“After sixty minutes,” he barked, “they will understand that when you play Michigan, you better put on a little extra tape, you better tie your cleats a little tighter, and you better put a little more air in your helmet—and strap it on!
“NOW LET’S GO!”
“YEAH!”
The coaches and players gathered at the opening of the tunnel, the collection of helmets looking like a swarm of bees from above. That was all it took for the biggest crowd in the country to stand and start cheering. Rodriguez turned back to his new troops and yelled, “Let’s go!” sending them storming out toward the banner, their ears pounding with thunderous cheers.
Stages don’t come any bigger.
* * *
After Michigan’s defense recovered a fumble at its own 26-yard line, the offense calmly moved the ball downfield. With first-and-goal from the 10-yard line, Sheridan took the shotgun snap, rolled out, found freshman tailback Michael Shaw open in the flats, and tossed him the ball. From there, Shaw had no trouble zipping into the end zone for the first touchdown of the Rich Rod era, just 3:40 into his first season. 7–0, Michigan.
It’s fashionable to say Michigan fans are quieter than most, but not after that play. The place erupted.
On Michigan’s following possessions, the offense stalled, and stalled again. Sheridan, with too much new information to sort through on every play, struggled to get his passes off fast enough, and when he did, they were frequently off the mark.
Rodriguez wasn’t surprised, or alarmed. He’d been through it four times before, and he expected some bugs with his offense. But he didn’t expect the Utes to have such an easy time against Michigan’s defense, which boasted nine returning starters. When the Wolverines ran up the tunnel for halftime of Rodriguez’s debut game, they were already down 22–10.
Falk met them just inside the door, barking at each player who passed: “Let’s go, Blue! Second half, team! Second half, team!”
The players were yelling and whooping, getting pumped up as soon as they got back into the room.
“We’ve worked too hard for this!”
“This is it, seniors!”
“Everything you’ve got—now!”
But in the coaches’ room, it was all business. They had just seen these players perform in a real game for the first time, and they had a lot of raw data to sift through. They started going over their play sheets and stat sheets and working the dry-erase boards.
“We need to stop their offense, and fast,” Rodriguez said, “because our defense is about to pass out. It’s hot as hell out there.” With the temperature in the mid-eighties, it was at least ten degrees hotter on the field, thanks to the black rubber pellets in the FieldTurf.
Rod Smith said, “The Nick we’re seeing today isn’t the Nick we saw all spring. No rhythm. No confidence. Let’s keep him in there for another series and see how he looks. If he hasn’t got it, let’s put Steve in there.”
Rodriguez nodded grimly, probably the way the Titanic captain did when informed of the size of the iceberg they’d just scraped. Like that captain, Rodriguez didn’t need his assistant to spell out what the news meant. If you were trying to run the spread option without a confident field general, you were in deep trouble.
Rodriguez looked at the digital clock, which read 8:32. “Let’s go.”
The offensive coaches fanned out to talk to their position groups, while Scott Shafer, the new defensive coordinator Rodriguez hired from Stanford, addressed his defense in front of a big whiteboard.
With a few minutes to go, Rodriguez addressed the team again: “They’re not doing anything that we can’t fix. Nothing special. No gettin’ our heads down.
“We play sixty minutes of football here at Michigan. That’s what we do. That’s why Barwis worked your asses off all year.
“We’re going to kick off, we’re going to pin their asses back deep in their own territory, and then we’re going to get the ball back and score. That’s it.
“Sixty minutes of Michigan football. Let’s go!”
Michigan kicked off, shut the Utes down, and got the ball back, just like Rodriguez had said they would. Trusting his instincts, he spontaneously decided to put Steve Threet in. But Threet didn’t get much traction, either, and on the Utes’ next possession they kicked a field goal to go up 25–10. When Michigan finally got a drive going, it ended when tailback Brandon Minor committed Michigan’s third fumble of the day.
Rodriguez was trying to be calm and patient with his players—not his strengths, he would be the first to tell you—but he couldn’t contain himself. “DAMN IT! We are KILLING ourselves!” he yelled at Minor and the other tailbacks. “Hang on to the ball, high and tight, every time!”
They needed a break. And with just nine minutes left in the game, still down 25–10, they got it. Walk-on sophomore Mark Moundros—a special teams madman—rushed Utah’s punter, blocked the ball, and smothered it deep in Utah territory.
Rodriguez decided to press their advantage immediately, calling for a pass to Junior Hemingway. Threet threw a perfect ball, and Hemingway took it straight in. Utah 25, Michigan 17. Rodriguez, the players, and the crowd were reborn. “Now we got a game!”
On the Utes’ next possession, the refreshed defense chased quarterback Brian Johnson around the backfield when sophomore lineman Adam Patterson knocked the ball out of Johnson’s hand. A few plays later, freshman tailback Sam McGuffie ran it in.
Utah 25, Michigan 23, with 6:26 left in the game.
Once again, Rodriguez didn’t hesitate: “Let’s go for two, right now.”
For those who knew their Michigan football history—a group that included just about everyone in the stadium that day—the moment harkened back to Lloyd Carr’s 1995 debut. Just three months after he’d been named interim head coach, the Wolverines fell behind 17–0—a greater margin than Michigan had ever overcome—and it looked like Carr’s next job title could be former interim coach. But the Wolverines capped the comeback on the last play of the game with a lob to Mercury Hayes in the corner of the end zone. The Wolverines won their next four games, and by the eleventh week Michigan removed Carr’s interim status.
Thirteen years later, Threet rolled out, scanned the end zone, and saw Toney Clemons wide open, gliding underneath the goal posts. “He’s there!” Rodriguez shouted. “Throw it! THROW IT!”
But unlike the seasoned Scott Dreisbach in 1995, the untested Threet hesitated. He pulled the trigger a beat late and threw off his back foot, causing the ball to float high and behind Clemons. No chance.
Six minutes later, Rodriguez was 0–1 as Michigan’s head coach—but the crowd cheered anyway.
In January 2011, offensive tackle Elliott Mealer said, “If we beat Utah that first game—it’s hard to put it all on one game—but I think things would have been different.”
It might sound a little crazy, but Mealer knows that in college football, more than perhaps any other sport, momentum breeds momentum, something Utah proved after narrowly escaping the Big House, then running the table that season, capped by beating Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.
Likewise, if Threet had hit the open Clemons in the end zone to tie the game, it’s not hard to imagine the Wolverines scoring on their next drive, then pressing on to beat at least Toledo and Purdue, which would have been good enough to keep Michigan’s bowl streak alive and most detractors at bay.
But the losing started on day one, and so did the doubting. The factions that wanted the heads of Rodriguez or Martin—or both—all received a small gift that day.
The players jogged up the tunnel to the locker room, where they met Falk standing behind one of the big laundry carts. No motivational messages after a loss.
“Turn your helmets in and keep moving! Get inside! Turn your helmets in and keep moving. Hustle up!”
The only sound in the locker room was that of helmets crashing on helmets in those bins. Rodriguez stepped on a leg machine in the center of the room and told them to take a knee. They
weren’t happy—there was no chatting or laughing—but they weren’t crushed, either. The dominant emotion was uncertainty—about their team, themselves, and their new coaches. Rodriguez sought to dispel some of that.
“That was a tough loss, but you guys didn’t quit,” he said. “We just got beat, and that hurts. It’s supposed to hurt! If it doesn’t hurt, you don’t belong at Michigan.
“The coaches have got to do a better job of getting you ready, and that starts with me. No one points a finger. No one. We win as a team, we lose as a team. We’ll all take the blame today.
“I promise you this: I will not leave your side, or your back.
“You’ve got to understand something: I’ve been here before, and I can assure you, we’re going to be okay. Got that? No heads down. We’ll be okay. See you tomorrow.”
Back in the coaches’ room, seven coaches sat in their chairs with their heads down, every one of them. No one said a word.
Dave Ablauf, Michigan’s sports information director for football, handed Rodriguez some stat sheets. After a quick glance, Rodriguez whipped them against the wall above his desk. “DAMN IT!” he shouted, then knocked over his metal folding chair.
He believed what he had told the players: They would be okay.
But a loss is still a loss, and for the kid from Grant Town, it always hurt.
9 WOKEN UP BY THE ECHOES
When the digital clock in the staff room hit eleven o’clock the next morning, the start time for their postgame meeting, Rodriguez still hadn’t walked through the door from his adjoining office. It was unheard-of for a man who was early for everything and expected everyone else to be, too. The assistants knew something was up.
“Who’s he talking to?”
“Tate,” Rod Smith said. He didn’t have to say any more.
Rodriguez’s disappointing debut had kept him up most of the night watching tape and writing down observations. Nothing new there. He had enough perspective to realize his team wouldn’t be setting college football on fire his first season, anyway.
His staff had worked hard to secure commitments from four-star defensive linemen Pearlie Graves out of Tulsa and DeQuinta Jones from Louisiana, and quarterback Shavodrick Beaver out of Dallas, to commit to Michigan in April. But the coaches were convinced that Tate Forcier, who had just turned eighteen three weeks earlier, could be the guy to lead them to the promised land.
“If you have the right guy running the spread, it’s damn hard to stop,” Rodriguez said. “But if you don’t, you’re going to struggle.”
Forcier would have enough credits to graduate from high school in December, so he could enroll in January. And that meant he could be working out with Barwis, learning the offense, and be ready to compete for the job the next fall.
When Rodriguez finally entered the coaches’ room at 11:12, he was in a much better mood than his coaches expected.
“So?” offensive coordinator Cal Magee asked.
Rodriguez tried to keep his poker face, but he couldn’t. “He committed.” When you’re 0–1, coaching a team weakened by graduation, NFL jumpers, and transfers, you could probably not be blamed for fantasizing about the future. Everyone in that room believed the most important piece of that puzzle had just fallen into place.
* * *
Rodriguez won his first game at Michigan the next week over Miami of Ohio, 16–6. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the monkey off Michigan’s back and put a painted game ball on Rodriguez’s shelf, right below the famous helmets.
Next up: Notre Dame. Heading into this classic contest between the two teams with the most wins in the history of college football, Michigan still held a commanding 869–824 advantage, but the race for the highest all-time winning percentage was closer. Notre Dame had led Michigan for eighty-four years until the Wolverines took a razor-thin lead in 2004. At times the difference was a ten-thousandth of a point, but as of that week Michigan’s all-time winning percentage stood at .738, with Notre Dame at .736, close enough to take back the lead by the end of the season.
Adding to the intrigue, Notre Dame head coach Charlie Weis’s job seemed to be in jeopardy—adding to the instability going back a decade. When the Fighting Irish fired Bob Davies in 2001, the Irish offered the post to George O’Leary, but rescinded it when they discovered he had fudged his résumé. They hired Tyrone Willingham instead, and fired him after just three seasons in late 2004. Utah’s Urban Meyer, named after a pope, turned down what was once his dream job to take over at Florida. Finally, they hired Weis from the New England Patriots, though he had never been a head college coach. He arrived with great fanfare, declaring that Notre Dame would have a “decided schematic advantage” thanks to his work as the Patriots’ offensive coordinator.
With Willingham’s players, Weis’s first team jumped out to a 9–3 record, earning him 2005 Coach of the Year honors—and, in midseason, a ten-year extension worth a reported $30–40 million.
In 2006, the Irish finished 10–3. But once quarterback Brady Quinn graduated, the Irish suffered through a faith-shaking 3–9 season—marking the first time Notre Dame had ever lost nine games. Even more embarrassing, the Irish offense finished third from last in school history in points per game—not exactly the decided schematic advantage he had been promising. Besides a healthy helping of Schadenfreude, what many Michigan fans took from Notre Dame’s demise was a cautionary tale. “We’re in danger,” they often wrote on the blogs, “of becoming Notre Dame.”
For the Wolverines, few things feel better than beating Notre Dame. For Rodriguez, beating the Irish in South Bend, which Michigan had done only four times since the rivalry resumed in 1978, would go a long way to establishing him as the worthy successor to all the greats who’d come before.
The night before the game, Rodriguez addressed his team in a banquet room at the South Bend Marriott. He started by warning them yet again of the heavy rains expected the next day, then showed them a clip of Weis and his players taking shots at Michigan.
When the tape finished, Rodriguez said, “They don’t like us. Weis has popped his mouth off and a few of their players have, too. That’s fine. They talk about the Golden Dome and Touchdown Jesus and all those national championship banners. That’s fine, too. But let me tell you right now: It wouldn’t matter if the pope himself came down and blessed every one of them. From what I know, the pope doesn’t coach football!” That got a good laugh. “It’s us against them, no one else.”
They reviewed a PowerPoint presentation highlighting Rodriguez’s “Keys to Victory,” then he turned his attention back to his players.
“Now, look. If I have to worry about motivating Michigan football players to get ready to play Notre Dame, then I’m coaching at the wrong school, and you’re at the wrong place.”
Whenever he addressed his players, it was striking how well he grasped Michigan tradition, relied on it, and broadcast it to his troops better than he ever did to the public.
“I hope you guys aren’t listening to anyone outside out of our circle,” he said. “Some of this stuff you might not understand for years—even I don’t understand it all right now—but we’ll get a lot of answers in tomorrow’s game.
“One thing I have figured out is that the guys in this program have a lot of pride. So you have to take it personally when they say, ‘We can’t wait to play Michigan!’ That bothers me. And I bet that bothers you, too.”
Rodriguez finished with a classic coaching tactic: the assumptive victory. “I visualize walking across the field after we kick their asses and shaking the fat boy’s hand and saying, ‘We can’t wait to see you again in 365 days.’
“Get your rest. We’ll see you in the morning.”
* * *
The Wolverines got off the bus, carrying their bags and wearing their iPod headphones, navy blue nylon Adidas sweats, and stern expressions, and walked through the stadium’s tall black iron gates.
If they had kept walking straight, they would have gone right down the tunnel unde
r Notre Dame’s huge national championship banners—running from 1924 to 1988, eleven in all, same as Michigan, with both schools claiming 1947—all the way to the grass field.
Instead, they cut just to the left of the ramp and then turned left at the wall, walking past a small brass plaque identifying the room: VISITORS LOCKER, 1101.
When they walked through the wooden door they entered one of the oldest locker rooms in the country, and it looks like it. Framed by yellow brick walls, a low ceiling, and textured windows protected by iron grilles, the place feels like a vintage Catholic high school locker room.
In the right corner, there’s another big wooden door, through which the assistants found their locker room, a cramped little space with old gray metal lockers lining the walls and a few rusty folding chairs. The only thing that’s changed since Michigan’s Fritz Crisler coached here in 1942 is the addition of fluorescent lighting and a dry-erase board. That’s it.
But when Rodriguez turned right again and squeezed through a tiny passageway to an even smaller room—maybe eight by eight—he’d found the place where the head coach gets dressed, replete with two metal lockers and two additional rusty chairs.
Now, when he turned his head toward the little room’s only uncovered wall, a six-foot-wide slab of gray-painted brick, he noticed some hieroglyphics drawn in blue. When he looked a little closer, he realized it was some kind of play, an “iso,” probably drawn by a desperate coach years ago. And, knowing Notre Dame’s record in this place, 299–95–5 at the time, it probably failed.
Standing there, squinting at this play, he probably couldn’t help but feel he was looking at the final words of a climber caught in a cave on a failed attempt at Mount Everest, who knew he was going to die there.
If you were not careful, this place could get to you.
* * *
Three hours later, under ominously dark clouds, the Irish chose to kick, which proved to be a wise move. During that week’s practices, when it had been relentlessly sunny, Rodriguez had the student managers hose down the footballs and dunk them in tubs of water to simulate game conditions, but it wasn’t enough. Just a few minutes into the game, Michigan fumbled two kickoffs and a pitch-out to fall behind 14–0.
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