“Do you want to be here?” Garrison asked Rodriguez.
“Yes, of course I do!” Rodriguez recalled responding.
“Trust me, if there ever came a time where you did not want to be here, we would not stand in your way. What we would do is sit down with the attorneys, cut the buyout in half, and you could be on your way.”
“He must have said ‘Trust me’ a hundred times,” Rita recalled. (Garrison declined to be interviewed.)
“We’re from the same small area—Fairmont is just a few miles from Grant Town—and I believed him. I thought he was all in. How dumb was that?”
Rodriguez would soon find out just how dumb.
But in the meantime, the unusually high buyout allowed Rodriguez’s bosses to drag their feet on his wish list, believing he was virtually trapped.
“Rich has his plan,” Astorg said, “and he’s working his plan, and the administration is right front and center in the way of his plans.”
Something had to give.
5 A STRANGE SEASON
The Wolverines’ 32–18 loss to USC in the January 1, 2007, Rose Bowl took some of the sparkle off a season that started with a historic 11–0 winning streak, but not that much. Michigan still finished 11–2, marking Carr’s sixth ten-win season and his fifth top-ten finish. Not too shabby. It would have been a good year to call it a career, and some thought he might take the opportunity to step down.
Several Carr confidants told me he planned to do just that, but Martin talked him into staying one more year. Martin already had a search under way for a new men’s basketball coach, and he needed more time to line up Carr’s successor. Perhaps thinking that coaching one more season would increase his odds of naming his successor, Carr agreed.
Martin, however, insisted that was not true. “Lloyd never said to me at any time that he was thinking of retiring. No. Not until his last year, and only toward the end of the season. Until then, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d said, ‘Bill, I want to coach another year.’ And frankly I was hoping he would.”
What could go wrong?
* * *
Since the NCAA split Division I into two subdivisions in 1978, Michigan, Notre Dame, and USC were the only BCS schools that had never scheduled an opponent from the lower tier, then called I-AA and now called the Football Championship Series (FCS). But when the NCAA decreed in 2005 that teams could add a twelfth regular-season game—in what can only be described as a shameless money grab on the backs, knees, and skulls of amateur athletes—Michigan had to scramble to find an opponent before the music ended and everyone else was sitting down.
“I always wanted to schedule opponents that Lloyd would approve,” Martin said. “If he said absolutely no, I wouldn’t schedule them. He knew our football program. He knew our goals. He knew how important it was to win every single game.”
Hawaii was initially at the top of Martin’s list. But after June Jones—who refined Mouse Davis’s run-and shoot offense, an older cousin of Rodriguez’s spread option—and Heisman candidate Colt Brennan, who would break Shaun King’s record for passing efficiency, led the Rainbow Warriors to an 11–3 overall record the year before, the Warriors were scratched off.
“I never would have picked up the phone and found Appalachian State,” Martin said. Scott Draper, the assistant AD for football and one of Carr’s most trusted lieutenants, came up with the idea. “It didn’t excite me—I didn’t want to play the I-AA schools, but everyone was doing it.”
When Appalachian State agreed to the game in February 2007 for a flat fee of $400,000, the few discussions it generated focused on why Michigan had scheduled them and where the heck is that school? Their fight song didn’t make a very strong argument, either: “Hi-hi-yike-us. Nobody like us. We are the Mountaineers! Always a-winning. Always a-grinning. Always a-feeling fine. You bet, hey. Go Apps!”
“The Victors” it was not.
No ranked I-A team had ever lost to an I-AA team. With most of Michigan’s key starters returning, including a stellar trio of Chad Henne, Mike Hart, and Jake Long, they entered the 2007 season ranked fifth.
They seemed safe.
The point spread was set at 27, though some Las Vegas sports books would not even take that bet. Not since 1891, when the Wolverines started the season against the teenagers at Ann Arbor High School, dispatching them 61–0, did the home opener seem like such a complete mismatch.
The Big Ten Network had debuted just two days prior to the September 1 contest. Because the better Big Ten games had already been snapped up by ABC, ESPN, and ESPN-2, the BTN had this one all to itself. Of course, not many homes got the BTN in its first week, and the few that did weren’t expected to tune in to this massacre.
Nobody gave the Mountaineers much thought at the time—but they should have. Appalachian State had won the previous two FCS national titles and would win a third straight that year. They weren’t big, but they were fast, well-conditioned, and well coached. They had mastered the spread offense, which they learned directly from a visit to Rodriguez in Morgantown, and they ran it very, very well.
The Mountaineers had been studying Michigan since the game had been announced. They knew the Wolverines had a national-title-caliber team, but they also knew their defense had a horrible time against the spread offense.
If the Wolverines weren’t ready for the Mountaineers, the Mountaineers were ready for Michigan. On their third play of the game, Armanti Edwards hit Dexter Jackson on a slant route, sending him 68 yards to the end zone. It wasn’t a fluke. They poured on three more touchdowns that half and headed to the locker room leading 28–17.
In the second half, despite a slew of turnovers, bad penalties, and a pair of failed two-point conversion attempts, Michigan regained the lead 32–31.
But with 1:37 left and no time-outs, the Mountaineers needed just seventy-one seconds to move the ball from their 24-yard line to Michigan’s 7, where they kicked the go-ahead field goal: 34–32.
Chad Henne responded with a 46-yard pass play to Mario Manningham to set up a 37-yard field goal attempt, with 6 seconds left. As crazy as the day had been, the Wolverines were surely about to escape, learn their lesson, and come back stronger the next week against Oregon.
But it wasn’t meant to be: A Mountaineer speedster ran straight through Michigan’s line and smothered the kick in his stomach.
The Giants win the pennant!
Down goes Frazier!
Do you believe in miracles?
The announcer from Appalachian State made all those famous calls sound about as exciting as a Burger King worker repeating your order at the drive-through speaker. ESPN still plays it.
There was no joy in Arborville.
Mighty Michigan had struck out.
It took a while for the whole thing to sink in: The fifth-ranked Michigan Wolverines had actually lost to the Mountaineers of Appalachian State, a team not even eligible to be ranked.
In the Michigan locker room, no one yelled. No one screamed. No one threw his helmet. They slumped down in their stalls, heads on hands, and stared off into space, dazed. They could not comprehend it.
* * *
History is usually presented as something that simply rolls along, one year after the next, and what it produces is the inevitable result of broad, sweeping trends that no one individual or single moment can alter.
Not true. Individuals matter. Moments matter.
Michigan football has plenty of proof: Louis Elbel. Fielding Yost. The 1945 Army game. Bo versus Woody, 1969.
But on September 1, 2007, Appalachian State added one of its own, pulling off what many sportswriters consider the greatest upset in the history of college football. Its effects were both immediate and long-lasting.
A few grown men left Michigan Stadium in tears, and the bars became morgues. You couldn’t escape the story, which was broadcast on virtually every channel, even MSNBC.
In one of the easiest journalistic decisions of all time, the editors of Sports Illustrated didn
’t bother to send anyone to cover the game, yet in an equally easy decision, they put the game on the next cover. “My job is to help put major college football developments into perspective…,” Stewart Mandel wrote. “But in the case of Appalachian State 34, Michigan 32 … I feel utterly unqualified …
“What every coach tries to tell his players and the media every week only to be met by perennial skepticism has now been confirmed as true. No one is unbeatable in college football anymore. Anything can happen.”
Brian Cook, creator of MGoBlog, the most popular college football website in the country, couldn’t even address it, instead opting to run a screen that simply said “Kittens!” It took him three days to bring himself to write about “the Horror,” running his story under the headline “Unconditional Surrender,” and a picture of a mushroom cloud.
“Let the record show that Lloyd Carr never learns, and that you are right. We suck. We promise not to hope or expect anything except misery until someone named Tedford or Rodriguez or Schiano is coaching the team and to regard all good events as mere preludes to a fall. We are a defeated people. Give us your treaty. We will sign it.”
That night the e-mail boxes of Carr, Martin, and University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman overflowed with vitriolic missives, occasionally disturbing enough to forward to university security.
But the fans’ emotions were real enough. And what many wanted was to see Carr go. The various websites devoted to Carr’s departure—sackcarr.com, FireLloyd.com—did brisk business that night. The talk shows didn’t need to give out their numbers to get irate fans to call in.
The game was a stinker of historic proportions. There was no spinning it. “We were not prepared,” Carr said afterward, “and that’s my responsibility.”
But it was only one game, hardly dwarfing Carr’s accomplishments on the field or off. Carr had won more Big Ten titles than Fritz Crisler and more national titles than Bo Schembechler, yet he remained the Harry Truman of college coaches—unappreciated in his own time.
I stopped by his office later that week to drop off the book I had coauthored with Bo Schembechler, which Carr had helped fact-check after Schembechler passed away, adding a few stories in the process. I found him in his office, the lights off, tilting back in his chair before the reflected glow of a big-screen TV dancing on his face. He looked as though he had swallowed a live grenade and his insides had been hollowed out.
He was philosophical. “I’ve been warning these guys for years that one of these days a MAC team is going to beat us,” he said, “and you don’t want to be the team that gets beaten.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Appalachian State was not even a MAC team. Appalachian State was probably better than most of them, but they still played in the FCS, not the BCS.
A week later, Oregon, a bona fide BCS team with another mobile quarterback running the spread offense, humiliated the Wolverines on their home turf 39–7.
Nationwide, just about every sports pundit said Lloyd Carr was “on the hot seat.” But the custom since Charles Baird became Michigan’s first AD was clear: Only one vote mattered, and Carr had it. He would leave under his own power, at his own pace. But the rest of the season would be dominated by predictions of Carr’s retirement and speculation about who would replace him.
The Wolverines rebounded when they got back to the bigger, slower, less imaginative Big Ten. Despite injuries to Michael Hart and Chad Henne, the Wolverines willed themselves to eight straight wins. Nevertheless, the Horror cast a long shadow. The 2007 season was not the victory lap Carr had hoped for, or deserved.
The Appalachian State loss not only lowered the stock of Carr’s coordinators, it also diminished his power to boost them. The ability to name his successor was something he badly wanted, but unlike Schembechler, Carr was not the AD, and the 2007 season confirmed concerns that his assistants were not the next Lloyd Carr.
In Carr’s final Ohio State game, with the Big Ten title on the line, the banged-up Wolverines managed a mere 91 yards of total offense en route to a fourth straight loss to the Buckeyes and an 8–4 record.
Two days later, on Monday, November 19, Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr announced he would retire after Michigan’s bowl game.
* * *
Two of the University of Michigan’s worst-kept secrets that fall were Carr’s likely retirement and the possibility of Les Miles replacing him. Both seemed like obvious calls. Miles had played for Schembechler, coached for Schembechler, and was about to lead Louisiana State University into the BCS title game in January.
Hiring Miles would have followed the oldest script in college football: promoting a school’s former player to lead his beloved alma mater. Gustave Ferbert was the first alum to coach Michigan to a Big Ten title in that famous 1898 win over Chicago, and Harry Kipke, Bennie Oosterbaan, and Bump Elliott—all great players—followed suit. Miles had not been a star player, but he was clearly a heck of a coach. But a third poorly kept secret was that Carr preferred that someone else get the job—anyone else.
Exactly why has inspired both honest speculation and ridiculous rumors. The two most likely theories include bad feelings left over from conflicts when both served on Schembechler’s staff—something Schembechler often intentionally stirred up between the old guard and the young Turks, just to get the best ideas out on the table—and the friction generated after Miles took over LSU in 2005, when they found themselves recruiting the same players.
But ultimately, it was less important why Carr didn’t like Miles than the simple fact that he didn’t, which no one denies.
Carr wanted his offensive coordinator, Mike DeBord, or his defensive coordinator, Ron English. But Martin wasn’t convinced that either was ready. DeBord had been a successful assistant, but in his four-year stint as head coach of Central Michigan, he compiled a 12–34 record. English had been a coordinator for just two years, with mixed results.
Whatever your opinion of what happened thereafter—from the scattered search to Rodriguez’s three tumultuous years in Ann Arbor—all of it could have been easily avoided had Carr prepared a worthy successor from his ranks. In Schembechler’s twenty-one years, he hired thirty-six assistant coaches, eleven of whom became Division I head coaches. Three won national titles, and Larry Smith and Don Nehlen came very close.
In his thirteen years, Carr had nineteen assistants, four of whom became Division I head coaches: Stan Parrish, Mike DeBord, Ron English, and Brady Hoke, who had just finished the 2007 season at Ball State with a 7–6 record, giving him a career mark of 22–37.
With no candidates from the Carr tree deemed ready, Bill Martin had to look elsewhere—and that’s when things got interesting.
6 A STRANGE SEARCH
Since leaving Iowa to become Michigan’s thirteenth president in 2002, Mary Sue Coleman had gained a loyal following among Ann Arborites and the alums nationwide. A former biochemist, she impressed just about everyone as professional and likable, though she could be surprisingly tough when needed.
She earned particularly high marks for recognizing the economic troubles ahead and deflecting them by spearheading a $2.5 billion fund drive that ultimately produced $3.2 billion—a record for a public university. Then she and her team wisely protected a far larger chunk of the university’s endowment than did its peer institutions before the crash of 2008. She also struck groundbreaking partnerships between Michigan’s seven-million-volume library and Google (whose cofounder is Michigan alum Larry Page). Coleman would be named by Time magazine as one of the nation’s ten best college presidents in 2010.
She had more important things to do than monkey around with a coaching search—just one reason why she had given Martin complete autonomy over the search, as she had when he had hired sixteen other coaches. She was neither intimidated by nor mistrusting of Bill Martin, forging one of the best working relationships in college athletics. The month after Carr retired, however, would test all of that.
A year earlier, Martin
had decided Kirk Ferentz, whom Coleman had hired when she was Iowa’s president, would be his top candidate. Schembechler respected Ferentz, and Carr would have supported him. Martin did not check with President Coleman, however, and she did not tell him until after Carr stepped down that Ferentz was not to be considered, perhaps because numerous Hawkeyes had serious off-field problems that fall. Whatever her reasons, the result was the same: Another solution had been eliminated.
Martin put together a six-man search committee representing a cross section of university leaders, successful businessmen, and former Michigan football stars who’d done well after their playing careers had ended—the kind of opinion leaders a wise executive would work hard to keep on his side.
About a week after Carr’s announcement, the committee met for the first time in the glass meeting room in Weidenbach Hall. Martin told them what he was looking for and mentioned that Tony Dungy was his favorite candidate. Dungy had played high school football for Jackson Parkside, a half hour from Ann Arbor, but turned down Bo Schembechler to play for Minnesota. His Indianapolis Colts had just won the 2007 Super Bowl the previous winter, and his book, Quiet Strength, had been on the bestseller lists much of the year. Exactly why Martin thought Dungy might be interested in Michigan, however, is a mystery.
The committee then briefly discussed Cincinnati’s Brian Kelly, who had won two NCAA Division II titles at Grand Valley State in Grand Rapids and a MAC title at Central Michigan before finishing the 2007 regular season in Cincinnati 9–3 while graduating 75 percent of his players. But Kelly had a well-earned reputation for being unpleasant—even basketball coaches had strong opinions about him—and Martin made it clear he was not a serious candidate.
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