Jacksonville State HC Rich Rodriguez accuses Week 1 opponent of spying

There was a time when Rich Rodriquez was one of the most respected coaches in college football. Nowadays, he's coaching at Jacksonville State — no offense to the Gamecocks — and seems to think his Week 1 opponent, Stephen F. Austin, is spying on his program.

Rodriguez went 60-26 in seven seasons with West Virginia and seemed to have control of one of the more high-octane offensive schemes in college football. He was so good at WVU that when Lloyd Carr retired at Michigan, the Wolverines swooped down to Virginia to snag Rodriguez as their next head coach.

Replacing Carr would have been hard for anybody, but Rodriguez was exceptionally bad at Michigan compared to the expectations on him. He went 15-22 and 0-1 in bowl games before being fired. 

Rodriguez did have a somewhat successful stint at Arizona, but flash forward to Wednesday, and he's claiming his Ohio Valley Conference program is being spied on by a team from the FCS.

“Pretty good sources that they had a couple staff members at our spring game,” Rodriguez said via ABC 33/40 News (h/t Sports Illustrated). “That’s not really supposed to happen. But we’re making plans accordingly, you know, so if they’re over there thinking they have our plays or what have you, signals or something like that, we’ve changed things since the spring.

“Then we caught somebody trying to film something the other day. First, my daughter caught him. … Then we caught him again, saw him peering through there with his camera. I sent the biggest guy in the program, ‘Cru,’ he’s one of our assistant strength coaches. He’s about like 6-foot-7, 350, probably benches like a thousand pounds or something. Sent him up the bleachers to run him out, and that guy disappeared pretty quick.”

True or not, how the mighty have fallen. This is like a subplot from "Friday Night Lights."