Reorientation: Rich Rodriguez is getting warmer

Adjusting to the weekend's new realities. • The clock is ticking. Despite the pervasiveness of a handful of dumb, halfhearted columns after last year's debut flop and legions of "hur hur Rich Fraud" threads all over the Web, Rich Rodriguez has never been on the "hot seat" at Michigan. He hasn't been close to it -- he inherited a mess of youth, attrition and apparently some entrenched cultural resistance from the deep-rooted Lloyd Carr administration, always had a minimum of three years to install his program and came into this year with plenty of leeway to demonstrate "progress" from last year's 3-9 disaster. And of course there would be progress, and with it plenty of patience. The perceived, hypothetical "hot seat" chatter around Rodriguez didn't bear any resemblance to his actual standing among Michigan fans and insiders. I say all that about the past year so I can say this about the next one: After dropping a 25-...