in many ways the architect of his own disaster at Michigan, and we needn't rehash the facts for you, as you know them well. And we're not defending those who use message boards as their own personal toilets, passing off malignancy as cleverness, or just passing it off as malignancy and not caring how it plays.

But these are the conditions that have prevailed in college football more than anywhere else in sporting landscape. That viral (in the bacterial sense) wing of the fan base can typically be connected to folks who pay money to help fuel the machine -- tickets, jerseys, sweatshirts, little noddy dog for the dashboard -- so what Rodriguez is actually saying is this:

"Hey, all you folks who made my profession so lucrative -- get a life."

The disconnect is clear here. Rodriguez has benefited from the lunatic not-so-fringe as much as he is being punished by it, so he of all people should know that "get a life," while an admirable sentiment in general, is also disingenuous in this context. They are operating in that disturbing and fantastical "I made you and I can break you" world of theirs, but there are enough of them to make that sentiment seem true.

Rodriguez basically gambled and lost by leaving West Virginia for Michigan after promising to stay. He handled the entire process of separation incredibly poorly, and was either badly advised or didn't listen to the advice at all. He toyed with emotions that are there to see every week -- and now in the 24/7 world, every day -- and thought that because he was him, everything would turn out fine.

Coaches often do that. Rodriguez is neither the first nor even the first this week. All he needs do is look what happened with Phillip Fulmer, or what is happening with Charlie Weis. They have been beset by other people who "don't have lives," but they are also part of the constituency that made them all wealthy men.

But coaches do not seek out logic, they dispense today's bromide and expect you to believe it because it came from their mouths. Saying "get a life" doesn't play when the people who lack those lives are also the people who helped contribute to your lifestyle. Rodriguez either doesn't realize this, or he does and is just trying to deflect more heat, a task at which he seems particularly unsuited.

He's right, of course. People who lose their innards over the local team should get a life, because the one they have is awfully narrow. But they long ago chose not to get that life; they'd rather be like they are, as troubling as that seems, and they have already been scolded enough so that they are impervious to disapproving lectures from outworlders. They are like the third rail of sports fandom -- they are dangerous, but they also help power the train.

Rodriguez thought he would be impervious to the danger because he'd always won wherever he went. He thought like his athletes sometimes think -- that he is bulletproof. Now he finds out that all that devotion lavished on him as a success in West Virginia has an ugly backhand now that he is at Michigan, and he either is or pretends to be shocked. He wants it both ways, and as anyone who follows sports knows, the participants always want it both ways, and that's only when they can't have it all three ways, or all four ways.

He'd have been better off avoiding the topic entirely, or saying, "This has been a tough year all the way around for everyone, and I'm just going to have to eat it. The fans are the fans, good and bad, and we'll just try to make the good ones feel good about Michigan football while we try and win over the bad ones."

But no, he had to go asking for it again. One more bad move in a series of them, by a guy whose luck has never run this bad before. Asking perspective of those who don't want it ... man, is that stupid or what?

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.