Gil Thorp

As you know, Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez was fired yesterday. Of all the negative newspaper pieces written about Rodriguez over the past few years, this one is not particularly remarkable, except for the fact that its author, Neil Rubin, also writes the comic strip Gil Thorp, which turns out to be very remarkable indeed in its own strange way.

The overall experience of reading Gil Thorp is something like tripping acid in the College Football Hall of Fame. Despite being created "for and about teenagers," the characters do not look or speak like teenagers. The strip mixes references to current TV shows like "Glee" and "Project Runway" with anachronistic elements like milkshake parlors. The artistic rendering of many characters changes drastically not just from year to year, but sometimes week to week. The current villain, improbably named Lini Verde, appears to be popular, gay, and a nerd -- a combination rare in life but rarer still in fiction. The eponymous Gil Thorp helms not only the basketball team, but also the baseball and football squads, so he can be forgiven for not grasping the nuances of each sport. Indeed, Thorp's coaching, at least what we see of it, consists mostly of flinging cliches at his players.

This last point is particularly interesting. A lot of sportswriting is, of course, overrun with cliches, but I always imagined that most sportswriters knew the score: while facile analysis may sell papers (although even that is now very much in doubt), to actually succeed as a coach requires expertise extending well beyond common knowledge. This does not seem to be the view of Mr. Rubin. In his imagined world, Coach Thorp instructs his players with the exact same cliches that the sportswriter deploys in his columns.

Mr. Rubin begins his critique of Rodriguez with a prediction that Michigan will win its bowl game (in the event they were blown out) and piles on with a string of lies, half-truths, and pure gibberish. It wouldn't be worth it to debunk the column paragraph by paragraph, but a simple Google search is enough to overturn nearly every assertion in it.

Maybe in the world of sportswriting there simply is no difference between cliche and truth: if people say something enough it is true, and if something is true it is often said.