Maybe next year

Well, the Michigan Wolverines have just one more game this season - almost no chance to go to a bowl game for post season play.
We started off with a bang - the first four in a row were wins! Hooray! Already this season beat last year (3-9).
Then came Michigan State, our second conference game. Watching the game was painful. We had opportunities to win the game, but we also have a young team, and inexperience ruled the day for us - we lost - in overtime.< br/>Next came the Iowa Hawkeyes - undefeated so far. We played pretty well up until Tate Forcier made a mistake in the fourth quarter. Coach Rodriguez pulled him and put in the backup quarterback, Denard Robinson, who, in my humble opinion, had yet not proven himself to be someone to count on in a pinch. Forcier had done so in several games prior to this. Well, because Robinson doesn't have the arm that Forcier does, we failed to score on our final series and lost to the Hawkeyes 30-28. It looked to me like the coach was upset and took it out on Forcier - at the expense of the team. We should have won that game and beaten the so far undefeated Iowa team.
Our final win came at the expense of poor Delaware State, who we beat 63-6 even with using the bench and not just first stringers. They were clearly out of their depth. I didn't enjoy that victory, even though it was ours - I felt sorry for Delaware State. Alas it was to be the last victory, thus far this season.
Penn State, Illinois, Purdue and finally yesterday, Wisconsin, all defeated us to leave us second from the bottom in the Big Ten conference; the only team below us in the Big Ten rankings is the one team we beat - Indiana. We have the same dismal conference record: 1-6, but we've one more win than they do.

It's still mathematically possible for us to become 'bowl eligible' but we'll have to beat the Buckeyes (that team from the middle of the state of Ohio) to do it, and guess who's in first place in the Big Ten? Yup. And they've only been beaten twice this season. Once by Purdue for the first time in a long time, and once by USC (hooray for the Trojans!). Our record against them with this coach, albeit that this is only his second chance, is not so good. He became the first coach in Michgan Wolverine history to collect a fifth in-a-row defeat from them. This year doesn't bode much better.
While I definitely do believe in miracles, I also believe that their purpose is to glorify God and not to cater to the silly desires of football fans, so I really don't expect a victory next weekend at the Big House (Michigan's Ann Arbor stadium). So another year down the tubes under the much touted leadership of Coach Rich Rodriguez. We did have a marginally better season this year, so I assume the powers that be will allow him to stay on, but, I really hope he can accomplish MUCH better things next year. It's not like he doesn't have any talented players, he does. Somehow he needs to figure out how to get them to play as a team, have some more endurance, not make rookie blunders, and so on and so on. But after all, isn't that what a coach's job is? I will grant that the team is young and inexperienced, and I hope to see great things from them in the years to come; I just hope that Coach Rodriguez can pull it off. Otherwise the team will have to go through yet another coaching change, which is never easy. Because if we don't improve greatly next year, I would expect the coach to be let go.