ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Want to get under Rich Rodriguez’s skin? Tell him opponents are “catching up” to his beloved spread offense and have figured it out.

One reporter in Chicago told Rodriguez an Ohio State coach said in the spring that defenses had caught up with the shotgun run by the quarterback.
“I could care less what he says,” Rodriguez said. “Everybody’s opinion is an opinion. We study everything, and our ultimate goal is to win. We sit down as a staff, and coaches and say what can we do that gives us the best chance to score points and win ballgames. For us it goes back to running the system we know.”
Rodriguez is one of the gurus of the spread-option offense and has spent years adjusting it.
“This whole thing about catching up to this, it’s all about execution,” he said at the Big Ten media days in Chicago last week. “They said the same thing about West Coast offenses, pro-style offenses. If you’ve got better players, you execute better, you’ll win 100 percent of the time, no matter what system you run.
“Because of the so-called spread, there’s so many variations of the spread that’s different, it’s going to be an easy mark — ’They’re not winning because of the spread.’ It ain’t the spread, it’s the execution of it. “
As for the other teams turning away from it, like Minnesota, that’s not his priority either.
“As a coaching staff, you’ve got to do what you know and what you believe in. We believe in our system,” he said. “The offense we’re running now is not the same offense we ran 20 years ago, and it’s not the same offense we ran five or six years ago, and there’s going to be different variations in the next four or five years. You constantly evolve and try to see what you can do to it.”