NCAA Football

Rich Rodriguez: I Was Wrong About Michigan Football GPA

Rich RodriguezIt's a claim that Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez has been fond of making: The football team during his tenure has had the highest cumulative grade point average ever recorded at Michigan.

But there's just one problem: Rodriguez had no basis for making that claim. He admitted on Wednesday that he actually doesn't know whether the current Michigan team has a higher GPA than past Michigan teams because Michigan keeps no record about its football team's cumulative GPA.

When the Detroit Free Press asked Michigan to provide records about the football team's grades, the school was forced to admit that it has no such records. Rodriguez said in a statement that when he asked academic advisers what the program's all-time best GPA was, they just gave him an educated guess, and he thought they were telling him something they knew for a fact.

"They did not make it clear that the number was just an estimate and not an exact calculation," Rodriguez said. "We apologize if this has caused any confusion."

The thing no one seems to be pointing out in all of this is that even if Rodriguez's claims were true, it wouldn't necessarily mean he was holding his players to higher standards than his predecessors. A high GPA might mean Rodriguez stresses academics, but it also might mean Rodriguez steers Michigan players into easy classes. It was silly for Rodriguez to boast about his team's alleged high GPA, and it's good that the Free Press got him to knock it off.

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