I went home exhausted, and all I’d done was follow him around and take notes. But working out with the strength coaches proved to be far tougher. In just six weeks, they doubled my bench press and tripled my squat. They also showed me you could puke from running or lifting weights (I hadn’t known that). After each workout I collapsed on my couch—not to nap, mind you, but to whimper in the fetal position for a couple hours.
How those players got any work done after their morning workouts was a mystery to me—and thanks to Michigan’s self-imposed penalties, the Wolverines actually worked fewer hours than the NCAA allowed.
If Robinson—or any of the 124 other players—did any of these things poorly, or not at all, that was Rodriguez’s problem. And whenever such missteps hit the papers, the talk shows, or the blogs, they quickly became much bigger mistakes before breakfast the next day.
This beast Michigan has created is just about the biggest, strongest, and fastest animal of its kind, but the coach’s job security and the athletic department itself still rest on kids who weigh three hundred pounds and can squat twice that but can’t grow respectable mustaches.
* * *
Everyone knew Rodriguez was on trial in 2010—not least Rodriguez, who hadn’t had a single good night’s sleep since he had moved to Michigan.
What seemed to get lost in the endless discussions about him and his future, however, was that Michigan was on trial, too.
Michigan has long been considered one of the game’s “destination jobs.” It is not the means to some greater position but an end in itself. When you accept this job, you’ve arrived once and for all.
Only one head coach in Michigan’s long history went on to become a head coach anywhere else. That coach, Gary Moeller, left only because he was fired for one bad night at a restaurant. When the NFL’s Detroit Lions later hired him, it was considered a demotion. They fired him after only seven games, perhaps because he had become the only Lions coach to post a winning record since 1972, a no-no in the Motor City.
Michigan has a lot to offer a head coach—as much as any college program in the country—but, like most elite programs, open-mindedness, flexibility, and patience are not among its selling points. Because the Michigan family had not needed those attributes in decades, they had atrophied by the time Rodriguez arrived.
Rodriguez shared many of Michigan’s blind spots, including his soaring ambition and admitted impatience, which occasionally created secondary problems. He made his share of mistakes, no question, but Michigan was hiring him, not the other way around. Its very constancy meant it had no recent experience accepting an outsider and preparing him to succeed.
The last time Michigan did so, in December 1968, Bo Schembechler asked his new athletic director, Don Canham, how many years he had. Canham, characteristically, pulled no punches. “You’ve got the same tenure I have. I think we have about five years. If you guys don’t succeed [by then], we’re all going to be out of here.”
Schembechler knew where he stood, and Canham’s word was good.
But by December 2007, Schembechler was gone, Canham was gone, and so was their way of doing business. Thanks to a century-old tug-of-war between Michigan’s presidents and athletic directors, which had turned decisively in the presidents’ favor after Schembechler retired as athletic director in 1990, Michigan’s presidents had hired four straight athletic directors who did not have a single day of experience coaching or administering college athletics. Before Rodriguez’s third season, Michigan hired a fifth.
They all brought serious strengths to the post, but none of them seemed to know what coaches went through and how best to help them.
The questions about Rodriguez started the day he arrived in Ann Arbor and multiplied each year he coached the Wolverines.
Could Rodriguez adapt to the unique culture that is Michigan football? Would he embrace the tradition, or fight it? Could his high-flying offense succeed in the stodgy Big Ten, and could he build a defense to match?
But questions about Michigan arose, too. Would the Wolverines, who cherish their past like no one else, seize the future in the form of the spread offense? Could they accept an outsider for the first time in four decades—and the first West Virginia accent in a century—and give him the support he needed to get the Wolverines back to BCS games, where everyone felt they belonged? How would the Michigan family respond if Rodriguez failed to win enough, fast enough?
Many Michigan Men would come to Rodriguez’s aid and help him any way they could—sometimes at considerable personal cost. Others immediately rejected him as a “bad cultural fit.” Still others came to that conclusion only after the losses piled up.
* * *
Rodriguez had not made it all the way from tiny Grant Town, West Virginia, to the biggest stage in the nation by playing it safe. As we sat in his office that July day in 2010, he told me that, for the third straight season, he would be starting a new quarterback in the opener—sophomore Denard Robinson, this time—with former freshman phenom Forcier demoted to third string.
Rodriguez knew he had to win, and he had to do it the right way—just one more reason the outcome of the NCAA investigation seemed so important. He also had to become, in the well-worn phrase of the day, a “Michigan Man”—a leader so exemplary that alums and fans were proud to see him serving as the voice of the program and, truly, the face of the university itself.
Sports fans invest great hopes and dreams in their teams. College football fans invest even more, I think, because of the stronger connection they feel with the school and the players. But I’ve never seen any fans ask more of their team than Michigan football fans ask of theirs.
There are only two groups who are more devoted to the Wolverines—the coaches and the players themselves. They have the most to gain and the most to lose. They know the stakes. And they accept them—even embrace them. It’s why all of them, from Rich Rodriguez to Tate Forcier to Denard Robinson, came to Ann Arbor. Not to be average, or even good, but “the leaders and best.”
Anything less would not do.
This book attempts to explain how the coach and his team fell short—and what happened when they did.
1 LEADERS AND BEST
This is a story that could happen only in America.
When you travel abroad you quickly realize it is impossible to explain why a university would own the largest stadium in the country. It is, literally, a foreign concept, one as original as the U.S. Constitution.
Indeed, it was Thomas Jefferson who drafted the Northwest Ordinance, providing for the funding of public schools and universities in the states that now constitute most of the Big Ten. “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The idea is so central to Michigan’s mission—even its very existence—it is engraved on the façade of its central building, Angell Hall.
If Ken Burns is right that the national parks are “America’s best idea,” our state universities—another uniquely American concept—might be a close second. The United States has spawned more colleges and graduates per capita than any other country in the world and created college towns rising out of cornfields, another American phenomenon.
Ann Arbor’s founders, in an effort to attract settlers and make money on their real estate venture, first bid for the state capital—and lost to Lansing. Then they bid for the state penitentiary—and lost to Jackson. Finally, they bid for the state university—and won, the best bronze medal ever awarded a brand-new town.
But as the university grew, Ann Arbor experienced problems common to all college towns. Put thousands of healthy young men in one place with little adult supervision, and all that testosterone has to go somewhere—which explains why the game of football was born and raised not in the city or the country but on college campuses.
Football was already so popular at Harvard by 1860 that the school’s president felt compelled to ban it for being too
violent. That, of course, only piqued the young men’s desire to play it. When Rutgers played the College of New Jersey—now called Princeton—on November 6, 1869, the game was a little different from the one Michigan and Connecticut would play in 2010. In the 1869 version, each team had twenty-five men who played the entire game and, because they hadn’t yet conceived the forward pass, engaged in a glorified melee.
Rutgers actually won 6–4, marking the first time Rutgers was the nation’s top-ranked team—and the last. When Princeton beat Rutgers in the rematch a week later, Rutgers’s brief moment at the summit was over.
The college boys that day could not have imagined that their wide-ranging scrum would become one of their nation’s most popular spectator sports—a billion-dollar American obsession worthy of stadiums holding over one hundred thousand people, with luxury boxes that would start at $55,000 per season. But that’s exactly what they set in motion that day. They also started something the students, the alumni, and the reporters would love—and the university presidents would hate just as much.
Just two years after that first game, Andrew Dickson White—who had left his post as a history and English professor at the University of Michigan to become Cornell’s first president—received a request from a group of students to take the train to Cleveland to play football against Western Reserve (now Case Western). He famously replied that he would not permit thirty men to travel two hundred miles just to “agitate … a pig’s bladder full of wind!”
But he was fighting a losing battle. Ten years later, in 1879, a group of Michigan students traveled to Chicago to play a team from Racine College in Wisconsin, in the first football game on the far side of the Alleghenies—or “the West,” as they called it then. The Wolverines won 1–0, starting a tradition that, 131 years later, would be described by athletic director and former regent Dave Brandon as the most prominent feature of Michigan’s “brand.”
The college presidents responded to this relationship like fathers of debutantes who find their pristine daughters falling for hooligans. It was not simply a Hatfield marrying a McCoy. It was a Vanderbilt marrying a McCoy.
If they could have annulled the marriage, they would have. But, conceding the impossibility of preventing this ungodly union of academics and athletics, Purdue president James H. Smart wrote to the presidents of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Northwestern, Chicago, and Michigan, inviting them to meet on January 11, 1895, in a wood-paneled room at the Palmer House in Chicago. If they were going to have to put up with this shotgun marriage, they at least wanted to put down some ground rules.
They started with the premise that they, the presidents, should have complete authority over all sports played in their universities’ names, and then created rules ensuring that everyone on the field was a bona fide student and an amateur athlete—issues schools still struggle with today.
This was a “radical departure from the prevailing norm,” former Big Ten commissioner Tug Wilson wrote, and he was right. The Big Ten was the first major organization of its kind, predating high school associations, other college conferences, and even the NCAA itself. Soon the rest of the country’s colleges and high schools followed suit, forming their own leagues based on the Big Ten model.
The American marriage of academics and athletics—something no other country in the world would even consider—had been officially consummated.
It’s been a rocky relationship, to say the least, and presidents to this day chafe at having to work with the unruly beast down the street. But it’s lasted over a century, and even a trial separation seems out of the question.
Of the seven schools that day that created what would become the Big Ten, one would emerge as the conference’s crown jewel. But if the Big Ten penned its Magna Carta at the Palmer House in 1895, the Wolverines would wait three more years to craft their constitution. They needed inspiration, and they found it in the Big Ten’s first rivalry.
When John D. Rockefeller decided to bankroll a university to open in 1892, he called it the University of Chicago and hired Yale’s William Rainey Harper to become the school’s first president. Neither Rockefeller nor Harper was stupid. They knew the fastest way to put their new school on the map was to make a splash in the sensation sweeping the nation: college football, thereby becoming one of the first schools to leverage the game to enhance its academic reputation.
One of President Harper’s first hires was his former Yale Hebrew student Amos Alonzo Stagg, a man trained by Walter Camp, the father of football and the author of its first rule book. The investment in Stagg quickly paid off when he turned the Chicago Maroons into a regional power, strong enough after just four seasons to join the nascent Big Ten.
Three years later, on November 24, 1898, in front of twelve thousand fans at Chicago’s Marshall Field, the undefeated Wolverines took on the 9–1–1 Maroons to see who could claim their first Big Ten title. Late in the game, Michigan’s little-used Charles “Chuck” Widman broke loose for a 65-yard touchdown, followed by Neil Snow’s crucial two-point conversion—just enough for a 12–11 victory and the first of Michigan’s forty-two conference crowns.
“My spirits were so uplifted that I was clear off the earth,” said Michigan music student Louis Elbel. The surprising finish started a song in his head. Some accounts have him finishing the melody by the time he got to his brother’s house, others on the train back to Ann Arbor. Either way, Elbel worked with amazing efficiency—perhaps because he seems to have lifted the renowned melody of “The Victors’” from “The Spirit of Liberty,” which his friend George Rosenberg had copyrighted seven months earlier.
But no one questions that the powerful lyrics are all Elbel’s. A year later John Philip Sousa performed the song in Ann Arbor and reportedly declared it “the greatest college fight song ever written.”
One overlooked aspect of “The Victors” separates it from all others. Most school songs urge their teams to make a great effort in the hopes of winning. “On, Wisconsin!” ask the Badgers to “fight on for her fame … We’ll win this game.” “The Buckeye Battle Cry” exhorts the “men of the Scarlet and Gray … We’ve got to win this game today.”
“The Victors,” in contrast, celebrates a contest already won.
Hail! to the victors valiant
Hail! to the conqu’ring heroes
Hail! Hail! to Michigan
The leaders and best!
Hail! to the victors valiant
Hail! to the conqu’ring heroes
Hail! Hail! to Michigan,
The champions of the West!
There is no wiggle room in those words. No hoping, no wishing—just a clear-as-day declaration that the Michigan Wolverines are “the leaders and best,” and everyone else will simply have to deal with it.
Of all the trappings of Michigan’s vaunted tradition, the first is something you cannot see or touch. It’s just a song. But more than the marching band, big house, or banner, “The Victors” established the most important element of Michigan’s identity—confidence—which served as the North Star for all that followed.
* * *
He wasn’t raised in Michigan, he didn’t play there or even take a single class in Ann Arbor, but no one did more to shape Michigan’s reputation for excellence—and arrogance—than Fielding H. Yost.
The son of a Confederate veteran, Yost was born in Fairview, West Virginia, in 1871, about five minutes from Rodriguez’s future home. He earned two degrees from the state’s flagship university in Morgantown before embarking on his coaching career. After one-year stints at Ohio Wesleyan, Nebraska, Kansas, and Stanford, by December 1900 Fielding Yost was out of a job yet again, because no one had the wealth or the will to hire a full-time football coach.
Michigan’s first athletic director, Charles Baird, wrote to Yost: “Our people are greatly roused up over the defeats of the past two years,” which was an interesting comment for a school that had just gone 7–2–1 and 8–2, establishing another Michigan tradition: high expectati
ons and the impatience that comes with them.
Baird assured Yost that “a great effort will be made” and backed up his promise with a $2,300 salary for just three months’ work, far more than a full professor made. Yost snatched up the offer.
Yost had never been to Ann Arbor until the day he showed up to start his new job. He pronounced his adopted team “Meeshegan,” which legendary broadcaster Bob Ufer mimicked so often ESPN has picked up the habit.
The day Yost arrived, he grabbed his bags and literally ran from the station up State Street to the campus. When he got there, a reporter asked him how the Wolverines would do that season. Yost hadn’t yet seen a single player, but that didn’t stop him from predicting, “Michigan isn’t going to lose a game.”
Then he delivered for fifty-six consecutive contests, going undefeated in 1901, 1902, 1903, and 1904, winning national titles every year—the first team other than Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn to win even one—while beating opponents by scores like 119–0, 128–0, and 130–0, that last one against West Virginia, his beloved alma mater.
According to Yost’s biographer John Behee, “No other coach and no other football team ever so dominated their era as Fielding H. Yost and the Michigan teams for 1901–05.” And no other coach ever will.
But all was not well with this new game. Incredibly, in 1905 alone, eighteen college students died on football fields.
President Theodore Roosevelt called the coaches and presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to the White House that year to urge reforms to save the sport. This meeting gave birth to the Intercollegiate Athletic Association, which we now call the NCAA.
Yost’s best counter to the many critics of football, however, might be his greatest gift to the game: In an era when football was considered a social ill run by renegade coaches, Yost argued that, when properly coached, football developed valuable qualities in students that the classroom could not. The belief that football builds character has been repeated so often it is now a hoary cliché, but when Yost espoused it, it was a fresh, even radical idea.
Three and Out Page 2