As a Michigan fan, my perspective of the issues surrounding the practice violations can be summed up thusly:

1. In August 2009, the Detroit Free Press released a story that stated the University of Michigan football team had flagrantly ignored daily and weekly limits on practice time and the use of quality control assistants. The story further went on to claim that some of these limits had been exceeded by a factor of 2 and then some.

2. Subsequent investigation of the allegations in the NCAA and the University of Michigan yielded a number of violations. The substance of the violations can be summed up thusly:
a) Michigan’s biggest offense was the illegal use of Quality Control staff in roles that constituted coaching activities. This was the fault of a failure by the compliance staff to provide the football coaching staff with guidelines (as backed up by documentation) and the coaching staff failing to clarify what was and was not legal with the compliance staff. As such, numerous people are at fault here, one of whom is Rich Rodriguez. However, in defense of Rodriguez, the rules regarding QC staff are rather vague and a number of rules violations committed by the QC staff would no longer be violations today, as the NCAA changed these rules after the investigation, realizing that they were dumb.
b) There were very minor practice overages. The most serious overage was a number of 1-hour overages during the offseason, in which voluntary hours with strength and conditioning staff are limited. During football season, there were a number of practices that exceeded the 4-hour limit by 20 minutes. This excess occurred because the football coaches were present while the players stretched. The coaches were unaware that stretching constituted a countable practice time. Incidentally, stretching is considered voluntary unless observed by a football coach.
c) There were a few other isolated violations. The only serious one was a graduate assistant lying to the NCAA. He was fired before the allegations were released.
d) The violations combined to result in a failure to monitor charge by the NCAA.

3. It is our position that the violations are really not that serious. Contrary to the Free Press report, which stated that Michigan had consistently and egregiously violated practice limits, Michigan only had a few minor overages. More serious is the QC staff problem, but to be fair, the NCAA has been changing and clarifying those rules because they realized that they were neither well-defined nor logical.

4. We also believe, based on comments from NCAA football players throughout the country, including some at Ohio State, that these violations would turn up at any other school. While this is not a defense, it is a reason that we get annoyed when fans of other schools either gloat or are smug about them with regards to us.

5. As the violations that actually occurred do not even begin to approach what was initially reported by the Free Press, one of the lead reporters on the Free Press had written numerous anti-Rodriguez opinion articles, the coverage by the Free Press showed tremendous bias, and the Free Press reporters displayed a disregard for journalistic ethics while putting together the report, I consider the report to be a hit job on both Rodriguez and the university.