Put aside, for a moment, your feelings on Rich Rodriguez. I think I’ve made mine pretty clear here, and, like it or not, the man is going to get at least one more year to turn this program around. Discussing his future seems pretty pointless right now.

Instead, I have a question — one that I’m almost uncomfortable asking, and one that has a very unclear answer: Have the past two years tarnished, at all, Lloyd Carr’s legacy at Michigan?

It’s a question I don’t even like bringing up. I started watching Michigan football in 1994, and can only vaguely remember the (brief) Gary Moeller era. So, for the entirety of my formative years, Lloyd Carr was Michigan Football. He brought home a national title, beat Ohio State with regularity (until the Tressel era), and was everyone’s favorite curmudgeon on the sidelines. He has done as much for this University, on and off the field, as any man in his position, ever. I have, and always will have, the utmost respect for Lloyd.

However, with all the talk about the cupboard being left bare for Rich Rodriguez, and the lack of talent shown on the field in the last two years, when Lloyd’s upperclassmen should have eased the transition to a new coach, it’s hard to to pin a fair amount of the blame for 3-9 and 5-5 on Lloyd Carr.

We all saw the program decline at the end of Carr’s career: the 2005 season was by far the worst of Carr’s career; the 2006 season skidded to a halt after a great start, with Michigan again getting creamed in the Rose Bowl; the 2007 season saw Michigan inexplicably lose to Appalachian State and get destroyed by Oregon despite having NFL-caliber players at every skill position and the #1 overall draft pick at left tackle. The Capital One Bowl upset of Florida provided a wonderful, lasting image of Carr being carried off the field, victorious in his final game as coach. He deserved that storybook ending.

But, we are still feeling the effects of those final few seasons. The recruiting efforts of Carr and his staff took a noticable downturn in his last couple years: The thin, top-heavy classes of 2006 and 2007 are the basis for the dearth of talented upperclassmen on the 2008 and 2009 teams. Linebacker and defensive back recruits were woefully underrepresented, leading to the disaster of a depth chart we see this season. I will never, ever accuse Lloyd Carr of not caring about the future of Michigan football — the man has far too much pride in his team and his school to ever do that. However, it is pretty clear that, by the end of his career, the grind of being a college coach wore him down, and his team suffered for it.

This is not to say that Carr didn’t know when his time was up: he left in 2007 with a sparkling 122-40 record in 13 years as the head coach, and never subjected Michigan to a drawn-out retirement process like Bobby Bowden has at Florida State. For that, we can be very thankful — he could have turned a three- or four-year turnaround process into a decade-long quagmire, and he had earned the right to do so with his service to the school. When I think of Carr, I will think of ‘97, and his dominance of John Cooper, and his hilariously terse sideline interviews, and his integrity and love for Michigan.

However, a very small part of me may also think of the years following his retirement. I am not saying it’s right, and I’m not sure how legitimate those feelings are, but they are there.

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