Weekend leftovers: Walk-ons and Wolverines

Most head coaches gave their assistants and support staff some much deserved time off, with Signing Day come and gone and Spring Practice not yet ramped up. Hopefully, Brian Kelly and company take a few days away before getting back after it, with one of the more important springs in recent memory just ahead.

Here are a few thoughts I collected over the weekend:

* If there’s a controversy brewing in the early days of the Brian Kelly era, it’s the changes in the walk-on policy. Depending on your sources, Kelly has either canceled the walk-on program, or merely changed the tryout dates for those students that would like to earn a place on the roster of the football team.

After sending an email to the football office for clarification, I was told that they have simply been rescheduled, though that would go against what I’ve heard from a few other sources, all of whom have given me a version similar to this, a student letter to the editor at The Observer:

“A few friends of mine were planning on trying out for next year’s team this spring and called the football office to find out when tryouts were. What they eventually found out was that the new head coach Brian Kelly and his staff were not going to have walk-on tryouts this year. Furthermore, they found that some of the current walk-ons were being cut.”

I think on the totem pole of issues, the walk-on program should be as close to the bottom as you can find, but it’s never a sound PR move to cancel a tradition, especially when it spawned people like Mike Anello and -- gasp! -- Rudy Rudiger. I expect Kelly to invite students to tryout for the team eventually. I just think this fall, where he’ll be working on installing an offense without a healthy quarterback and coming off a hectic recruiting season, might not be the best time to find guys that won’t contribute to your program for at least a few seasons at best. It’s not the worst thing in the world to push this off.

Chin up, aspiring Rudys. Your day will come...

* There was plenty of buzz on message boards about highly touted Michigan recruit Demar Dorsey, an elite safety that comes to Ann Arbor with a lot of baggage. Dorsey was charged with multiple felonies while in high school, stemming from multiple robberies. Here are Rodriguez’s comments from his Signing Day press conference.

“I don’t think it’s fair to the young man and his family to pass judgments on something before you know the whole story,” Rodriguez said. “As a coach we got a chance to visit these kids at the school, at their home and have them come up here and spend a weekend. You get to know them, certainly you get enough time to research and learn the whole story, not just what somebody’s written out there. Sometimes people are too quick to judge on something they read on the internet. I think that’s dangerous to do.”

I’m pretty disappointed with Rodriguez, but not for giving Dorsey a chance at going to college. The Free Press has the whole story. They’ve done the research and what they’re writing isn’t just something you read on the internet message boards. For Rodriguez to simply attempt to brush Dorsey’s past under the table is inexplicable.

I don’t make a habit out of supporting people that have committed felonies, but I think Dorsey deserves the chance to turn his life around. If Rodriguez simply said that Dorsey, who comes from an extremely at-risk background, made some mistakes and was dedicated to turning his life around, I think he’d gather some support and turn Dorsey’s story into one of redemption.

But Rodriguez dismissing some pretty serious criminal exploits as internet rumors is unacceptable, especially coming on the heels of the Justin Feagin incident, another questionable Rodriguez recruit that was eventually dismissed from school for his role in a botched cocaine deal.