It’s fair to say that there’s not a happier group of people in the country than those who reside in and around Ann Arbor, and the boosters and alumni of that city’s school, over what transpired very early in the morning Friday.
While the week began with headlines dominated by a Michigan football program under fire for alleged abuse of NCAA guidelines on the time players spent on football, it ended with the Wolverines’ saga being knocked off the front page by The Punch.
That doesn’t mean the looming specter of an NCAA investigation has gone away, however.
According to a report in this morning’s Detroit News, independent investigators were on campus all throughout the week, gathering evidence and lining up witnesses to interview. The investigators are working in concert with NCAA enforcement officials.
“What they are doing is basically securing all of the evidence they can, as quickly as they can,” Michael Buckner, a Florida lawyer who assists universities in such investigations, told the paper. “They are locating at any and all of the former players who played under coach Rodriguez at Michigan, and setting up interviews.
“They’ll interview all of the current players and support and coaching staffs from the head coach to the trainers to the student trainers to the student workers to the conditioning coach and his staff. They will also secure interviews with the compliance staff to see what kind of monitoring program was in place, and secure all of the documents related to the monitoring program.”
Again, the postgame incident involving LeGarrette Blount was the best thing that could’ve happened to the program. It allowed them to catch their breath after a week wrapped in a storm of national scrutiny and do their final preparations for what has turned into a critical season opener in relative calm.
Of course, if they lose to one of those directional Michigan schools today, that brief respite will become nothing but a very, very, very distant memory.