Pac-12 Football: Five burning questions for 2015
Jul 31, 2015; Burbank, CA, USA; Arizona Wildcats coach Rich Rodriguez at Pac-12 Media Day at Warner Bros. Studios. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
4. Is Arizona Building A Perennial Power?
It seems like the days of Rich Rodriguez guiding the West Virginia Mountaineers to a prominent bowl game every year was decades ago, with Rodriguez leaving the comfortable confines of Morgantown for what would wind up being a toxic atmosphere at Michigan.
However, it was only eight years ago that Rodriguez led West Virginia to a dominating Fiesta Bowl victory over the Oklahoma Sooners. Before leaving for the Big House, Rich Rod had three consecutive 11 win seasons with the Mountaineers and was considered one of the premier coaches in college football.
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Sure, he flopped at Michigan, going 15-22 in three years for the Wolverines. Still, the program was heading upwards when he left and his successor, Brady Hoke, was fired after four years with declining results. The prevailing wisdom was that Rodriguez was just not a good fit at Michigan, and that for whatever reason the traditionalist boosters of the school just did not like his style, both on and off the field.
While that seems like a ridiculous reason to fire a wildly successful coach who clearly has the program heading upwards, the Wolverines did exactly that, much to the delight of the University of Arizona, who hired Rodriguez after the 2011 season. Since his arrival, the Wildcats have gone 26-14 in three years, and capturing the South division title last year. While the Pac-12 championship game did not go as planned, the season was still a success. The question now is whether that year was just a fluke, or if Rodriguez is building another perennial contender.
We have seen the occasional outlier year from the Wildcats before. In 1998 the program went 12-1, as an example, before reeling off nine straight seasons with six or fewer wins. The only way to know is to watch how everything unfolds this year.
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