Three and Out

by John U. Bacon

  On Notre Dame’s next possession, Jimmy Clausen hit Golden Tate for their third touchdown in the first 10 minutes. It marked the most points Michigan had ever given up in a quarter in 129 years of varsity football.

  After all seemed lost, the Wolverines settled down, scoring three times to cut Notre Dame’s halftime lead to a slightly less ghastly 28–17.

  Michigan had reason to be optimistic. The bad news was pretty simple: Unforced turnovers and Notre Dame’s 60-yard pass play accounted for three of Notre Dame’s four touchdowns, but the Wolverines seemed to be getting the better of them on most plays. Threet had passed for 116 yards, little Sam McGuffie had already compiled 132 yards rushing, and the team had notched 16 first downs—all higher totals than the Wolverines had produced in the first halves of their first two games. The coaches were convinced if they could just hold on to the ball, they might leave South Bend with a surprise. The players felt it, too.

  “Plenty of time, men, plenty of time!”

  “We got this!”

  Michigan’s director of football operations, Brad Labadie, popped his head into the cramped coaches’ room and said, “Storm will be here soon, Coach. Supposed to last about an hour.”

  “Well, all right,” Rodriguez said. “Can’t drop the ball any more than we already have, can we?” He paused and asked again: “Can we?”

  Jon Falk spread the word. “Sticky gloves, men! Sticky gloves!”

  If the Wolverines could stop Notre Dame on its opening possession, then march down for a touchdown, they would be within a field goal. From there, they believed, their conditioning would take over.

  Out in the players’ room, offensive line coach Greg Frey assured his charges, “Those guys are dead-ass tired. Whatever you’re feeling, they’re feeling worse! This is why you did all that work—make ’em pay!”

  On Notre Dame’s first possession, Michigan’s defense got the ball back, and the Wolverines soon found themselves with a first and goal from the 5. They called a play for Kevin Grady, a highly coveted recruit from East Grand Rapids—but the Irish gang-tackled him, the ball popped loose, and the Irish fell on it at the 7.

  The third quarter ended with the score stuck at 28–17.

  Then the rains came—and kept coming.

  With the sky so dark that they turned the floodlights on, Michigan began to drive, pushing the ball to midfield. But when Threet called for the shotgun snap, it slipped right through his hands and bounced off his chest, then off the grass. The Notre Dame linebacker Brian Smith scooped it right up without breaking stride and lugged it all the way to the end zone.

  Michigan 17, Notre Dame 35.

  On Michigan’s next possession, Rodriguez put Nick Sheridan back in; Sheridan drove the offense down to Notre Dame’s 3-yard line.

  “It was still a long shot,” Rodriguez said afterward in the locker room. “But hell, get into the end zone here, get 2, and you’re down by 10. Who knows?” That is what the spread offense was designed for, after all: the endless two-minute drill. But Sheridan dropped back and threw one right at their linebacker, and that was it.

  “The worst part?” Rodriguez said days later, after he had cooled down. “We gave them 28 of their 35 points—I mean, gave them—and the other seven came off a 60-yard pass we never should have allowed. We fumbled the ball six times, lost four of them, and gave them an interception deep in the red zone. That’s five turnovers, three in their red zone and two in ours. There’s your 35 points right there. A giveaway!”

  That was enough to drive any coach crazy. But not as crazy as seeing some of your players, in the last minute of a tough loss to an archrival, standing behind your bench, giggling. Exactly what they were laughing at, Rodriguez hardly cared.

  The players jogged back to the locker room through the darkness, the rain, and the mud about as miserable as could be, but Rodriguez was so upset he cut through them all and got to the locker room first. He stormed straight to the coaches’ room, where his anger boiled over. He hit the metal chairs, banged the chalkboard, and knocked over a trash can. At first he was alone, but after the players got in, his rampage spilled over to their locker room, too.

  “DAMN IT!”

  He slammed their lockers and kicked over the Gatorade jug—which got everyone standing still, wide-eyed, too scared to move—before he finally spoke.

  “We’re losing the goddamned game, getting our asses kicked, and we’ve got two guys laughing over there on the sidelines,” he shouted. “LAUGHING! We’ve got seventy guys out there busting their butts, right up to the very end, and a few guys who think it’s funny.”

  There are times every head coach has to act angry to get his players’ attention. But this was no act. Rodriguez was white-hot mad.

  But he was not out of control. The last thing he needed was to lose his team after two losses, and he had enough sense, even in the heat of the moment, to know that most of the players, if not all, were working hard.

  “Now everyone else is going to dump on you—the media, the fair-weather fans, whoever—but I’m not going to leave you. I know how hard you’ve worked. Those folks haven’t seen it. They haven’t been at your workouts, your practices. They’ve got no idea. But I do. And I’ll defend you. But I’ll be goddamned if we give away another game like that!”

  All that was left to do was shower in silence, get on the bus, and endure a three-hour ride that would feel like a day. But before Rodriguez left the coaches’ room, he took one more look at that old play scribbled on the wall.

  He knew exactly how that poor bastard had felt.

  10 CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES

  Just as Rodriguez had warned them, the Wolverines took it like a piñata for a solid week. But Michigan had the next Saturday off, which was probably a good thing for all involved.

  When the players returned to Schembechler Hall, they had shaken off the defeat and its aftereffects. They were fresh and ready to work, putting in their best week of practice to that point.

  Rodriguez was pleased—and relieved to see them bounce back—but he still had the nagging feeling they were missing something, a certain joie de vivre. Maybe it was because they stood at an uncharacteristic 1–2 for the second year in a row and had ninth-ranked Wisconsin coming to the Big House that Saturday. The Badgers were not just the highest-rated team in the league, they were widely considered to be the Big Ten’s best chance—maybe its only chance—to win a national title.

  Fresh or not, Michigan’s players knew ending the weekend at 1–3 was a very real possibility. The seniors who had endured the 7–5 season in 2005, and the ignoble start to the 2007 season, couldn’t be blamed for dreading the onslaught of criticism they’d face if they lost to the Badgers.

  “I don’t get the feeling they really believe we’re going to win,” Rodriguez told me that week. “They’re intense, but they’ve got no swagger. We’re not having any fun.”

  When Gary Barnett addressed his Northwestern team before their opening game against heavily favored Notre Dame in 1995, the Wildcats hadn’t won in South Bend in thirty-four years. Barnett believed they could. But did his players?

  Right after their bus pulled up to Notre Dame Stadium, he told them not to carry him off the field when they won. Not if—when. It was a great bit of motivation—and it worked. The Wildcats beat Notre Dame 17–15 that day, the first step in a magical journey that ended in Pasadena.

  “Well, that’s what I want to do,” Rodriguez said, pondering the story. “Plant the seed that maybe, just maybe, we could win this one.”

  On Thursday, Rodriguez decided it was time to lighten things up. “I want some spirit!” he said in the coaches’ meeting that morning. “I want some fight!”

  Under Rodriguez, Michigan ended each practice with one play for the offense and one for the defense, just as Schembechler had done for years. The offense was supposed to throw a last-second game-winning touchdown pass, and when it was the defense’s turn, it was supposed to knock down a would-be game winner.

  On th
is Thursday, however, after each of those last two plays, Rodriguez wanted them to jump up and down, storm the field, and generally act like they’d just won the Rose Bowl. But when they did it, Rodriguez wasn’t satisfied.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “That’s not it, men.”

  They didn’t display half the enthusiasm he had wanted, so they did it again. Once more, however, their celebration fell short.

  “Hold up! Hold up! Hold up!” he yelled. “You’re not celebrating like you just won some big game. The way you’re acting, you look like you just won a scrimmage! So we’re going to do it again!”

  The third time was a little better but not quite the charm. So Rodriguez blew the whistle one more time and gathered the players around him.

  “Okay, now you just won a nonconference game—maybe,” he said. “But it wasn’t any Big Ten game. And it sure as hell wasn’t anything like the way you’ll be dancing when you beat the ninth-ranked, first-place Wisconsin Badgers on Saturday! So we’re going to do it again. And damn it, we’re going to keep doing it until you guys learn to celebrate like a Michigan team should.”

  He knew that last threat would get them, because if there’s one thing college players want more than anything else, it’s for practice to end.

  “All right, this is it! Last play of the game! We’re beating Wisconsin by two points, they’ve got three seconds left, and the crowd is going crazy. But the Badgers got the ball, and you know what they’re going to do. Hail Mary! Here it comes! Let’s go—hike the ball—and be ready!”

  The quarterback dropped back and heaved a bomb. But the defensive backs were in perfect position and knocked the pass to the turf. Normally that would be enough, but on this day it was just the first step. The question remained: Would the players celebrate with enough enthusiasm to satisfy their coach—and get to go home?

  They started jumping up and down, doing chest bumps, and screaming and yelling like madmen. The guys on the sidelines came charging onto the field like they were being chased by lions. Mike Massey grabbed the first-down marker and started thrusting it up and down over his head like he was a member of some football tribe initiating a war dance with his shield. Mike Shaw got on his knees and banged the turf with his fists like he was crying. Toney Clemons sprayed water on his teammates as if it were an explosive bottle of champagne, while others high-stepped up and down the field like drum majors.

  Rodriguez got into it, too, hooting and hollering and chest-bumping everyone in sight.

  They kept it up for a solid two minutes, when Rodriguez finally blew the whistle, signaling the players to get in two lines and slap hands the way they do after each practice. Everyone was still belly laughing.

  “Now, men, that is how a Michigan team celebrates a great win!” Rodriguez said. “Don’t forget it!” Not all the players were “all in” for Rodriguez, but on that day it sure looked like it. And a big win could make a convert out of almost anyone.

  * * *

  In the first half of the Wisconsin game, however, the Wolverines didn’t give themselves or their fans much to cheer about. How bad were they? They took only twenty snaps on offense the entire half. They gained a grand total of 21 yards on offense—with minus 7 yards passing. They would have been better off telling Threet to take a knee on every play.

  That’s not a joke. They got exactly one first down—one—and that play ended with a fumble, one of four turnovers that half.

  The Wolverines all but gave Wisconsin 19 points. The Badgers’ defense was on the field so rarely that their players broke into the Gatorade and oranges not out of hunger but boredom. They had the first half off.

  The day marked the five hundredth game in Michigan Stadium, and in all those games, the Wolverines had never come back from so far down, not even in Carr’s record-breaking debut. They didn’t seem likely to on this day, either.

  When the Wolverines ran up the tunnel at halftime, the Michigan fans gave it to them, and good. One veteran said it was the loudest booing he’d heard since Oregon tagged Michigan 39–7 the year before—and that, he said, was the loudest he’d ever heard. “Honestly,” he muttered, “I don’t know if we’re going to win a league game all year.”

  When the Wolverines ran up the tunnel, they heard the Badgers yelling, “Take a shower, Blue! Ball game’s over. Take a shower!”

  In the locker room, Terrance Taylor, a senior defensive lineman, yelled at his teammates, “You guys aren’t playing like you give a damn! This is it for the seniors. We don’t have another shot at the Big Ten title. This is our last chance! It’s up to you, offense! How ya gonna respond?”

  No one yelled back.

  But Rodriguez didn’t rant and rave, not even in the privacy of the coaches’ locker room. He didn’t make a lot of changes, either. “Our strategy wasn’t the problem,” he said later. “Hell, maybe it’d be easier if it was. You could fix it, then.”

  He had enough experience with rocky transitions to recognize what he could start changing immediately and what could be improved only over time. And he didn’t share Taylor’s view that they didn’t care.

  “The strange thing was, no matter how bad we’d played, no matter how bad we looked, and no matter how loud the fans booed us, our effort was good,” he said the next day, after he’d seen the tape a few times. “It was our execution that was lousy. No, we just had to get in a rhythm. Give Threet something he can execute, get his confidence back, and get a little momentum going.”

  Before they ran back onto the field, Rodriguez said in a calm voice, “Now look, I’m not gonna pull your chain. That first half right there—well, hell, we just couldn’t play any worse. But despite all that, we’re only down 19–0. Could be a lot worse. Should be a lot worse! They had to settle for four field goals in the red zone. That’s got to tick ’em off a little. Our defense is playing their asses off!

  “We’re not going to make many adjustments, because that’s not our problem right now. The only change we’re going to make is this: Whenever we have a run-pass check, we’re going to give the tailback the ball and run it. That’s it. Everything else stays the same. Got it?

  “Now, maybe some of you aren’t sure if we can get back in this game. And I know the fans don’t think so. No one likes being booed. But you had to notice one thing: None of them left. They ain’t leaving! So somewhere in there, they still believe. And we do, too.”

  The next day in his office, he said, “Every game you learn something about your team. And I knew I was about to learn a lot about mine—one way or the other.”

  And they were about to learn something about him: The man could coach.

  * * *

  Michigan opened the second half with the ball, but stalled at their own 43. On fourth-and-1, Rodriguez figured they didn’t have much to lose, so he decided to go for it—knowing that if they failed, the cement on their 1-and-3 record would start drying. There wouldn’t be any need to celebrate that. But tailback Kevin Grady, fresh from a crucial red-zone fumble against Notre Dame, made Rodriguez look smart by busting through Wisconsin’s beefy defensive line for 5 yards.

  They stalled again at the Badgers’ 26. On third-and-10, Threet found freshman tight end Kevin Koger in the end zone for Michigan’s first points of the day. Michigan had been horrible to that point, but the scoreboard said 19–7. They weren’t dead yet.

  The coaches’ decision to simplify Threet’s play list had a great effect. Instead of looking lost, confused, and hesitant, he seemed calm, cool, and in control, throwing a series of short, quick strikes all the way down the field. Pop, pop, pop! He suddenly looked like a world beater.

  With the Michigan fans on their feet for the second time all day—and the first to cheer instead of boo—Threet handed off to Brandon Minor, who busted through the Badgers’ line for a 34-yard dash to the end zone. 19–14. The Big House went berserk, and the Badgers started feeling the heat. On their next offensive play, quarterback Allan Evridge dropped back and fired one over the middle—but Michigan’s cornerb
ack, Donovan Warren, read the play perfectly and got a hand on the ball just enough to tip it into the air for linebacker John Thompson to jump up and catch it.

  An entourage of eight Wolverines seemed to materialize out of nowhere to escort the less-than-speedy Thompson down the field. No Badger could get within five feet of him. Thompson lumbered 25 yards to the end zone, and by the time he got there, the crowd was so loud that the coaches up in the press box could not be heard through their headsets.

  After Michigan’s defense, feeding off the crowd’s energy, stopped Wisconsin again, Threet took off on an awkward 58-yard run, and McGuffie finished the job.

  Michigan 27, Wisconsin 19.

  The Badgers finally came back to life with a touchdown—their first points of the half—and then lined up for a two-point conversion to tie the game at 27. They made it, but an official saw that they had lined up illegally and had the guts to make the correct call. On Wisconsin’s do-over, Michigan stopped them, and then held on for a 27–25 victory to complete the biggest comeback in the five-hundred-game history of the Big House.

  The celebration that followed almost equaled their rampage after Thursday’s practice.

  Almost.

  Unbeknownst to the fans, Rodriguez’s crazy prediction had paid off, and his stunt worked like a charm.

  “In all my years of coaching,” Rodriguez told them back in the locker room, getting a little choked up, “I’ve never been more proud of a team than I am of you guys today.”

  It felt like he’d won them over. Winning, of course, solved a lot of problems, but perhaps this one more than most. And maybe, just maybe, Rodriguez might skip the first two stages of Bowden’s four-step progression and start winning close.

  11 WHILE THEY WERE MAKING OTHER PLANS

  The 2–2 Wolverines would likely be heavy underdogs against high-flying Penn State and Ohio State—both of whom were in the hunt for BCS bowls—but they still had lowly Toledo and Purdue ahead of them, and winnable games against middle-of-the-pack Illinois, Michigan State, Minnesota, and Northwestern. Six wins seemed conservative.