Three and Out

by John U. Bacon

  “Never seen nothing like the drama of this place,” he said, and he was including West Virginia in the comparison. “Ridiculous. Someone at this university has to stand up and say, ‘Enough!’ But no one ever does. Everyone just listens and surrenders when we’re right! Why do we always give in to it?”

  His office phone rang. He looked to see who was calling and let it go to voice mail.

  “It’s always ‘Trust me, trust me,’” he continued, searching for something on his desk. “They told me in the interview, ‘You get to Michigan, and you’re gonna be surrounded by great people who’re gonna support you.’ Oh, yeah? Really? Where are they?

  “I want to talk to the regents, directly, and tell them what’s going on.”

  He walked out to his secretary’s desk to sift through a small stack of papers.

  “People who want to support our program only hear about all the bullshit these guys are making up. What about Mark Huyge? Jared Van Slyke? Tim North?” They were, respectively, an engineering student and starting lineman; the son of a baseball star who chose to be a football walk-on; and a great student with a bright future in business. “What about the guys from Pahokee, who never got three meals a day or a practice jersey until they got here? So many good stories aren’t getting told. It grinds you.”

  Madej walked into the office. For him, it all boiled down to a simple idea: “We need Bo,” something all the veterans echoed at some point that weekend. “Bo would say ‘Bam!’ and all this bullshit would be over. I was worried as soon as he died about what would happen. It started with Harbaugh taking a shot at the program when Lloyd was the coach—and now this.”

  Rodriguez sat down at his desk, while Madej looked over his shoulder to work through several drafts of a short press release. But they were at a loss, since they weren’t sure exactly what they were responding to. Ablauf joined them and suggested they also send out a copy of a week of their practice schedule to all the reporters who cover the team, as proof that they were in compliance.

  This is what they finally came up with: “Rich Rodriguez: We know the practice and off-season rules and we stay within the guidelines. We follow the rules and have always been completely committed to being compliant with all NCAA rules.”

  They had no idea if it would do any good. The progress they had made over the previous nine months, culminating in the unrestrained joy and hope of the past twenty-four hours, was in danger of being wiped out by Sunday’s paper.

  16 BAD NEWS ON THE DOORSTEP

  When Rodriguez woke up Sunday morning, this is what he found on his doorstep:

  MICHIGAN FOOTBALL PROGRAM BROKE RULES, PLAYERS SAY

  Rodriguez denies exceeding NCAA time guidelines

  By Michael Rosenberg and Mark Snyder

  Free Press Sports Writers

  The University of Michigan football team consistently has violated NCAA rules governing off-season workouts, in-season demands on players and mandatory summer activities under coach Rich Rodriguez, numerous players told the Free Press.

  Players on the 2008 and 2009 teams described training and practice sessions that far exceeded limits set by the NCAA, which governs college athletics. The restrictions are designed to protect players’ well-being, ensure adequate study time and prevent schools from gaining an unfair competitive advantage.

  The players, who did not want to be identified because they feared repercussions from coaches, said the violations occurred routinely at the direction of Rodriguez’s staff.

  “It’s one of those things where you can’t say something,” one current Wolverine said. “If you say something, they’re going to say you’re a lazy person and don’t want to work hard.”

  That player was one of six current or former players who gave lengthy, detailed and nearly identical descriptions of the program to the Free Press.

  Rosenberg and Snyder stated that Rodriguez and his staff were making their players put in some fifteen to twenty-one hours a week on football during the off season—more than twice the NCAA limit of eight—in an article depicting a head coach exploiting his players for personal gain. The long piece raised more questions than answers, not only about Rodriguez’s program, but also about the Free Press’s motives and sources. But in the short run, none of that mattered.

  Ablauf and company pointed out that the headline and opening paragraph themselves were misleading, because the players interviewed (two of whom—Brandin Hawthorne and Je’Ron Stokes—were freshmen proud of the work they had done) apparently didn’t know the difference between “countable” and “uncountable” hours and were not accusing the coaches of breaking those rules, since they didn’t know what they were. The writers, not the players, were making that charge.

  But as the saying goes, you can’t unring a bell, and the Free Press had banged this one loudly enough to be heard from coast to coast, drowning out any questions or counterpoints for a news cycle or two.

  * * *

  The coaches met for their regular meeting at 11:00 a.m. and got the day’s business behind them before allowing themselves to ruminate on the story making national news as they spoke. Though somewhat shell-shocked, and not yet able to get their heads around the entire piece, they had read enough to poke at the particulars pretty efficiently.

  “These guys are claiming our players go forty-five hours a week,” the normally easygoing Cal Magee said. “Do they even know the fuckin’ rules?”

  In the reporters’ defense, just to cover a small section of this rule, the NCAA needs two pages and thirty-five bullet points. Boiled down, student athletes can spend only eight hours a week on their sports during the off-season, and twenty hours a week during the season. But when you get into which hours count and which don’t, things get blurry fast.

  Under “countable hours,” the NCAA lists eleven core activities, like practice, games, and team meetings. “Uncountable hours” include just about everything else, sixteen items total, including getting taped, receiving physical therapy, eating team meals, and traveling—and, most ill-defined of all, anything deemed “voluntary.”

  How can you tell the difference? Good question. If you write for The Michigan Daily or play in the Michigan Marching Band, you probably should expect to put in extra work if you want to become the editor in chief or the drum major. Does that make it mandatory? Who knows? The NCAA isn’t watching them, of course. But it doesn’t get much easier to determine what’s truly voluntary when you’re talking about a football player who’s dying to start or get to the NFL.

  Even voluntary weight lifting can be tricky. If several strength coaches are in the weight room conducting the session, it’s considered mandatory, and it counts. But if only one strength coach is in the weight room monitoring the players for safety, that’s considered voluntary and does not count. And that’s why Rodriguez always called the strength coaches’ office to make sure the coast was clear before he headed down for his workout.

  Put it all together, and the twenty hours a week the NCAA counts is probably about half the actual time a student athlete puts in every week, in just about any sport.

  Which just underscores the self-evident fact that, for the nineteen-year-old quarterback and the twenty-year-old kicker, on whose arms and legs the $100 million athletic department depends, college football is not merely an adventure. It’s a job.

  But unlike most full-time workers, these guys also have to squeeze in a college education while they’re at it.

  That’s the story the Free Press could have pursued with vigor and balance: the silliness and hypocrisy of the NCAA rules, which give the false impression that the workload for student athletes is half what it really is.

  Before Michigan’s NCAA champion softball coach, Carol Hutchins, and her team play their first home game in April, they make six separate trips south. But none of those hours “count” unless they’re in meetings or in gyms or on the field. Their games—like all games in the NCAA rule book, no matter the sport—count only three hours, even though Hutchins
said, “We get there three hours before the game even starts. That’s how arbitrary the whole thing is. It’s all bogus.”

  How bogus? Consider the Michigan hockey team’s annual trip to play league opponent Alaska-Fairbanks. They leave at 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday and return about 4:00 p.m. on Sunday—a 106-hour trip. While there, they have two one-hour practices, one mandatory twenty-minute skate, and one voluntary twenty-minute skate (which doesn’t count), and two games, which count as three hours each. All told, that 106-hour trip adds up to a mere 8:20 in the NCAA’s eyes—only 97:40 shy of the total trip.

  And that is the difference between countable and uncountable hours.

  Impressively, the hockey team graduated over 90 percent of its players until they started leaving early for the NHL, and the softball team consistently has a team GPA over 3.0. But Hutchins is tired of the NCAA’s hypocrisy, too. “Just tell us the truth,” she said. “If the limit is twenty or thirty or forty hours a week, say so. But make it real.”

  Knowing the NCAA, however—which former Central Collegiate Hockey Association commissioner Bill Beagan called “Vatican West”—don’t hold your breath. Until the NCAA does “make it real,” however, the crux of this rule will always be the distinction between countable and uncountable hours.

  And that was a distinction Rosenberg and Snyder—experienced, hardworking sportswriters with a deep knowledge of Michigan athletics—did not mention once in their three thousand-word package accusing Rodriguez of breaking that very rule.

  “It was in the story at some point,” Rosenberg told me, “but it went through a lot of edits. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. We should have explained that to the readers. [But] for whatever reason, I don’t think that ended up being in the story.”

  To some readers it was a major oversight. To others, it was inside baseball. But to every journalist I’ve discussed this with—including colleagues of Rosenberg and Snyder—it was a jaw-dropping omission, tantamount to accusing General Motors of tax fraud without mentioning the difference between gross revenue and net profit.

  The people sitting around the table had other problems with the piece. “A four-hour workout?” Barwis asked, referring to another claim made in the story. “You’d be dead. Forty-five minutes of running? You’d be dead.”

  I could vouch for both. Two hours with these guys was the rough equivalent of ten hours at your local gym. Barwis did not need to break the rules to get his people in shape, and to prove it, the pro players he worked with—including Morgan Trent—usually finished well under two hours each day, though they were obviously free to work as long as they liked.

  “You guys aren’t doing anything different than they did before,” added a former player.

  In fact, a few veterans said, if the Free Press had talked with people from Carr’s era, they would have found out about “Torture Tuesdays,” when players were punished for missing class (one of the NCAA violations Rodriguez would be accused of) and receiver Antonio Bass and others worked out with the coaches—not the quality control staff—and, significantly, a football before spring ball started (yet another violation Rodriguez would be charged with). Sadly, in the last such practice before spring ball, Bass broke his ankle so badly his foot pointed ninety degrees to the side, and his career was over.

  This is not to say Carr ran a renegade program. Far from it. Though not perfect, he had earned national acclaim for leading one of the cleanest programs in college football. It does suggest, however, that Rodriguez was being held to a standard even his predecessors had not achieved.

  But the article inspired at least one immediate change: That evening, Michigan State removed the piece on its official football website bragging about the fourteen-hour Sundays their players put in to get ready for the season, as a counter to all the attention Barwis’s weight program had been getting that year.

  “I don’t understand,” Rodriguez said, looking more hurt than angry. “When it’s just hearsay and you’ve got no facts, how can you publish this? We just got the highest GPA ever. If they’re overworked, how does that happen?

  “And the two freshmen they quoted, all they said is ‘We work hard.’ No kidding?! Aren’t they supposed to say that? They’re proud! What if they said, ‘This isn’t any harder than high school’? They’d want me fired—and they should!

  “We bust our ass to try to help these kids. That’s what really bothers me. They’ve got more people trying to help them than any other students on campus. We give them tutoring, counseling, strength coaches, trainers—and when you graduate, we take you back, for free, to help you some more. And this is the thanks you get from some of the alums.”

  Although the article did not distinguish between the current and former players, the coaches did, separating the benign quotes of the freshmen from the damaging comments of the anonymous players they suspected were mostly from the 2008 team.

  That brought the subject back around to which former players might have talked to the Free Press. They quickly came up with a list of a half dozen, closely matching the list generated by the administrators in the Champions Center lobby Friday evening. But when they tried to guess who the one or two current players who spoke anonymously might be, Dusty Rutledge cut it off.

  “We can’t even think about that,” he said, ending the speculation. “We have to go on like no one said anything, or else you start suspecting everybody, and your team falls apart.”

  They agreed, and—somewhat surprisingly—there the matter ended. But that still left the question of which, if any, staff helped the writers with the story. That would become one of the most damaging guessing games played in Schembechler Hall that fall.

  The writers’ motives, accuracy, and impact would be debated for over a year, but one thing was beyond debate from the moment the papers dropped on readers’ doorsteps that morning: Thanks to the Detroit Free Press, the team’s water had been poisoned, and the feeling of trust they had worked so hard to establish—what the program was based on, Rodriguez had told the players repeatedly—had been compromised. The Rodriguez program would never again be as strong as it had been the previous Friday afternoon. If the article’s goal was to bring the program down from the inside, it had just struck a load-bearing pillar, making the whole structure shake.

  “In all my years, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Bruce Madej, whose thirty-one years at Michigan covered the Fab Five, Moeller’s last weekend, Bo’s passing, and the Horror. “We always know what to do, even when it’s bad. And this isn’t even bad! It’s nothing! But it’s just one thing after another. It has a completely different feel to it. It’s personal. I feel horrible for Rich. And there’s no framework for how to respond. It’s partly the nature of the new media, but it’s more than that.”

  When Rodriguez left the room for a moment, Fred Jackson said, “I’ve never seen him like this before. I think this is really getting to him. The idea that he wouldn’t be doing the best for his players—that hurts him.”

  As the sole carryover from Carr’s coaching staff, Jackson had known Rodriguez for only twenty months, but he had already seen him face a few bad days—and he was right. Rodriguez had been bruised from all the battles he’d been through over the previous two years, but on this morning, something fundamental in him had changed, like a slat under your bed breaking. You can’t see it, everything looks about the same, but you can hear it, and you can feel the difference every day thereafter.

  The coaches kept up business as usual, meeting with each other and their positions, but there was no ignoring the elephant in the room. During the 12:30 offensive coaches’ meeting, they went over every play, four sheets of them, but Rodriguez was clearly distracted, pressing his eyes closed at times, biting his lip at others.

  Cal Magee was determined to remain positive. “Team meeting’s at four, right?” he asked the other coaches, then added with a chuckle, “I bet they’ll be on time today!”

  But even Magee was affected. “What bothers me is, if these people just k
new our hearts, and how we care about these kids, they’d never believe this stuff. Just amazes me.”

  Outside the meeting room, Rick Leach stopped in Ablauf’s walk-in-closet office, clearly upset. “We all know where this is coming from, do we not?”

  Ablauf tilted his head and shrugged. He’d already decided that that game led only to a dark place, with no final answers.

  When Leach walked into Rodriguez’s office, he gave him a hug and broke down, which finally cracked Rodriguez’s defenses, causing him to break down, too.

  “I’m sorry,” Leach said. “This is not the Michigan I know.”

  That afternoon, Rutledge, who had helped sell Rodriguez on leaving his alma mater for Michigan, walked down to the coach’s office to apologize.

  “What for?” Rodriguez asked.

  “When I told you Michigan was a first-class place, I was wrong.”

  “This can be a great place,” Rodriguez replied. As much as the article hurt him, he was far from abandoning his faith in his decision to come to Michigan. But it was the first time I had heard him say “can be” instead of “is.”

  The two freshmen who had been tricked into speaking for the story on Media Day, Brandin Hawthorne and Je’Ron Stokes, made their own walk down to Rodriguez’s office that afternoon. Of the six “current and former” players quoted in the piece, they were the only ones quoted by name.

  “They came in with tears in their eyes,” Rodriguez said afterward. “I told them, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong. They just misrepresented what you said.’ I had to make sure they knew I wasn’t mad at them.”

  Hawthorne and Stokes made it clear that if the Free Press writers had been up front about the thrust of their story—exploitation and abuse—they would have refuted it, not supported it. Stokes’s dad was particularly upset, telling The Wolverine: “My wife and I talk to Je’Ron every day … I know [the allegations] are not true, because I know how Mike Barwis cares for these kids. He’s taken my son to Bible study and to church. These are the kinds of things that impress us about the program and Rich Rod and his staff. They are good people, and I hate the fact that every negative thing put out there brings the wrong perception to the Michigan program.