* * *
In 2011, I asked Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg if he felt he had any bias against Rich Rodriguez. “I never had personal feelings for Rodriguez one way or the other,” he said. The column he wrote about Rodriguez’s hiring supports his claim.
“Michigan hired a great football coach Sunday. Not a good one, like Greg Schiano. Not a very good one, like Les Miles. A great one … For the Michigan football fan who has complained incessantly for the last ten years, Rodriguez might as well show up at this morning’s news conference dressed in wrapping paper and a bow.”
The column laid out the pros and the potential cons of the hire in an evenhanded manner—very presciently, in many ways—but his private comments that day suggest a different mind-set.
After Rodriguez’s first press conference, Jim Brandstatter, a former lineman turned Michigan color man and one of Schembechler’s closest friends, walked out to the parking lot with Rosenberg, when the columnist declared, “I don’t like that guy. I don’t think he belongs here.”
Brandstatter wasn’t sure why Rosenberg was so convinced and told him he should at least give the guy a chance. But he went away certain that Rosenberg’s mind, at least, was already made up.
Before Martin had hired Rodriguez, just about everyone who followed Michigan football was already apoplectic. They care deeply about the program, after all. It’s not a stretch to say many fans feel it represents the very best of their cherished midwestern values, and those who have worn the winged helmet know it will be one of the first things mentioned in their obituaries, no matter what else they do before they die.
All the members of the Michigan family had trusted Bo Schembechler and his heirs to protect it. One fan, whose dad had died young, went so far as to write the AD that “Michigan football is my father.” To see the succession handled so carelessly created anxiety and even animosity among the fans, the alums, and especially the former players, who’d done the work to make the program what it was.
Just about every faction was upset, including those devoted to Lloyd Carr, Ron English, and Les Miles. Mary Sue Coleman, the regents, and the athletic department staffers weren’t happy, either. People were angry that their favorite candidate didn’t get the consideration they felt he was due, and they were angry with each other, too. They all had one thing in common, however: Fairly or not, they were all mad at Bill Martin, who would never again have the full support of any of those constituencies. Whatever ill will Martin had already generated among the Michigan Men and the media was sure to affect the head coach he had just hired.
In fact, a few months later, Rosenberg confessed to several U-M employers his feelings about the athletic director. His comment to one was typical when he said, “word for word, that he hated Bill Martin because he’d lied to him, and he was going to get him run out of his job.”
The faster Rodriguez failed, many reasoned, the sooner Martin would have to leave, too. To this faction, Rodriguez was just collateral damage—and so were the players.
* * *
Some started leaving immediately. But it turns out the departures might not have been as spontaneous as they first appeared.
After Rodriguez’s press conference accepting the Michigan job on Monday, December 17, he flew back to Morgantown to close out his business there. Before he returned a few days later, Lloyd Carr suddenly called a team meeting for his players in the team room on either Tuesday or Wednesday morning. According to five players there, Carr told them he knew some had come to Ann Arbor to play for him, and some to play for Michigan. “But,” he said, “you’re here to play for Michigan.”
“Of course,” one player said, “every coach has to say that.”
But not every departing coach has to say what Carr said next. He told them he wanted them all to be happy, and he recognized not everyone would want to go through the coaching change to come. So, he said, if any of them wanted to transfer, he would sign the form, since it requires a player’s current coach’s signature.
On its face, it seems like a simple, generous offer to look out for people he cared about—and, in fairness, that was probably part of his motive. (Carr did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.) But it was also interpreted by many of the players as a vote of no confidence in his successor before Rodriguez had conducted a single team meeting, a single workout, a single practice, yelled or sworn at a single player, or coached a single game. It was an invitation from Carr, someone they knew, admired, and looked to for direction—the man who had recruited them and promised their parents he would look out for them like a father—to execute a preemptive bailout, to transfer, to jump to the NFL, or simply to not come back for a fifth year.
Certainly that’s how Michigan’s former director of compliance, Judy Van Horn, read the gesture. When former director of operations Scott Draper called over to Compliance as soon as the players left the meeting—to give them a heads-up that a line of players might be asking for their transfer papers in a few minutes, and that Carr was prepared to sign all of them—the compliance officer alerted Van Horn. She told Martin of Carr’s offer and said, “Bill, we just can’t let this happen. It could be a mass exodus.”
Van Horn then called Rodriguez. As Van Horn recalled, “Rich said, ‘If a player wants to go, I don’t want to make him stay. But I don’t want Michigan to give any player a release until I’ve had a chance to talk with him.’”
That seemed fair, even generous, but Van Horn called the Big Ten office to make sure it would not be a violation of league rules. The Big Ten assured her Rodriguez’s request was allowable, because he was not keeping anyone from transferring who wanted to. Satisfied, Van Horn passed on Rodriguez’s response to Scott Draper, who replied, “But Lloyd won’t like that.” The day raised more questions than answers, but no one questioned Draper’s devotion to Carr. (Draper declined to be interviewed.)
Carr’s feelings aside, that was the policy created that day: Any player who wanted to transfer could do so, provided they talked with the new coach first. But even that low bar was too high for some players, including Ryan Mallett, who only spoke with Rodriguez on the phone before leaving Ann Arbor.
* * *
There are about three dozen people who worked directly for both Carr and Rodriguez and know them well. Almost every single one of them told me, at one point, “Lloyd never liked Rich.”
In many ways, their styles could not be more different. Carr came across as professorial, while Rodriguez was more comfortable as a good ol’ boy. Carr was very private, even closed off. Rodriguez was open and outgoing. As early as the Capital One Bowl, one athletic department staffer observed, “If those two were driving across the country together and couldn’t talk about family or football, they wouldn’t have anything to say to each other for three thousand miles.”
Carr was also no fan of the spread offense, which had tormented his team many times. In the last few years of Carr’s tenure, he and his staff sponsored a fantasy camp to benefit the children’s hospital. In 2007, a camper asked one of Carr’s assistants if they would learn about the spread offense. “The spread offense?” the assistant spat. “That’s Communist football!”
Whatever friction might have existed between the two, it is simply impossible to square Carr’s making an unsolicited call to Rich Rodriguez to sell him on Michigan, and telling Bill Martin that Rodriguez might be a good candidate, followed almost immediately by his offer to help any of his players transfer. It’s even harder to square those actions with his new role as Michigan’s associate athletic director, whose job it is to protect and promote the Michigan athletic department, football above all.
* * *
When Rodriguez returned to West Virginia to pack up his office and persuade his assistant coaches to join him, all of them seemed ready to go, but they were still curious to see who would succeed Rodriguez as the Mountaineers’ next head coach. Rodriguez had recommended offensive coordinator Calvin Magee for the post, even though he wanted Magee
to lead his offense in Ann Arbor.
“He was ready,” Rodriguez said, “and you can’t deny him his chance.” But when an administrator told Magee the West Virginia fans might not accept an African-American head coach, Magee decided not to press the issue.
“If that was the case,” Magee told me, “I figure it’s better to know it and move on than wait around for something that’s never going to happen.”
Though disappointed for his friend, Rodriguez was relieved to have Magee on board. Ditto Jeff Casteel, who had taken a shaky defense and turned it into one of the nation’s ten best in 2007, earning the national Defensive Coordinator of the Year award for his efforts.
Casteel used the 3-3-5—the defensive answer to Rodriguez’s spread option offense—which emphasizes speed over size, putting fast, versatile players in space and letting them attack. Like the spread option, the 3-3-5 has its critics, who say it won’t work in the Big Ten. But Rodriguez, as usual, wasn’t listening to the critics. Besides, he and Casteel worked well together, and their approach to the players was in sync.
Casteel was that rarest of college coaches: content. He cares only about family and football, and in West Virginia he had everything he wanted, including a trailer on a lake where he took his family after home games. He seemed to have no particular desire for wealth, fame, or a bigger stage.
But he knew his next boss could jeopardize his private paradise. Head coaches have strong personalities, and if they don’t mesh, you’re in for a rough ride. Given the choices, Casteel’s best chance to preserve most of what he had was to follow Rodriguez to Michigan—and that’s what he decided to do.
“Here’s the big thing that most people don’t know,” said Rodriguez’s eventual director of football operations, Mike Parrish, in 2011. “Casteel already had a Michigan cell phone. He was getting ready to go.”
Rodriguez tried to retain all his assistants, save one: Bill Stewart, whom Rodriguez had inherited as the quarterback coach until Rodriguez brought in Rod Smith in 2007, moving Stewart to tight ends. Perhaps for that reason West Virginia named Stewart the interim coach for the Fiesta Bowl game against third-ranked Oklahoma, the Big 12 champion. After the ninth-ranked Mountaineers pulled off the upset 48–28, West Virginia surprised almost everyone by tapping Stewart to be the permanent head coach. As a result, the West Virginia staff would have to decide: stay with Bill or leave with Rich.
Many fans recall that when Nick Saban left Michigan State for LSU, not one assistant went with him. “That was my greatest fear,” Rodriguez said, “and an even greater fear for Rita. She loved those guys and knew how important they were to our team—and to me.”
So after Rodriguez came to Ann Arbor, he sent a plane back to Morgantown to get his assistants. Who was going to get on? How many?
A couple of hours later, Magee called Rodriguez and said, “We’re ready to go. The plane’s full, and we’ve got two cars trailing us filled with the strength coaches.”
Rodriguez let out a sigh of relief—then decided to have a little fun. He called Rita and told her, “Calvin said no one is on the plane but him.”
Rodriguez planned to drag it out, but Rita was so distraught he didn’t have the heart to keep the gag going. “Naw, honey, I’m just kidding ya! It’s full. Everyone’s coming with us.”
“Don’t you ever do that to me again!”
“Honey, I don’t ever want another chance.”
But one coach did not get on that plane: Jeff Casteel.
Stewart made a play for almost all of Rodriguez’s assistants, including Rod Smith, who turned him down to accept less money, a smaller role, and no contract to coach the quarterbacks at Michigan—which is exactly what Michigan expects.
However, when Stewart offered Casteel $275,000 and, more important, a two-year contract, it looked pretty good compared to Michigan’s offer: $265,000 and no contract at all. Casteel decided to stay put.
“If they don’t hire Stewart,” Parrish said in 2011, “Jeff Casteel comes to Michigan.”
And if Casteel had joined Rodriguez’s staff?
Parrish didn’t hesitate: “It would have been completely different.”
If Rodriguez came close to batting a thousand on hiring, even with one vital miss, he didn’t fare as well when it came to firing.
On Thursday, December 20, Rodriguez asked to meet with everyone—from coordinators to clerical workers—in the team room. He explained that, like any new coach, he had autonomy over hiring, and he had people in mind for most of the coaching positions, but he was willing to talk with anyone who wanted to stay. (In the football business, many new coaches simply clean house before they even meet.)
He told them he would be in the commons—which also serves as the team’s second-floor dining hall—and would stay for as long as people wanted to talk.
There is no easy way to complete such a chore, but it’s fair to say that, despite good intentions, Rodriguez didn’t make any new friends that day. Rodriguez kept all the trainers, equipment managers, video staffers, and secretaries, plus running backs coach Fred Jackson and, at Carr’s urging, operations men Scott Draper and Brad Labadie.
All told, Rodriguez kept far more of Carr’s employees than he let go. The assistant coaches knew they would be leaving and simply wanted to get on with their lives with their dignity intact.
But that was not the day’s lasting memory. Instead of setting up individual appointments, they ended up lined up outside the commons, with some of them sitting on the floor waiting for hours, which did not go over well with a group of men who had won Big Ten titles as players and coaches. When they finally did see Rodriguez, at least two were unimpressed with his lack of eye contact and sincerity.
“The conversation was hollow,” former assistant coach Steve Szabo said. “I didn’t think he was up-front. I don’t think he had any intention of keeping any of us. I can understand that—everyone brings in his own guys—but I wish he’d just said that. He was trying to be nice, but I’d rather he’d be flat honest.”
Any labor lawyer can tell you it’s not firing employees that generates lawsuits but the way you fire them. And this was not handled well—creating another layer of well-connected insiders who would have no love for Rodriguez, no mixed feelings if he failed, and no hesitation about spreading their views on the matter.
Mike Gittleson, who’d been Michigan’s strength and conditioning coach for thirty years, was one of those who felt bitter about the transition, but the fault was not all Rodriguez’s.
The coaches were terminated immediately, and lost all benefits except health, which they kept for sixty days—though it is not uncommon elsewhere for even fired coaches and staffers to get benefits and severance pay for much longer.
None of this was communicated directly by Martin, who never met with the staff, but a third party. “They give you a box and say, ‘Clean your offices out,’” Szabo recalled. “It was in some ways shocking. I was offended by the way we were treated.
“As much as we disliked the way Rodriguez talked to us, he had nothing to do with that whatsoever. Bill Martin was ultimately responsible for the mechanics of the way we were treated, the dismissal. There were a lot of quality, hardworking coaches there. We were knocking on the door of a national title in 2006, and came back from a bad start in 2007 to knock off the defending national champions.
“But that’s not how we were treated. That didn’t sit well with anyone. We all resented the way it was handled. The whole thing was just really sad.”
Strength coach Mike Barwis planned to name the new weight room after Gittleson—until reports started coming in every week of Gittleson bad-mouthing Rodriguez, Barwis, and his staff around town, at clinics around the country, and even to reporters, recruits, and current players. Of all the disaffected former staffers, no one, it seemed, was more eager to castigate the new coaches than Mike Gittleson.
* * *
Coach Carr’s final season might have started on the worst note in the history of Michigan f
ootball, but it ended on one of the best.
In the 2008 Capital One Bowl, played in Orlando on New Year’s Day, Las Vegas oddsmakers calculated that the twelfth-ranked returning national champion Florida Gators would beat Carr’s unranked 8–4 Wolverines by double digits.
But the Wolverines, healthy for the first time since the opener, upset the Gators 41–35. The most memorable play of the game occurred after the game, when the seniors—who hadn’t beaten Ohio State or a bowl opponent until that game—lifted their coach onto their shoulders and carried him across the field.
Sure, the Capital One Bowl has all the tradition of … well, a credit card company, but it was the best departure by a Michigan coach since Fritz Crisler’s players lifted him up after his 49–0 Rose Bowl victory over USC to cap an undefeated national title season exactly sixty years earlier.
Back in Schembechler Hall, Rodriguez was stumbling out of the gate. On Tuesday, January 8, 2008, the day after his entire staff had moved in, Rodriguez walked into the team room to address the Wolverines for the first time. He said all the right things, and the introduction was well received. “They all stood up and cheered,” Parrish recalls, “wildly. I mean, loud.”
But a key group was missing: the outgoing seniors. There was a logic to this. Rodriguez would not be coaching them, of course, which is why most coaches excuse the seniors a few minutes into their last team meeting. Rodriguez hadn’t coached that senior class, barely knew them, and—while they were not barred from attending the meeting—he made little attempt to connect with them on their way out, thank them for their contributions, or ask for their support.
Not reaching out to them generated unnecessary ill will among a powerful class that included four-year starting quarterback Chad Henne, Michigan all-time leading rusher Mike Hart, and future number one NFL draft pick Jake Long. Tough guys, good guys, great leaders, and soon-to-be graduates—the very embodiment of the Michigan ideal. They were not the kind of people to spend their time and energy bad-mouthing the new coach. But they could have been the kind of true-blue Michigan Men Rodriguez sorely needed to be ambassadors to the former players and the public. Instead, Rodriguez lost them from the start.
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