The Kansas City Star: By J. Brady McCollough

Outsider may be just what Michigan needs to regain swagger

BY J. BRADY McCOLLOUGH THE KANSAS CITY STAR

The Michigan torch was passed from Lloyd Carr to Rich Rodriguez.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. The outsider’s door is always open. That’s the first difference. People come and go throughout the day, hoping to make their initial judgments, and the outsider makes time.

Rich Rodriguez knows that many of his visitors aren’t convinced he’s the right guy to man the captain’s seat of Michigan football, arguably the country’s steadiest ship, but he chats them up anyway. He doesn’t sound like them with his easy Appalachian drawl, his mix-and-match grammar. He knows that, too.

For years, Schembechler Hall was an impenetrable fortress. With an arrogance that drove nearly all of its peers crazy, Michigan was content to sit at the top of the hill and look down on the changing world around it. Isolationist policies eventually die, though, and Rodriguez, the program’s first outsider in 38 years, has arrived to begin the process of modernization.

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