On the Spot: Wolverines sink or swim vs. Purdue

Players, coaches and teams with the most at stake on Saturday. To some extent, Rich Rodriguez has been on the spot ever since he took over from Lloyd Carr at Michigan, and even more so since Nov. 1, 2008, the day his first Michigan team lost at lowly Purdue, 48-42, clinching the program's first bowl-less season in 33 years and its first losing campaign in forty. A certain segment of the Wolverine fan base has never quite forgiven "RichRod" for that; though the prevailing wisdom from the very beginning has been that Rodriguez would need time to both re-invent a stodgy offense and make over a stodgy attitude that had pervaded the program, setting a new record for losses in a single season was never going to be anything other than an incredibly bitter pill to swallow for the nation's all-time winningest program. So to say that Rodriguez is on the spot this weekend -- when the Wolverines will be hosting Purdue, incidentally -- is almost a given. But there was a time wh...