Three and Out

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by John U. Bacon


  Rodriguez decided to bet on himself.

  On his first trip to Morgantown, his father dropped him off on the wrong side of the stadium. Rodriguez still remembers how long that walk felt, circling the stadium, trying to figure out where he was supposed to go.

  When he finally found the rest of the wide-eyed walk-ons gathered in the locker room, an assistant coach started yelling names off his clipboard, telling each player where he’d been assigned. After he’d finished, the assistant barked at Rodriguez.

  “What’re you doing here? Move!”

  Rodriguez screwed up his courage and said, “You never called my name. Where do you want me to go?”

  “Aren’t you Gonzales?” he asked.

  “No, sir, I’m Rodriguez. Rich Rodriguez.”

  “Ah, you’re all the same anyway. I can’t tell you apart.”

  Once Rodriguez concluded they had no idea who he was, his plan was simple: “I was going to get in as many fights as I could the first week, just so they would know my name. I played desperate—because I was.”

  “Rich was a very solid player,” head coach Don Nehlen said. “He certainly was not very flashy. He was like his coach—slow! He was a 4.8 or 4.9 guy. But he was smart, and he could read a play.”

  At the end of his freshman year, Nehlen gave Rodriguez a full ride for his sophomore season. He’d made it.

  His first big bet on himself had paid off—and with it, a mind-set began to take hold. Whenever Rodriguez faced a crossroads, he would bypass the safe route, take a chance on doing it his way, and usually make it pay, often quite handsomely.

  Once again, Rodriguez’s timing was impeccable. He joined the Mountaineers right as Nehlen started turning a program of perennial losers into a perennial bowl team, finishing all four of Rodriguez’s seasons in the top twenty. Rodriguez got to learn from another master, one who had learned from Bo Schembechler when he assisted him in Ann Arbor.

  “When I got to West Virginia,” Nehlen said, “about all I did was turn the ‘M’ upside down. Whatever Bo did, we tried to do here.”

  After Rodriguez graduated in 1985, he spent a year on Nehlen’s staff as a graduate assistant, then took a job as an assistant coach at a small school called Salem College. There he served under the unforgettable head coach Corky Griffith. Whenever Griffith’s assistants presented him with a problem, he’d invariably say, “I’ll solve your problem, Jack!” And he’d come back the next day with a solution you could never have imagined.

  When they were having trouble recruiting, Corky put an ad in USA Today. “WANTED: Football players at Salem College. No experience necessary. See the country.”

  When Rodriguez told Corky they needed thigh pads, he returned the next day with boxes of Reader’s Digests. “They’re the Christmas issues!” he boasted. “Twice as thick as the normal ones!”

  When Rodriguez told him they had no grass on their field, and no money for seed or turf, Corky said, “I’ll be back tomorrow, Jack! Solve your problem!” And he returned the next day with a few guys in hazmat suits, who started spraying something on the field. The backs of their suits read HUMAN WASTE FACILITY. Corky had brought them down to shoot shit all over the field—for free. It smelled like shit, but the grass grew.

  After Rodriguez’s second season at Salem, 1988, Corky Griffith called him into his office and said, “It’s all yours, Jack!”

  “What is?”

  “The team, Jack! I went out and bought a bar and a pontoon boat, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

  So, at the ripe age of twenty-four, Rich Rodriguez became the youngest head coach in the country. He also got a raise, from $16,000 to $20,000 a year.

  On Rodriguez’s first team, he started fourteen true freshmen, including one player who “couldn’t play dead in a Western.” (That player, however, would go on to play a role in Porky’s II: The Next Day.)

  The team finished 2–8, but Rodriguez felt optimistic about the season ahead, until his phone rang one morning. The man claimed to be a reporter from the Associated Press. “How do you feel about your program being canceled?”

  Rodriguez knew a prank when he heard one. But a few minutes later, the school’s athletic director walked in to tell Rodriguez, “We’re going to have a press conference to make an announcement that will be detrimental to your program.”

  There is detrimental, and there is detrimental. In this case, “detrimental” meant they were killing the football program, effective immediately. A Japanese university had just bought the school and had no interest in funding a football team—though, in fairness, no one outside the United States would ever understand why any college would fund a football team, or any other team.

  Rodriguez had already proposed to Rita Setliff, a former West Virginia University cheerleader from Jane Lew, a town of about four hundred people just down Route 79 from Grant Town, where her family could get only channels 5 and 12. Since her dad would not let her watch Three’s Company because it was too risqué, that left one channel, so she focused instead on basketball and tennis, and played both well enough to win the Lewis County High School Female Athlete of the Year award—to go with her homecoming queen crown.

  “I liked her immediately,” Rich said of their first meeting in the school cafeteria. “She was good-looking, had a great personality, sharp as can be—and she liked sports, too.”

  When Salem killed football, however, he realized he had a new car to pay for, a new house, and a fiancée who was betting on him.

  “‘Honey, I’ve got some good news, and I’ve got some bad news,’” he recalled telling her. “‘The bad news is, the school just cut football, I don’t have a job, and I’ve got no idea how I’m gonna pay for the car or the house.

  “‘But the good news is, I’m still gonna marry you!’

  “And, God bless her, she still said yes.”

  For their honeymoon, all they could afford was Cedar Point for one night, but they remember it fondly.

  Faced with the kinds of problems that make most new husbands head for the hills, the mines, or the cubicles, Rodriguez didn’t hesitate. He returned to Morgantown, where Coach Nehlen welcomed him back as a volunteer assistant coach. Rodriguez paid his bills teaching driver’s education on the side. But he was still in football. To Rodriguez, that’s what mattered.

  The next year, 1990, the Glenville State Pioneers came calling for a head coach. The pay was meager, the Pioneers hadn’t won a single game the previous year, and it wasn’t even an NCAA school. But it was a paid position, and a head coaching one at that. Rodriguez didn’t sit around waiting for a better offer. He grabbed it.

  To say Glenville, West Virginia, is in the middle of nowhere is not fair. It’s actually fifteen miles off the interstate, which goes through the middle of nowhere. When Rodriguez moved there, it took forty-five minutes to get to the nearest McDonald’s.

  The Pioneers had 105 players, and only nine scholarships to divvy up among them. Rodriguez would take his broken-down tackling sleds to his dad to weld them back together, and Nehlen let Rodriguez ransack West Virginia’s bins of used stuff. “Practice pants, jerseys, shoes, you name it,” Nehlen recalled. “Rich grabbed everything he could.”

  One day one of the assistant coaches told Rodriguez, “We’ve got 105 guys out for the team and only 95 helmets.”

  “I figured the competition for those last ten helmets would be intense,” Rodriguez said. “And it was!”

  The program off the field matched the team on the field. “We were so bad that first year,” Rodriguez admitted, “the crowd would literally give us a standing ovation if we got a first down. I’m not kidding. And they didn’t have to do it very often.”

  The Pioneers finished that first season 1–7–1.

  But the locals still loved him. “He lived in Glenville, right in the faculty apartments,” his star receiver Chris George said. “He played in the local softball league, he played on the local nine-hole golf course. Rita played there. They lived there. He knew everyone, an
d everyone knew him.”

  “That’s what made him so loved around this state,” longtime sidekick Dusty Rutledge noted. “He was one of them.”

  But all that love was no substitute for winning. In need of leftover players, Rodriguez went back to the same place he got his leftover equipment: Morgantown. Nehlen told him he had about fifty walk-ons, and if Rodriguez could offer them at least room and board, he could probably get a few of them. Rodriguez scooped up a bunch, including quarterback Jed Drenning and receiver Chris George.

  “Remember the Land of the Misfits?” Rodriguez asked. “Well, that was Glenville: the Land of the Misfits. A bunch of Rudolphs and Herbie the Dentists, and none bigger than me!

  “But I’ve got to say, the kids we got were hungry. We might have all been misfits. We might have all been a little lost, trying to find something better. But we all wanted it, and wanted it badly. And we were willing to sacrifice to get it.”

  It will come as a surprise to Michigan fans who felt Rodriguez did not embrace Michigan tradition that right before Rodriguez’s second season in Glenville “he puts that sign up in our weight room,” George recalled, “THOSE WHO STAY WILL BE CHAMPIONS. And he didn’t just put it up, he explained what it meant. He said, ‘This is going to be hard. We’re going to have people leave. We’re going to have guys who can’t handle it. But if you stick with me, you’ll be rewarded. Trust me.’ And we did.”

  The Pioneers still had a long way to go. “My first year,” George said, “teams were laughing at us when we got on the field.”

  They had reason to. The Pioneers headed into their fifth game of Rodriguez’s second year at 1–2–1, and they weren’t likely to win against West Virginia State. “They were good,” George said. “They beat [Drenning] to a pulp. He needed help just getting to the training room the next day.”

  In fact, he’d been sacked thirty-two times over his last two games, a season’s worth even for a bad team. Worse, the Pioneers were about to face Wingate, which had whipped them 63–0 the year before. To say things looked grim is to understate the case considerably.

  * * *

  They say necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes it’s actually true. In 1945, Fritz Crisler had a bunch of seventeen-year-olds who were no match for the undefeated, top-ranked Army squad, with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old guys who had already swept Italy, Germany, and Japan. They were not scared of a bunch of teenagers. Crisler knew it was time to gamble.

  Pioneer Stadium would never be confused with Yankee Stadium—your average suburban high school soccer field is nicer—but Rodriguez’s desperation was every bit as great as Crisler’s. And what he decided to do on that field that day would change the game more than anything since Crisler created his platoon system forty-six years earlier.

  Quarterback Jed Drenning was so bruised from all those sacks that he begged his coach to use the shotgun formation. Drenning didn’t know it, of course, but he was talking to the right guy. Rodriguez had been thinking about using the shotgun on every play since his conversation with Coach Weir on the high school sidelines. The Monday before the game against Wingate, Rodriguez surprised his quarterback by asking, “How often do you want to run out of the gun?”

  “Coach, I’ll run the clock out in the gun if you want.”

  Rodriguez nodded. Ideas that had been knocking around in his head for years started coming together. He thought back to his days as a defensive back and asked himself: What was the toughest thing to defend? The answer came to him in a snap: the two-minute drill.

  Rodriguez surprised Drenning when he took it to its logical extreme: “Let’s see if we can do that the whole game.” They would skip the huddle, go to a shotgun snap on every play, put four or five receivers on the field, spread them out as far as they could, and throw the ball all over the place—and keep it up for sixty minutes.

  Like Army in 1945, Wingate still won—but barely, escaping 17–15.

  Using their never-ending two-minute drill, the Pioneers won three of their last four games. Rodriguez was onto something.

  “Whatever incarnation of Rich’s offense exists today,” Drenning told Tim Layden, “it was born that day when we played Wingate. And he turned the place around pretty quickly after that.”

  During a routine practice the next season, in 1992, Drenning inadvertently provided another piece of the puzzle for his coach, who was smart enough to recognize it when he saw it.

  As Tim Layden recounts in his excellent book Blood, Sweat and Chalk, Drenning bobbled the snap and failed to hand the ball to the running back in time. Normally when this happens, the quarterback simply follows the running back to salvage what he can, but Drenning noticed that the backside defensive end had already started bolting down the line to tackle the running back, whom he thought had the ball. Drenning decided to go in the opposite direction, to the spot where the backside defensive end had started—which was now completely vacant.

  Rodriguez blew the whistle. But he wasn’t mad. He was curious. “Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?” asked Drenning.

  “Why did you run that way?”

  “The end pinched,” Drenning said, though he could have just as easily quoted Wee Willie Keeler: “I hit ’em where they ain’t.”

  Every football coach in the country has seen his quarterback bobble a snap and run the wrong way on a broken play. And thousands of those quarterbacks probably did so for the same reason Drenning did. But not every coach had the curiosity to ask why and the insight to recognize what he’d just seen and heard for what it could be.

  In fact, only one coach did: Rich Rodriguez.

  * * *

  Yost didn’t invent the forward pass, of course. But when he saw Benny Friedman toss pass after pass to the sure-handed Bennie Oosterbaan, he knew they were going to change the game.

  Likewise, Layden points out that Rodriguez was not the first coach to use the run and shoot with the shotgun, but he was almost certainly the first to come up with the zone read, in which the quarterback is a potential ball carrier, forcing the defensive end to cover him or chase the tailback. Spread them out, and the defender simply can’t cover both.

  Another secret was changing the way his quarterback gave out the ball. Instead of simply sticking it into the runner’s gut, or faking it by holding the ball while putting his empty hand against the runner’s stomach, in Rodriguez’s zone read, the quarterback holds the ball with two outstretched hands and places it against the runner’s belly—and lets it ride for a few feet, like a swinging gate, while he watches to see if the end is following the runner or staying put.

  If the defensive end stays put, the quarterback releases the ball, and the runner senses that it’s time to clamp down on it—with one fewer defender to worry about. But if the end starts heading after the runner, the quarterback pulls the ball and runs where the end had started.

  It is an elegant, simple solution to an age-old problem that any chess player can appreciate. When you have eleven players and your opponent does, too, how do you gain an advantage? Knocking one of them over is one way, but it takes a lot of effort, you can always miss, and unless your guys are a lot bigger and stronger than the other guys, it probably won’t work very often. But with the zone read, you force the defender to tip his hand first, and if you read his movement correctly—which any decent high school quarterback can do—you have successfully removed him from the play.

  A pianist has eighty-eight keys at his disposal, and a chess master has sixteen pieces—and both of them must use their limited arsenal in ways no one has thought of before. A football coach has only eleven players, but on that fall day, on a scruffy practice field in Glenville, West Virginia, fifteen miles from the interstate to nowhere, Rich Rodriguez figured out a way to eliminate a defensive player without even touching him.

  No one knew it yet, but the game had changed forever.

  With this new key, the Pioneers started unlocking defenses that had been impenetrable just two years before. />
  “The defense didn’t know what we were going to do next,” Rodriguez said, “and they were chasing their tails, gasping for air. They had to respond to us. Given our record the previous year, that really impressed me.”

  While Rodriguez and his staff were still learning how their new weapon worked, they soon realized that it forced the opponent’s defense to spread out, too. And once they did that, they couldn’t help but show you how they planned to defend your play before you even snapped the ball—and not just the ends, either, but the linebackers, the corners, and the safeties, too.

  This gave the Pioneers a great advantage, but only if they were smart enough to recognize it. The coaches started teaching their quarterbacks to look where the defenders were setting up and, based mainly on that information, call the play seconds before the snap. Once they got the hang of it, they could not only make the defensive ends chase the wrong guy but also send three or four defenders so far off the scent, they were no more dangerous than rusty tackling sleds sitting in the middle of the field.

  That’s when Drenning “started picking them apart,” Rodriguez recalled. “That was fun!”

  Even if the quarterback didn’t make a complete read on the defense, or if the defense caught on to at least part of the joke being played on it, Rodriguez still held an advantage. If he could simply force all the defenders to cover all his players—including, crucially, the quarterback—he could make the defense play man-to-man against his receivers. That might not sound like much of an edge on paper, but when you consider that the receiver knows where he is going and where and when the ball is coming, it’s a considerable advantage over the defender, who can only guess at all three questions.

  It is like chess, with a catch: You get only three seconds to make your move, the opponent’s pieces can weigh up to three hundred pounds, and if you make the wrong move, they’ll smash you into the ground. If just one player blew his assignment, not only was the advantage instantly lost, but the ball carrier—usually the fleet-footed quarterback or a speedy little slot receiver—was badly exposed to getting blown up by a big, angry defender who was not going to pass up his chance to hurt the little guy who’d been making him look dumb all day. So, for Rodriguez and his system, being “all in” wasn’t merely a motto; it was a necessity. By all accounts, he was not notably tolerant of missed assignments.

 

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