In an incredible interview with ESPN’s Chris Low, ex-Michigan head coach Rich Rodriguez shares about being offered the Alabama job, denying the offer, and ultimately, failing at Michigan.
As Rodriguez says himself, hindsight is 20/20. And if given the chance, he might just take the Alabama job in 2007. But then again, he knows he helped start a dynasty in Tuscaloosa since he rejected Mal Moore’s offer and it led to the arrival of Nick Saban.
“Rich Rodriguez was visiting an Alabama college football spring practice a couple of years ago and chatting on the sideline with one of the Crimson Tide’s big supporters.
Gazing around at Alabama’s grandiose football digs, Rodriguez couldn’t help himself and quipped, “Where’s my statue?”
The Alabama booster looked at him curiously and said, “What do you mean?”
With a sheepish smile, Rodriguez deadpanned, “I’m partly responsible for those five national championships because if I had said yes, you wouldn’t have had the greatest coach of all time, Nick Saban, winning all those championships.”
He’s not wrong. When Rodriguez decided to stay at West Virginia, Moore’s job hunt continued to find the next head football coach at Alabama.
“Moore, who got to see three of Saban’s five national titles at Alabama before dying in 2013, had his sights set on Saban from the beginning after firing Mike Shula on Nov. 27, 2006. But Saban was just finishing up his second season as the Miami Dolphins’ head coach and initially rejected Alabama’s overtures. Moore also reached out to Steve Spurrier to gauge his interest in the job. Spurrier, who had just completed his second season at South Carolina, remembers encouraging Moore not to give up on Saban.
“Mal called after Saban turned them down,” Spurrier recounted. “He didn’t say he was giving me the job or anything like that, but wanted to talk and see if I was interested.
Spurrier’s response was, well, vintage Head Ball Coach.
“I’d made a commitment to South Carolina. They’d been good to me, hiring me when I was 60,” Spurrier said. “I just told Mal, ‘With the history of the program here, we have nowhere to go but up. So I’m going to stay here, ride this thing out and see if we can do some things that haven’t been done at South Carolina.”
That’s when Moore settled on Rodriguez, which of course didn’t work out. But that didn’t stop Moore from pursuing the man he wanted for the job all along: Nick Saban. And on Jan. 3, 2007, Moore announced Nick Saban was headed to Tuscaloosa.
Rodriguez would decide a year later to become Michigan’s head coach, a decision he often thinks about.
“His greatest regret is not so much that he passed on the Alabama job, but more the manner in which he left for Michigan. He never had a news conference to tell the West Virginia fans why he was leaving. He said he was advised by Michigan officials to move forward and thus went against his own instincts.
“That’s what I think about now, not that I turned down Alabama, but that I went to Michigan and never told the West Virginia people why,” Rodriguez said. “That was my home, my school, and I should have told them why I was leaving. That was a mistake, and it’s on me.”
At Michigan, Rodriguez would go 15-22 in three seasons in Ann Arbor. But it’s the NCAA probation for rules violations , centered primarily on offseason workouts and activities of support personnel, that occurred on Rodriguez’s watch that sunk his ship so to speak.
Rodriguez would go on to coach at Arizona from 2012-2017, and most recently, joined Lane Kiffin and the Ole Miss Rebels as offensive coordinator.
“We all have things in our lives that we would do differently if we had that opportunity,” said Rodriguez, 56, who may look next to catch on with an NFL staff. “And, sure, hindsight is always 20-20, but Alabama would have been a better fit for me than Michigan.”
Although Alabama may have been a better fit for him, even Rodriguez himself admits Nick Saban was perfect for Alabama:
“I’d say it worked out pretty well for Alabama because they went out and got the best college football coach of all time.”
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