Three and Out

by John U. Bacon

  This problem, at least, was easily solved: stop saying that.

  And that’s exactly what Bill Martin advised him to do. Martin’s subordinates said two negative e-mails were enough for him to reconsider almost anything, and he once stopped by Rodriguez’s office after a tough loss to tell him a regent had complained about his use of the word “ain’t.” So when he received some feedback saying Rodriguez’s “rebuilding” comment had ruffled their feathers, Martin promptly paid another visit. For a man frequently criticized for not helping Rodriguez win over the Wolverines faithful, this time his advice was spot-on. But for some reason, on this point Rodriguez—who as a baby was stubborn enough to hold his breath until he passed out—refused to drop the phrase permanently from his repertoire, angering the Carr crowd every time he said it.

  “Bill says you don’t need to rebuild a program here at Michigan,” Rodriguez told me. “But we do! But I knew from West Virginia never to make any comparisons with the way it was done before—I always tell our players never to say anything we do is better, just different—I didn’t then and I’m not doing that now.”

  Rodriguez sincerely believed this, and he had often bitten his tongue about the state the program was in when he arrived. But he had let slip enough comments that the average fan would disagree with his assessment of his restraint.

  And, as was often the case, the man who suffered for it more than anyone else—albeit all out of proportion to the crime—was Rich Rodriguez.

  If Rodriguez’s trusting nature was his Achilles’ heel in negotiations, his candor was his downfall in public relations. The sealed-lips approach Carr had made famous in the Fort Schembechler era might have been boring, but it rarely generated distracting controversies.

  At the coaches’ meeting the following morning, Rodriguez let himself and his coaches have it. He knew they were in Phase One, he knew they knew they had a very inexperienced offense, and he knew recruiting would be the key. He’d been through it all before. But enough was enough.

  “We just got outworked, outplayed, and outcoached,” he said, sitting at the end of the long meeting table. “Everything. And now we have to get their spirits up. This is getting old!”

  The defense was especially puzzling. The experienced group was supposed to be the strength of the team, but it didn’t seem to be getting better. Rodriguez, who had hired Shafer virtually sight unseen, wasn’t sure what was happening, or wasn’t happening, on that side of the ball—Was it the players? Was it the coaching?—but he would be watching all of it more carefully in the days ahead.

  Rodriguez had also decided they had a better chance to be aggressive with his favored 3-3-5 defense than with the more conventional 4-3-4 that Shafer used, and insisted it be installed for the upcoming game against Purdue.

  But it was more than defensive schemes that were bothering him.

  “Something is fundamentally messed up. This is the eighth game of the damn year, and we’re still doing basic things wrong. Either we’re coaching them to do the wrong things, or we’re letting them do the wrong things. Either way, I’m getting my nose in it. You can call it micromanaging if you want, but if I’ve got to, I’ll get into every damn position.

  “We’re going over every damn play today—offense, defense, and special teams—and I’m going to tell you one more time exactly what I expect from you and your players. There won’t be a lick of doubt when we leave this room today.”

  And that’s exactly what they did. They watched play after play after play, every single one of them. And they didn’t just watch them but went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, stopping, commenting, and correcting each and every one. It took the coaches three hours to finish this grueling exercise, after which they finally escaped into the well-lit hallway, rubbing their eyes like they’d just finished an FBI interrogation.

  A few hours later, Rodriguez gave the team a similar message.

  “Because shit runs downhill, it ran on your coaches today,” he told them in the team room. “I was all over them. And this is something I don’t share with anyone else because it ain’t nobody’s business but ours, but you’ve got to know that everyone is held accountable. Always. And when we’re not doing our jobs the way we should be on the field, your coaches hear about it—and so do I, every day.

  “Everyone’s asking me, ‘You’re 2–6, are you gonna change your approach? Whatya gonna do differently?’

  “Whatya gonna do differently? You guys know me pretty well by now. Whatya think? And the answer is: nothing.”

  Here he was obliquely addressing the frequent criticism that he should have waited until he had the right players before installing the spread. When I asked him about this, he replied, “The players always struggle at first. But if we tried something else, then no one would know what the heck’s going on. Is that better?”

  In fact, the adapt-to-your-talent argument is largely a canard, one rarely made by experienced coaches. Football is now so complicated that just learning a new offensive or defensive system usually takes more than a year, and few coaches are allowed much more than that if they plan on keeping their jobs. So trying to teach your players one system, then the other, is a waste of valuable time and risks confusing your players and possibly your assistants, too. Yes, coaches can adapt their play calling—witness Rodriguez’s shift from running to passing when he went from Jed Drenning at Glenville State to Shaun King at Tulane—but they cannot easily adapt their systems.

  “We’re not going to start having picnics or hit every day,” he continued, “and I ain’t trading you in, either. I’d still rather have you guys than their guys. We’re just going to do what we know how to do like we know how to do it! That’s it!”

  They would have been thrilled to win the next four games, including Ohio State, and get back to a bowl game, but that’s not why Rodriguez was taking this tack. He was a realist about the odds they were facing. What he was insistent on, however, was that they get rid of some bad habits, develop some better ones, and become a better team by 2009. He also wanted to determine which players were all in and which weren’t.

  Of course, Rodriguez had directed this play before. As usual, the older players didn’t like the tougher conditioning regimen or the intensity of the coaching.

  One change none of them liked was the new Sunday schedule. At West Virginia, the players didn’t complain to Rodriguez about coming down for a meeting or weightlifting, then going home for an hour or two off before returning for an evening practice. The upside was getting Mondays off.

  But when Rodriguez brought the same schedule they had followed in Morgantown to Michigan, some of the players grumbled to outsiders about it.

  It was bad scheduling. But as the 2008 season wore on, Rodriguez reduced the Sunday schedule until it was a simple walk-through, and changed it altogether before the 2009 season. But some things weren’t going to change, including the intensity of their new coaches.

  If some of the players found Rodriguez and Barwis shocking, that was true about Bear Bryant at Texas A&M and Alabama, Woody Hayes at Miami and Ohio State, and Bo Schembechler at Michigan. It is the well-worn formula for just about every football movie ever made.

  But, as Rodriguez said in the coaches’ meeting, “something is fundamentally messed up.” He sensed that something was different this time, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

  Rodriguez knew he didn’t have all the seniors. That was typical, too, of this phase and mirrored his first year at West Virginia. But he didn’t realize that many of them were still meeting regularly with associate athletic director Lloyd Carr across the parking lot. You could certainly argue this was normal, even healthy. Most of the seniors had a deep and abiding affection for their former coach, which Carr reciprocated. Depending on what was said, the meetings could very well have been helpful to Rodriguez and the team. But a reasonable inference could be drawn from what Carr was saying on behalf of Rodriguez in public: nothing. With just a handful of brief exce
ptions, he avoided the press, the alums, and the subject altogether.

  The only model Michigan had of welcoming an outsider into the fold was too old for anybody in the building to remember: the transfer of power from Bump Elliott to Bo Schembechler almost forty years earlier. Elliott is an erudite, modest Midwesterner—who happened to be a celebrated All-American—who rarely swore or even yelled, and if you said you were hurt, that was enough for him. Schembechler yelled, screamed, and swore like a sailor. He grabbed your face mask, literally kicked you in the ass, and cracked your backside with a yardstick—and his were special models, twice as thick and four feet long. He also drew a distinction between being “hurt” and being “injured.” The latter was serious and got you medical attention. The former was just pain, and if you missed a practice because of it, you got left in Ann Arbor when the team flew to Minnesota in 1969.

  Needless to say, the players who had come to Michigan to play for Elliott, not this raving madman, were less than enthusiastic. It was the casual attitude of thirty or forty players, mostly walk-ons suddenly walking off, that prompted Schembechler to put up his famous sign, THOSE WHO STAY WILL BE CHAMPIONS.

  But before they were champions, some of them went to see their former coach, Bump Elliott, who had stayed on as the assistant athletic director, to complain about the new guy.

  “If he wanted to,” Schembechler said in Bo’s Lasting Lessons, “Bump could have made life very difficult for me. Hell, he could have set me up for failure. His players loved him, really loved him—and remember, that first year I was coaching all his players. I was an outsider, they didn’t owe me anything, and it wasn’t like I was making life easy for them, either. Bump was a former Michigan All-American, and a whole lot nicer than I was! They could have complained to him—he was still working in the athletic office—and I bet some of them tried, but he would have none of it. He made it clear to everyone that he was on my side.”

  “I didn’t want to talk to them,” Elliott told me in 2011. “That was Bo’s team now. There was no reason for me to be involved in that.” As a result, not many made their way to his door. And once they learned where he stood, they stopped completely. Whatever problems Schembechler had in 1969—and he had plenty—Bump Elliott was not one of them. And that is why, when Michigan beat Ohio State that first year, Schembechler gave the game ball to Elliott—and there was not a dry eye in the room.

  Thirty-nine years later the situation was quite different. When Carr’s former players came to his new office to complain about the Rodriguez regime, Carr was reportedly happy to listen as long as they wanted to talk. But when Rodriguez walked to Carr’s office, which he did at least eight times by his count, to personally invite Carr to speak to the team or just visit practice, Carr declined every time.

  There were rational reasons for Carr to avoid Schembechler Hall, such as ensuring that his successor had the space to do his job without worrying about Carr looking over his shoulder. But declining Rodriguez’s eight personal requests suggests a deeper stubbornness on the subject.

  Likewise, there were plausible explanations why Carr refused to comment publicly on Rodriguez and his staff, including Carr’s naturally private personality and his desire to avoid making any comment that would invariably be scrutinized, parsed, and twisted out of context. But as the months rolled on, during a rocky transition, Carr’s silence became deafening and stood in stark contrast to Schembechler’s repeated public and unequivocal statements in support of Lloyd Carr. Exacerbating matters, most of the players from the Carr era—including a few famous faces—followed his lead.

  Of course, if Rodriguez had started out 6–2 instead of 2–6, the critics would have been a lot quieter and ignored by the masses. Likewise, if Carr hadn’t generated so much well-earned admiration over a distinguished career among Ann Arborites, Michigan Men, and fans, what he said or didn’t say would not have mattered so much, either. But Rodriguez was struggling and Carr was respected, making it easier for many players to follow their former coach than their new one.

  And that, in turn, made it easy for the fault lines the search had created in the Michigan football family to split wider with each loss.

  13 PLAYING FOR PRIDE

  On a picturesque fall Saturday in West Lafayette, Indiana, Michigan’s team buses rolled past a guy in a Michigan jersey standing on a street corner with a sign that said OUR 2–6 TEAM IS BETTER THAN YOUR 2–6 TEAM! That’s what the 2008 season had been reduced to. They were in a dead heat with Purdue for the bottom of the league.

  Michigan busted out to a 14–0 lead just five minutes into the game, then watched Purdue mount its own 62-yard touchdown drive and convert a fumbled punt into another touchdown. And that’s how the game went, with Michigan going up 28–14, falling behind 35–28, then falling behind again, 42–35, before tying the game at 42–42 with just 1:20 left. The offense was working, but the shift from the 4-3-4 to the 3-3-5 defense, at least, could not be deemed a success. The Boilermakers, eager to give their avuncular head coach Joe Tiller a respectable final season—and avenge the “stealing” of Roy Roundtree—mounted another scoring drive.

  With just 34 seconds left and the ball on Michigan’s 32-yard line, Purdue’s Justin Siller dropped back and found Greg Orton in the flats, wide open but facing the wrong way. The Wolverine defenders soon discovered why when Desmond Tardy ran up to Orton, who tossed the ball to him, pulling off a perfect hook and ladder for the 48–42 victory.

  That was it. Any chance the Wolverines had to keep their streaks of forty-one winning seasons and thirty-three bowl games was dust. Back in their locker room, a few of the players banged the metal stalls and knocked over stools.

  The press conference, held in an annex of the locker room, wasn’t much better than the game itself when a Detroit reporter asked, “What’s the problem?”

  Rodriguez was typically candid: “Blocking, tackling, and holding on to the ball.” Then he added, “And that’s coaching. That’s me.”

  He would never make it in politics.

  * * *

  The Wolverines stood at an unheard-of 2–7, heading up to face the 7–2 Minnesota Gophers, and they would enter the game without their starting quarterback, Steven Threet, who was home nursing a concussion suffered during the Purdue game.

  But putting in Threet’s understudy didn’t concern the coaches too much. Threet worked hard and was eager to please, but he had never fixed his odd delivery or gotten much better at running the spread. Nick Sheridan, who looked half-asleep in the quarterback meetings, turned out to be listening the entire time. His goal, after all, was to coach—and if he couldn’t learn, he couldn’t teach. He was also undeniably tough.

  Since the Wolverines had won the Little Brown Jug back in 1909, they had kept it seventy-six of ninety-eight years, merely lending it to Minnesota the other twenty-two. This great imbalance probably explains why, when the Gophers do win the most storied trophy in college football, they give it a seat on the team plane and parade it through every restaurant and bar in the Twin Cities, where patrons actually drink from it. (This is not advised.) But when Michigan keeps the Jug, they just put it back in its box, pack it on the truck, and head on home.

  That latter scenario didn’t seem very likely when they faced off again in 2008. That morning, ESPN conducted a poll to see which team would run up the most points: Ohio State against Northwestern, or Minnesota against Michigan? The viewers voted for Minnesota in the kind of landslide that would have made President Reagan proud.

  What the viewers weren’t seeing, admittedly along with almost everyone in Ann Arbor—coaches and players included—was that Rodriguez’s team wasn’t as bad as its record. Far from good, no question; even genuinely bad; just not as bad. If Rodriguez could take any solace from 2008, it was watching his team “lose close.” Overthrowing a wide-open receiver against Utah. Missing a tying field goal against Toledo. Falling for a last-minute hook-and-ladder play against Purdue. Just a few plays the other way and Rodriguez’s Wolverines coul
d have been 5–4, with plenty to play for in the last three games. It was a tin lining, to be sure, but to the farsighted it suggested there was reason to expect better days weren’t far off.

  The Friday night before the game, the Wolverines gathered, like always, in the banquet room of their hotel. The meeting was scheduled for 8:00, but by now everyone knew the starting time was a myth. The players arrived no later than 7:42. When Rodriguez walked into the room five minutes later, the players shushed each other, and he began his speech.

  “We don’t play these guys for a couple years, so the Brown Jug is going to be in someone’s possession for three years. I think it should be ours.

  “Number one: We must play the game with GREAT PASSION. I don’t understand why anyone would not do that.

  “Number two: WE MUST stick together as a TEAM! The most important people in my eyes are my family and my football team. Outside of that, whatever people say really shouldn’t matter. On campus, in the press, doesn’t matter. Stick together! Everyone wants me to point the finger, and they want you to point the figure. Never gonna happen. Never will.

  “Number three: We MUST enjoy being PART of the TEAM! It’s as simple as having something bigger than yourself to fight for.

  “Think about the opportunities you have to make a statement to the entire country. And you get to make that statement every time you play! You play for Michigan—everyone’s watching! Trust me, if this season has taught me nothing else, it’s that everyone is watching!”

  They all laughed.

  “Starting tomorrow, you seniors can make a statement about your last three games in a Michigan uniform. And you freshmen can make a statement about the future. The future of Michigan football.