MORGANTOWN — Having spent a few days — and, on some points, a few weeks — considering all that has transpired in this brutally ugly divorce of Rich Rodriguez and West Virginia, I have come to what I believe are some rational conclusions.

Some of them you certainly will not agree with or embrace, so feel free to dissent.

s Throughout the process of leaving West Virginia for Michigan, Rodriguez has done nothing brazenly illegal.

s His actions at times have seemed unethical and perhaps have been such. But ethical conduct is often in the eye of the beholder, and were your allegiances reversed — i.e., if you were a Michigan fan and not a Mountaineer — your perspective would change dramatically.

s All of that having been said, much of what Rodriguez has done has been slimy, selfish and vindictive and in the end that has cost him not only any shred of respect he ever earned from West Virginians (let’s face it, that ship has already sailed), it will also be his undoing as far as his national reputation is concerned and in his attempt to barter down or out of the $4 million buyout clause in his WVU contract.

I’m no lawyer and I never stay in a Holiday Inn Express, but that last part just seems to be the one unintended consequence of Rodriguez’s egomaniacal attempt to make certain that the next generation of WVU football coaches and players will have as little opportunity as possible of reasonably parlaying the framework of his success into any future accomplishments.

In other words, I can’t take the players, but I’m sure as heck not going to leave you with anything else.

Again, it’s petty and spiteful and reminds me a lot of my 22-month-old, who couldn’t care less about any of her toys until she sees them in the possession of her 4-year-old sister.

Little Annie has a wonderful vocabulary for someone not yet 2, but when she sees Grace with an Elmo book she had long since discarded, she is reduced to “Mine, mine, mine, mine.’’

I guess I can forget about looking for Christmas cards from Rich, whom I have known since long before he became a football coach of any distinction. But it’s hard to overlook what is obvious.

Anyway, let’s try to look at this without the rage.

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On the morning of Dec. 16, Rodriguez had not yet told his West Virginia players he was leaving and was at least eight hours away from relaying his official resignation. That was also about the approximate time that he claimed to several of his assistant coaches that he had about an hour or so before Michigan demanded a decision. Yet it was also apparently the time he called at least one potential recruit — quarterback Terrelle Pryor — to tell him of his decision to go to Michigan.

Illegal as far as the NCAA is concerned? Probably not. That’s a body that can make rules about when players can be contacted, but would be in for a world of hurt if they tried to investigate everything that took place in those conversations. As a coach at a Division I college program — whichever program it was at that precise time — Rodriguez was allowed to call recruits and that’s what he did.

Was it unethical? It certainly was from a West Virginia standpoint. Technically, that call prevented West Virginia’s remaining coaches from calling Pryor — and anyone else Rodriguez phoned that day — for the rest of the week because it was a period during which the NCAA allowed only one phone call from coaches to players in a week’s time. But recruits were allowed to call the coaches to find out what was going on and, given the unique circumstances, the NCAA probably would have looked the other way had WVU’s remaining coaches tried to make one call. It created a huge mess for then-interim coach Bill Stewart, but at least by the book it probably wasn’t illegal.

And imagine for a moment that Rodriguez had done the same thing when moving from Clemson to West Virginia. Wouldn’t you have considered the ethics of it and yet looked the other way and said, ‘Hey, I like this guy. He’s digging into the rulebook and using it to our advantage.’’’

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MORGANTOWN — Having spent a few days — and, on some points, a few weeks — considering all that has transpired in this brutally ugly divorce of Rich Rodriguez and West Virginia, I have come to what I believe are some rational conclusions.

Some of them you certainly will not agree with or embrace, so feel free to dissent.

s Throughout the process of leaving West Virginia for Michigan, Rodriguez has done nothing brazenly illegal.

s His actions at times have seemed unethical and perhaps have been such. But ethical conduct is often in the eye of the beholder, and were your allegiances reversed — i.e., if you were a Michigan fan and not a Mountaineer — your perspective would change dramatically.

s All of that having been said, much of what Rodriguez has done has been slimy, selfish and vindictive and in the end that has cost him not only any shred of respect he ever earned from West Virginians (let’s face it, that ship has already sailed), it will also be his undoing as far as his national reputation is concerned and in his attempt to barter down or out of the $4 million buyout clause in his WVU contract.

I’m no lawyer and I never stay in a Holiday Inn Express, but that last part just seems to be the one unintended consequence of Rodriguez’s egomaniacal attempt to make certain that the next generation of WVU football coaches and players will have as little opportunity as possible of reasonably parlaying the framework of his success into any future accomplishments.

In other words, I can’t take the players, but I’m sure as heck not going to leave you with anything else.

Again, it’s petty and spiteful and reminds me a lot of my 22-month-old, who couldn’t care less about any of her toys until she sees them in the possession of her 4-year-old sister.

Little Annie has a wonderful vocabulary for someone not yet 2, but when she sees Grace with an Elmo book she had long since discarded, she is reduced to “Mine, mine, mine, mine.’’

I guess I can forget about looking for Christmas cards from Rich, whom I have known since long before he became a football coach of any distinction. But it’s hard to overlook what is obvious.

Anyway, let’s try to look at this without the rage.

nnn

On the morning of Dec. 16, Rodriguez had not yet told his West Virginia players he was leaving and was at least eight hours away from relaying his official resignation. That was also about the approximate time that he claimed to several of his assistant coaches that he had about an hour or so before Michigan demanded a decision. Yet it was also apparently the time he called at least one potential recruit — quarterback Terrelle Pryor — to tell him of his decision to go to Michigan.

Illegal as far as the NCAA is concerned? Probably not. That’s a body that can make rules about when players can be contacted, but would be in for a world of hurt if they tried to investigate everything that took place in those conversations. As a coach at a Division I college program — whichever program it was at that precise time — Rodriguez was allowed to call recruits and that’s what he did.

Was it unethical? It certainly was from a West Virginia standpoint. Technically, that call prevented West Virginia’s remaining coaches from calling Pryor — and anyone else Rodriguez phoned that day — for the rest of the week because it was a period during which the NCAA allowed only one phone call from coaches to players in a week’s time. But recruits were allowed to call the coaches to find out what was going on and, given the unique circumstances, the NCAA probably would have looked the other way had WVU’s remaining coaches tried to make one call. It created a huge mess for then-interim coach Bill Stewart, but at least by the book it probably wasn’t illegal.

And imagine for a moment that Rodriguez had done the same thing when moving from Clemson to West Virginia. Wouldn’t you have considered the ethics of it and yet looked the other way and said, ‘Hey, I like this guy. He’s digging into the rulebook and using it to our advantage.’’’

nnn

The other quasi legal point to be considered here is the new document-shredding allegation. That’s a bit trickier because we still aren’t 100 percent sure what was destroyed. The best guess here, though, is that they were indeed Rodriguez’s “personal notes,’’ as agent Mike Brown termed them, but that they were assumed to be much more than that by West Virginia coaches and officials who knew of their existence.

Imagine it like this: You’re the CEO of a corporation overseeing multiple department heads who, in turn, are overseeing 125 other workers. Just for kicks and giggles, we’ll call it the Mountaineer Family, which is what Rodriguez always called his team.

Now, as a department head you have much, but not all, of the same access to records and such as does the CEO, but the only thing you consider pertinent is those records that pertain to your specific workers. Perhaps you keep those specific records, perhaps not, knowing that they are always available from the CEO. Some of the information you don’t have at all, but it is readily available.

Then all of a sudden the CEO defects to another corporation. And rather than leave that employee information behind for his successor — none of which in any way pertains to his new job — he spends hour upon hour shredding every document he has.

Worst-case scenario is that what he destroyed was somehow incriminating. I don’t believe that at all, not for a moment. My best guess is that Rodriguez destroyed the files for no other reason than selfishness and spite. Legally he can argue that nothing, or virtually nothing, that was destroyed hadn’t also been available to the assistant coaches on his staff (even though most followed him to Michigan) and that his copies were “personal notes.’’

Technically and legally that may or may not be true. At least Rodriguez’s attorneys will argue to the ends of the earth that it is.

Morally? It just flat stinks.

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As for the pending litigation over the $4 million buyout in Rodriguez’s contract, that’s where all of this rubber hits the road. Again, I’m not a lawyer, but I can read, and the contract refers to the buyout as “liquidated damages.” Until we went through all of this with John Beilein mere months ago, I couldn’t have told you the first thing about liquidated damages. But, at least in that instance, it seems that what the term means is the real — or at least estimated — monetary damage done to the aggrieved party. In both cases that is WVU, which lost a coach and had to recover from that. In the Beilein case it became very obvious very quickly that not only was the damage minimal, but the end result was perhaps advantageous to the university, which had no trouble and very little cost in hiring what many consider an upgrade, Bob Huggins, who actually came cheaper than Beilein. No court was going to rule that WVU had suffered $3 million in damage — which was the Beilein buyout at the time he left — and the sides settled on an amount half that.

This is obviously different. Yes, West Virginia got a new coach at a bargain basement rate — $800,000 for Bill Stewart compared to $1.9 million for Rodriguez — but it appears the school is spending most of the difference in order to hire a top-shelf staff. As far as real damage is concerned, Rodriguez stripped the program of most of the assistant coaches, virtually the entire strength and conditioning staff and considerable other support staff. Rodriguez’s well-documented calls to recruits even before he resigned could play into damages, too, as well as the intrinsic public relations hit the program took. Just look around and imagine what college football fans — and certainly potential recruits — are thinking about all of this. “What in the world is going on at West Virginia?’’

Now in addition to his baseline argument that WVU did not fulfill all the terms of the contract (that’s for a judge or an arbitrator to decide, so we won’t even go there), Rodriguez is sure to point to alleged harassment of himself and his family and his assistant coaches’ families as further evidence that he has been wronged and that he is the victim here. And, despite the feeling here that most of that is slickly marketed propaganda into which the Michigan media blindly bought (the same media, by the way, that fawned when he said he was shocked — shocked, I tell you — to learn on the ESPN ticker that he was being sued by WVU, which incidentally found out that it was about to lose a coach in whom it had invested almost $2 million a year the same way), that might have had a chance of influencing any ultimate decision regarding the buyout.

That is until it was discovered that Rodriguez and his cronies spent hours hunched over shredders, vindictively destroying notes and records for which they had absolutely no use, but would have been wonderfully helpful to his successor — not in stealing Rodriguez’s secrets, but in simply having a record of what Stewart and Jeff Casteel and Bill Kirelawich and all of the players in the program had helped to build over the years.

But Rodriguez couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t be classy. He had to be Annie. “Mine, mine, mine, mine.’’ (Although Annie gets over it and quickly reverts to her natural sweetheart self.)

And that just might be Rodriguez’s downfall, because anyone who looks at this objectively will see that Rodriguez’s acts were not in reaction to any backlash, but rather right at the start of all of this. He called recruits hours before he even told his team he was leaving and most of a workday before he had his graduate assistant deliver his letter of resignation. He waited not even days, but hours, before shredding those “personal notes.”

The bottom line is that whether it was all shrewdly calculated or merely a first impulse, he made it as difficult as he possibly could right from the start for West Virginia to recover from his departure, which does may not bode well for any argument his attorneys make that WVU’s liquidated damages were minimal.

It was also vengeful and malicious and certainly has to stir at least some concern among his new employers about just what kind of traits their new Michigan Man embodies.

To contact staff writer Dave Hickman, use e-mail or call 348-1734.