The esteemed Rivals editor Tom Dienhart once caught the wrath of The Rivalry, Esq for his cliched and premature attack on the excellent 2008 Penn State football team. Although the senior editor at a major college football website, Dienhart has consistently painted complex issues with painfully broad strokes, rarely using actual football knowledge or facts to support his arguments.
But now Mr. Dienhart has turned over a new leaf. He has, fortunately, began following The Rivalry's take on Big 10 football.
Truly, in his latest post, a bland, uninformative, and head scratching ranking of Big 10 coaches (RichRod over Paterno? Bielema, who has made numerous mistakes at the helm of a storied program, is better than Fitzgerald, who has steadily pushed a mediocre NW program towards the top of the Big 10? What?!), Dienhart explained Rich Rodriguez's first season at Michigan in these words:
Think round peg, square hole. That's the best way to describe Rich Rod's dubious and dreadful debut. We all know he's better than that. Witness the national power he built at West Virginia, where he amassed a 60-26 record and four Big East titles. It was painfully obvious the offensive personnel Rodriguez inherited in Ann Arbor were ill-suited to run his spread-option offense. That slowly will change as he fills the roster with his players. Then, look out.
Yes, why yes. I agree. Round peg, square hole. In fact, we at The Rivalry, Esq first associated this maxim to the Maize and Blue's offensive impotence in our tastefully titled article,"Round Peg, Square Hole, or, The Michigan Offense," published last Fall.
So here's how you the reader can follow Dienhart's path to wisdom. A simple Yahoo! search for "michigan offense rivalry esq" will pull up my "round peg" article as the first link. I can only assume that after ravaging Dienhart's reputation back in Fall 2008, he has been trying to duplicate my vicious, biting style by poring over all my old articles. This culminated in his acknowledgment of my Michigan assessment in his latest third grade worthy piece. So I have a quick message for Tom Dienhart:
One. Don't do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an eduation you coulda got for a dolla fifty in late charges at the public library.
Just kidding. Thanks for the shoutout Tom. Enjoy the blog.