Three and Out

by John U. Bacon

  “They took and twisted and misconstrued [his quote], when Ronnie was just simply saying he’s doing the regulated hours required by the coaches within the rules.”

  Stokes’s dad was not alone. Many players’ parents called and e-mailed all day, and their sons walked down to Rodriguez’s office by the dozen to let him know how angry they were and wanted to speak out. Mark Ortmann, David Moosman, and even the cool-tempered Nick Sheridan were outraged.

  All but one of the players showed up unannounced: Jared Van Slyke, a walk-on, whom Rodriguez had asked to see a few days earlier. When they kept the appointment, Van Slyke felt compelled to take on the article that had broken that morning. “I wanted him to know we completely disagreed with the whole thing, and we got your back,” he later told me. “And I told him I wasn’t just speaking for myself. That’s how we all feel.”

  Rodriguez was touched, but he had summoned Van Slyke for a completely different reason. Rodriguez wanted him to know he had earned a scholarship for the season. Having been a walk-on himself, Rodriguez loved giving this sort of news. Van Slyke didn’t disappoint. ”I was jacked! I hugged him—and it was cool to see his genuine happiness at my reaction.”

  It was a rare bright spot in an otherwise bleak twenty-four hours.

  They conducted the position meetings right on time, followed by the team meeting at four. Bill Martin, who’d heard about the story Friday night when the Free Press asked him for a comment while he was at the family’s cottage in the Upper Peninsula, flew back in time for the Sunday meeting.

  Rodriguez addressed the story with the team briefly and obliquely and mentioned again how they had achieved the highest grade point average in Michigan’s recorded history—clearly a point of pride. The message was simple: The program is working, and you guys are doing a great job.

  He got choked up a couple times, talking about how much he cared about them and how much he’d seen them grow together, as tight as any team he’d ever coached. He apologized to them for having to go through all this—“You deserve better”—and told them not to worry about it but to focus on football and school.

  “I’m proud of the way you’ve come together,” he said, “and now it’s time to show ’em what we’re made of.

  “Seniors, I’ll meet you at my home, as scheduled.”

  * * *

  The seniors drove ten miles to the Rodriguez home—a small castle south of Saline, to which they had all been before—where Rich and Rita met them at the door. They ate salads and steaks and shrimp and chicken and Miss Rita’s famous nachos, followed by plenty of cheesecake. Then they retired to the basement sunroom facing the pool, where they lounged in chairs and on couches.

  Rodriguez sat on a barstool and gave them a different talk from the one he had planned a few days earlier. Rather than discuss the season ahead and the leadership he needed from this senior class, and ask what they needed from him, he decided to face what everyone was thinking about. If you had to pinpoint the exact minute when the Free Press article started to affect the way Rodriguez coached his team, this would be it.

  Just about any successful college coach knows the team depends on the seniors. They set the example for the players behind them and the tone of the team when the coaches aren’t around, whether it’s off-season workouts or off-campus fun. Rodriguez knew if they were going to repair the damage the article had already inflicted on the team’s morale they had been bolstering every day since the Ohio State game, it would have to start with the seniors, and it would have to start immediately. If he didn’t have them, he wouldn’t have the rest.

  He began by debunking the article’s primary charge. “Claiming we’re breaking the time limits, using anonymous sources—it’s just not true, it’s just not fair.” Then he embraced the two freshmen the Free Press had exploited: “They came into my office to apologize, and they looked like they’d seen a ghost. Man, that’s not right.” That was his way of letting the seniors know there was to be no witch hunt among the players. The two were victims, not traitors, and would have the support of the entire team—reinforcing the basic principle of any team.

  He then reminded the seniors of all they’d accomplished. “You guys do work hard, you do come in on Saturdays, you do do all the things Michigan Men are supposed to do! And they punish you for it!”

  The seniors were nodding. Rodriguez downshifted a bit, lowering his voice and slowing his pace. “What really bothers me is that we care about you guys—a lot.” He paused to collect himself.

  “Mike Barwis—” He could not finish the sentence. He got up and went to the bathroom for a minute or two, then returned, red eyed but more resolute.

  “Mike just wants you guys to get better. Has he ever refused you extra help? He’s got two young kids. I’m sure he’d like to be home, but he works twelve-hour days, at least. Because he knows that’s what it takes.

  “We don’t coach for a living. We live to coach. I want you to know, if you ever have a problem, you can come and see me. I think you do know that, and I have seen some of you.”

  The seniors were still and respectful, with a few wiping some tears of their own. Punter Zoltan Mesko was one of them. “All the guys who didn’t want to work,” he said, “we knew who they were, and they’re gone.”

  “We just need to take care of business,” Kevin Grady said.

  “I can’t wait,” Brandon Graham said with his infectious enthusiasm, eyes alight. “I can’t wait to get started. I can’t wait for Saturday!”

  Probably nothing Rodriguez heard all week made him feel better than that.

  17 MEET THE PRESS

  On ESPN, the announcer mentioned that Michigan had scheduled a press conference for the next day, adding, “Many Lloyd Carr loyalists don’t approve of the fact that Rodriguez is not a Michigan Man. No doubt this just turns up the fire on Rich Rodriguez.”

  No doubt.

  The press conference was actually the first of the regularly scheduled meetings they held every Monday throughout the season. But this one had an entirely different feel to it, with national news trucks filling the parking lot. They had not come to discuss the Broncos of Western Michigan.

  The national newspapers sent a reporter, as did just about every major sports outlet, including ESPN’s Joe Schad. Rosenberg and Snyder made a conspicuous entrance.

  “I think both he and Snyder came in that day with a kind of ‘Hey, look what we did!’ bounce in their step,” recalled one reporter, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. “I remember Snyder walking up to a clump of writers with an expectant look on his face, and everyone just kind of rolled their eyes.”

  The sense among most journalists there, twenty-four hours after the Free Press story ran, was that it was overblown at best and unethical at worst, particularly in regard to the use of the unsuspecting freshmen players.

  “I remember walking into the press conference,” another said, “and the first thing I saw was Mark Snyder and Rosenberg, looking smug—that’s the only word to describe it. We usually all socialized before the press conference, walking around and making small talk, but I remember them sitting by themselves for a while before the presser started. They definitely hadn’t made any friends in the media that day. None of the other reporters wanted much to do with [them].”

  Things would get weirder before the day was done.

  Neither Mary Sue Coleman nor Bill Martin attended, so Bruce Madej went up to the podium to lay out the format. Then Rodriguez rose slowly, wearing a white golf shirt with the block “M” on it, to take the stand.

  “Normally, I don’t bring notes,” he said. “I just kind of speak from the top of my mind. But I have a few notes for obvious reasons. I want to talk the majority of the time about Western Michigan, but obviously we need to address the situation that came out.

  “First and foremost, I want to tell everybody I am very proud of the way our players have worked the last seven, eight months.”

  With this, Rodriguez established that h
e, at least, would not be backing off. He also provided a strong defense of Mike Barwis. “I have complete trust in him, and I think he is absolutely the best strength and conditioning coach in the country.”

  He extended the same support to his entire staff: “We know the rules and we comply by the rules. We have a very transparent program. You guys that follow us know that. You’ve been out to practice several times.”

  Then things veered toward the emotional.

  “I guess the thing that bothered me the most about the things that were recently written or said, or maybe some things in the last eighteen months, is the perception that’s out there that we did not care as much for our players’ welfare, and that is disheartening.”

  At this, Rodriguez choked up, looked down, and clutched the podium. He had to pause before continuing, with forceful deliberation.

  “That is misleading … inaccurate … and goes against everything that I have ever believed in coaching.”

  He spoke of his family attending every practice, his pride in his sixteen years as a head coach helping lots of first-generation college students become great success stories, and his commitment to Michigan.

  “When I have two young freshmen come into my office yesterday upset, saying, ‘Coach, what did I do? What did we do? We just said we worked hard, and it was harder than it was in high school and we were committed to helping win a championship.’ I said, ‘You didn’t do nothing wrong.

  “‘You did nothing wrong.’”

  He paused again to collect himself before stressing the positives of the program and asking, “Why try to tear that up?”

  Then, finally, he got to Western Michigan and questions.

  Drew Sharp, a columnist with the Detroit Free Press, raised his hand. “The fact that you have certain players and their parents willing to basically call out your program, is there a potential disconnect there?”

  “The response from our parents, our current players’ parents, has been overwhelmingly positive … We have an open door, and the parents always know that they can call.”

  They actually discussed football for a bit, before Rodriguez closed by saying, “Our players are working very hard. Our players have done a whole lot to build this program. And so I’m sure they’re not happy to have to deal with this.”

  As usual, the reactions to Rodriguez’s presentation were mixed. He certainly could have done worse—but he could have done better. He did a capable job defending his players and his ethics, but a poor job addressing the Free Press piece itself. He said how hard they worked, which did nothing to weaken the Free Press’s case, but never once mentioned the article’s glaring omission—which all the coaches had immediately pounced on the day before—about the difference between countable and uncountable hours.

  He also could have mentioned the one-sided quality of their anonymous sources. When I asked Rosenberg if they had made any attempt to talk to players with different views, he replied, “Did we keep calling until we got guys to say, ‘Hey, it’s fine?’ No, we didn’t.”

  Although many of the players didn’t know my name or exactly what I was doing, over a dozen sought me out that week to tell me the anonymous players were not speaking for them. Such players were not hard to find. They were hard to avoid.

  Four of them volunteered to speak after Rodriguez left the podium.

  Mark Ortmann talked about the coaches changing their summer practice schedule to accommodate their classes and how “personally, I don’t think we’re working hard enough. We can always improve.”

  “Last year was just a tumultuous time,” offensive guard David Moosman said. “We just think we had a lot of guys—a lot of older guys—having their own agendas … I don’t feel like we have anything like that this year.”

  None of the comments, taken individually, added up to much. But taken together a picture began to emerge of a team determined to stick together and get Michigan back to where it belonged—one with a very different character from the year before.

  Some of the most dramatic moments happened after the cameras turned off.

  When the reporters started packing up, Brian Cook, the founder of MGoBlog, approached Michael Rosenberg and Mark Snyder individually to ask if they knew the difference between countable and uncountable hours.

  Both seemed as surprised by the questioner as they were by the question. Because I was sitting right there, it was easy to record their conversation.

  “I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about that,” Snyder replied.

  “So you just write the article—and that’s it?”

  “I was on radio and TV talking about this,” Snyder said.

  “But you won’t talk to me? I’ve got a direct quote from Brandin Hawthorne saying—”

  “This is not something that I’m addressing with you.”

  During the next few go-rounds, Cook repeated his question about countable and uncountable hours, to which Snyder repeatedly replied, “You’re a competitor,” then ended the interview.

  Cook caught up with Rosenberg on the way out, in the anteroom between the main meeting room and the parking lot. Rosenberg remembered the encounter vividly.

  “A guy comes up to me after the press conference,” he told me, “and starts barking questions at me—practically yelling at me. I’ve never seen him before, to my recollection. He won’t let me speak, always cutting off my sentences.

  “He’s talking about countable hours, and I’m trying to explain to him, ‘Of course we know the difference between countable and uncountable hours, even if the players don’t know the difference. I didn’t catch your name,’ and he just glares at me. He won’t respond. So I reach out my hand and say, ‘I’m Michael Rosenberg.’ He says he’s Brian Cook. But he has no recorder, no pen.”

  Cook recalled the exchange a bit differently. As he remembered it, he asked Rosenberg if he knew the difference between countable and uncountable hours. “He said yes, and so I tried to get him to explain why the words ‘countable hours’ never appear in the article. He just kept asking me what my name was, which was totally irrelevant, as I kept asking him why his article claimed that Michigan was forcing players to spend over twice the allotted daily hours when common sense suggests that cannot possibly be true, that any coach who so brazenly flouted NCAA regulations wouldn’t have lasted seven years anywhere.”

  Cook remembered that it had actually been Craig Ross, a local attorney and author of The Obscene Diaries of a Michigan Fan, watching the exchange with bemused interest, who told Rosenberg who Cook was, “after about the fourth time I asked him if his story made sense.

  “I think we were both right in the end,” Cook told me. “My name is Brian Cook, and Rosenberg did know what countable hours were.”

  If Rosenberg and Snyder expected to be greeted as liberators—fighting for the downtrodden players against their powerful oppressors—they must have left disappointed. But if their goal was to spark a story that would get the entire sports nation buzzing by lunchtime and reverberate for over a year, they had succeeded wildly.

  By day’s end, the story was burning in every direction, with no one in control of it anymore—not Rosenberg, not Rodriguez, not the Free Press, not the University of Michigan.

  When ESPN ran a report later that day, they added a graphic, listing Rodriguez’s problems since leaving Morgantown:

  • Buy out. Michigan paid $2.5 million.

  • Accused of shredding documents.

  • Notable players have left. Mallett, Boren, more.

  • Accused of excessive practice time.

  And nationally, that’s how the story played: New coach takes hallowed Michigan football program from the penthouse to the outhouse in eighteen months.

  Most Michigan fans, however, were more circumspect. The websites blew up with comments, some accusing Rodriguez of ruining Michigan football, but many expressing anger with the Free Press—even on the Free Press’s own site. The e-mail boxes of just about every Michigan administrator and coa
ch with any connection to the case filled up overnight.

  In the weeks that followed, thousands of Michigan alums and fans wrote to Rodriguez, his staff, Bill Martin, and President Coleman professing their support of Rodriguez and his methods—confirming his view of the people he met every day. It didn’t take long for many national commentators, including former Ohio State greats Kirk Herbstreit and Chris Spielman, to conclude that the story was missing some important pieces. Jim Tressel and a few other Big Ten coaches expressed misgivings over the story and support for Rodriguez.

  But the most powerful reaction came from a former Michigan Daily editor named Jonathan Chait, now at The New Republic. Writing for The Wolverine, Chait titled his piece “Violations Truly Worthy of Firing.”

  Chait wasted no time clearing his throat. “Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg’s exposé on Michigan’s workout program revealed a shocking breach of rules that should cause somebody to lose his job. That somebody is Michael Rosenberg’s editor.”

  Chait’s central charge was that Rosenberg, who hated Rodriguez “from the moment he appeared on Michigan’s radar,” had written an opinion piece dressed up as investigative journalism. He obviously had a right to his opinion, Chait wrote, but not to publish “a prosecutor’s brief, determined to make the case against Rodriguez, rather than present the facts in an evenhanded way … Letting him write and report the article himself is journalistic malpractice.”

  I asked Rosenberg about the controversial decision to assign a columnist to write an investigative piece, particularly on a subject about which he had already published strong opinions. He replied that, due to budget and staff cuts, the Free Press no longer had an investigative reporter dedicated to the sports department. So, in the current era, such double duty is harder to avoid.

  But with any journalism, objectivity is paramount. When Larry Foote encountered Mark Snyder after the story came out, he asked, “Why didn’t you ask me about him? You know I know him.”