Three and Out

by John U. Bacon

  To which Snyder replied, “I just don’t like the guy.”

  On Thursday, Rosenberg visited the Detroit Lions’ facility for Media Day, when Larry Foote—who had left Pittsburgh for his home team that spring—sought him out, asking why he was so harsh to Mike Barwis, among others. Rosenberg confessed that he knew how positively the players felt about Barwis.

  “Then why didn’t you write that?” Foote asked.

  Rosenberg answered by telling Foote how bad his own week had turned out and all the duress he was under. If Rodriguez didn’t deserve to be unfairly attacked—even demonized—Rosenberg obviously didn’t deserve to have his book War as They Knew It dishonestly rated down on Amazon.com. “I poured my heart and soul into that [book] for three years,” he told me. “The shots at me on Amazon.com bothered me. There’s nothing I’ve ever been prouder of than that book—so for them to trash the book really hurt.” Telling all this to Foote, who had considered Rosenberg a friend, Rosenberg became teary-eyed.

  By that time, however, neither response could stop his story from spreading, having generated a momentum all its own.

  18 STARTING OVER

  After the Free Press story, the Wolverines’ already strong need to redeem themselves for the 2008 disaster had been multiplied many times over. They felt both determined and defiant.

  When Rodriguez met with the team the night before the Western Michigan game, he told them, “I’m tired of all the drama, I’m tired of all the talk,” sounding much less upbeat and enthusiastic than he had exactly eight days earlier. “I just want to play ball. And that’s what you came here for: to get a degree and play ball.

  “When people ask, ‘How’s your team handling it?’ I think about you guys walking down the tunnel together, with your hands on each other’s backs. That’s it: We’ve got each other’s backs.”

  He had no choice but to hope it was true and that it would last all season.

  An echo of that was evident in the room shared by true freshman Craig Roh and sophomore Brandon Herron, in and of itself a potentially awkward situation because they were both competing for outside linebacker. The coaches pulled them over after practice that day to tell them Roh had won the position. But the two had worked it out, partly due to a shared interest in the Bible.

  “I’ve been attracted to the psalms lately,” Roh said. “Psalm Twenty-seven is the best one. David’s being attacked from all angles, but God’s his rock.

  “‘The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?’” he recited from memory. “‘When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. Though a host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.’”

  By the time he got to false witnesses rising up and breathing cruelty, I didn’t need to ask him where he stood on the Free Press article.

  The scene was different a floor below, where senior Nick Sheridan—the previous starter—shared his room with Tate Forcier, the freshman who would be taking his job. Forcier wore his trademark oversized baseball hat down low on his head, working on the playbook all the quarterbacks had to fill out every week, while Sheridan reclined on his bed, munching chips, drinking Gatorade, and watching ESPN. He had finished his playbook much earlier.

  Forcier was trying to cram before his final, which he would be taking the next day at the Big House in front of 110,000-some graders. Sheridan was nice enough to help him.

  “On Ram Flex Trojan,” Forcier asked, “what side of the field do I work when the defense comes out with two high?”

  “Is it Trio?”

  Forcier checked. “Yes.”

  “Then you work the weak side,” Sheridan said, while Forcier filled in his answer. “Understand that?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “And then you throw to the open guy who’s wearing the same color jersey you are.”

  “Got it.” Forcier smiled. “Thanks.”

  Was Forcier nervous?

  He looked up and grinned his Tom Sawyer grin. “Never nervous,” he said, and returned to his workbook.

  After a 9:00 a.m. wake-up call and a hearty breakfast consisting of bins of scrambled eggs, bacon and ham, potatoes au gratin, biscuits and gravy, and French toast, the players went through their morning “walk-through”—one room for defense, another for offense. Forcier took his first “snaps” without an actual football, under a chandelier, surrounded by his coaches leaning against textured floral wallpaper, going through his steps on Victorian-style carpet, in a comfortable air-conditioned room. Beyond the cadence, all you could hear was the swish of nylon sweatpants.

  The actual exam room would look a little different.

  * * *

  None of them were surprised that the Free Press had picked Western Michigan to beat the Wolverines 31–27.

  The coaches got dressed at the stadium in dead silence. A few leaned forward on their metal chairs, heads down, as if in prayer. They knew what this game suddenly meant—and they also knew that, at this hour, their collective fate was largely in the hands of a group of former backups and walk-ons and a kid from California who’d just turned nineteen.

  Someone turned on the TV, and inevitably the Michigan game—and everything attached to it—came up on ESPN.

  Former Indiana coach Lee Corso opined, “You can lose some games, but you can’t lose your football team. Rich Rodriguez is about to lose his football team.”

  Out in the locker room, an unlikely leader stepped up: walk-on junior Mark Moundros. “The only thing that matters,” he shouted, “are the people in this room. So today we fight for each other, we fight for our coaches, and we fight for Michigan!”

  When the game finally arrived—where no one mattered but the eleven players on the field—the Wolverines were ready. Michigan’s defense forced the Broncos to punt after three plays, giving the ball to Michigan’s offense at its own 48.

  So here it was: the debut everyone had been waiting nine months to see. Tate Forcier jogged out to the field while the crowd rose to its feet.

  Forcier took the shotgun snap, faked the handoff, rolled out, and found Junior Hemingway for a 5-yard gain. In just about every Michigan game since Schembechler took over, the first play went straight up the middle. But on this day, in this situation, that calm progression of options and execution hit the faithful like a bucket of baptismal water.

  They were reborn—and cheered like it.

  A few plays later, the Broncos flushed Forcier out of the pocket. But, once again, he found Junior Hemingway, this time for 28 yards—and a touchdown.

  Just 2:52 into his collegiate career, Forcier had three completions for 47 yards, with no incompletes, no interceptions, no sacks, and one touchdown—and 109,019 instant believers.

  Just like that, it seemed Michigan’s nightmare was over.

  * * *

  With 4:07 left in the quarter and Michigan holding a 7–0 lead, Rodriguez sent Forcier’s understudy, the talented but raw Denard Robinson, in at quarterback. It was risky, but not much riskier than starting a freshman in the first place. Rodriguez was not yanking Forcier. He just wanted to see what Robinson could do.

  After being penalized for a false start, Robinson dropped the next snap, picked it up, and then took a few steps to the right instead of the left, which is where the play was supposed to go. Recognizing his mistake, he stopped, looked up, and saw that his teammates had already abandoned him, running their routes downfield, leaving him to face a rush of Broncos by himself.

  And then, just as suddenly, he seemed to remember he was the fastest man on the field.

  What happened next was something Michigan fans might long remember. Robinson saw a seam and, from a dead start, simply took off, flying past would-be tacklers as though they were treading water and he was driving a Jet Ski.

  He was as gone as gone could be.

  Michigan 14, Western 0.

  When Robinson ran back to the bench, Forcier
rushed out to the field to meet him for a spontaneous chest bump. “The best thing I saw all day,” a relieved Bill Dufek said afterward.

  They were young, with a lot to learn. But the unbridled joy they brought to this successful but stodgy school was unmistakable. Michigan fans had never seen anything quite like it since Crisler’s Mad Magicians—and it was all encapsulated in that one play.

  The halftime score: Michigan 31, Western 0. It was a good old-fashioned butt kicking.

  During halftime, Forcier was sitting in his stall when Sheridan walked past him, gave him a fist bump, and said, “Good job, man!”

  When I walked past, Forcier said, “I told you, man!”

  I turned around. “Told me what?”

  “Not nervous. Never nervous. I told you!”

  * * *

  On TV, however, the news wasn’t all good for the Wolverines. During the first intermission, ESPN condensed the Free Press’s allegations in a chart:

  • 6 players give allegations

  • Sundays, worked 9 hours

  The chart did not note that most of the nine hours would not count against the NCAA’s limit of twenty. In other words, they were repeating the same mistakes the Free Press had made. The story was already recycling itself.

  When the game ended at 31–7, the team ran over to the student section to sing “The Victors”—the loudest the crowd was all day, which was saying something. But before they started the song, the students started another chant, “Rich Rodri-guez,” and afterward, “Beat the I-rish!”

  When the Wolverines headed toward the tunnel, they ran under an eight-foot sign: IN ROD WE TRUST.

  “Must be my kids behind that,” Rodriguez joked.

  * * *

  The Wolverines packed more into that one wild week than they had in most months. The retreat showed them they were much closer and sharper than they had been the year before. The Free Press piece piled more pressure on them and their coaches, and while it surely shrank their margin of error, it hadn’t affected their play. If they could still win games, they could still escape their detractors.

  Hope was very much alive.

  19 AS GOOD AS IT GETS

  Against Western, the Wolverines had everything to lose.

  Against Notre Dame, they had everything to gain.

  The game came with two side stories: Charlie Weis’s status at Notre Dame, which was more in doubt than ever, and the Wolverines’ almost uniform contempt for the Irish’s flashy quarterback, Jimmy Clausen.

  “I’ve known him since we started going to camps,” Forcier said after practice. “He loved the attention—too much. I don’t like his ego. He’s a pretty boy. Go look at Martin’s locker.”

  Mike Martin had taped up six color photocopies of Jimmy Clausen in various poses: one of him sitting on a helmet with a football in his hands, like a cheesy yearbook pose; another displaying his gaudy rings; and a third of him decked out in a big fur coat, posing with a limo.

  Martin’s engine usually idles pretty low, but he got revved up for Clausen. “He better not be showing up at our place in a stretch limo with some spiked hairdo,” he said, “and expect to get out of here alive.”

  “He represents pretty much everything we don’t want our team to be,” Ryan Van Bergen added. “You can tell someone’s behavior on film. You see him get sacked and he tosses the ball in the guy’s face.

  “Asshole.”

  “Men, the entire country is watching us tomorrow afternoon,” Rodriguez told his team Friday night at the Campus Inn. “That’s just one reason why you came here—games like this.

  “Bottom line, what this game comes down to is respect.

  “And isn’t that what we’re all fighting for right here?”

  A few minutes later, in the room he shared with Martin, Van Bergen observed that the previous season Rodriguez would say, “‘We’ve got guys in here we can win with.’ Now he says, ‘We’ve got guys who will win.’”

  Tate Forcier shared their confidence. “They’re gonna blitz a lot,” he said, studying his playbook in his room. “But as they say, ‘You live by the blitz, you die by the blitz.’”

  Forcier’s world had changed quite a bit since classes had started that week. “I walked into one of my lectures, the professor says my name, and eighty heads turn to look at me. It was awkward.

  “If we win this one, you’ll see a big change, a lot of guys getting on the bandwagon. And we’ll get a lot more respect, nationwide, because people will start thinking Rich Rod is doing something special.”

  For the upperclassmen, like walk-on turned starter Mark Moundros, there was no point pretending. “Every game is big. But this is Notre Dame. We know what we’re capable of. No one came here to be in the middle. That’s what Michigan is—at the top.”

  The next afternoon, the crowd lining the Victors’ Walk was even louder than it had been the previous week. In the coaches’ room, the usual pregame silence was broken by the Central Michigan–Michigan State game on TV, which pitted Rodriguez’s good friend and former assistant coach Butch Jones against the considerably less well-liked Mark Dantonio.

  At the Big Ten luncheon in Chicago a month earlier, Dantonio announced to the thousand or so people in attendance that the Spartans’ rallying cry that year was “Play up!”—play up, that is, to the best competition in the Big Ten, “Penn State and Ohio State,” he said, with no mention of Michigan, which he now apparently considered beneath them.

  Even privately, Dantonio was prickly. At a Chicago steak house the night before that luncheon, the Wolverine contingent coincidentally got seated next to the Buckeye bunch. Jim Tressel could not have been more pleasant, and ditto actor Jamie Foxx, a true sports fan, who was sitting nearby and who engaged Rodriguez in a twenty-minute postdinner conversation. But earlier, when the Michigan folks first arrived, the Spartans brass was—amazingly—at a nearby table, and Dantonio wouldn’t say two words.

  On the day of the Notre Dame game, when Central scored a touchdown with thirty-two seconds left to close the gap to 26–27, the Michigan coaches had no trouble deciding which team to pull for.

  “Gotta go for two!” Tony Dews said, to which new defensive coordinator Greg Robinson—the only other man in the room who’d been a head coach—quietly added, “Easy to say from here.”

  Central missed the two-point conversion but executed a perfect onside kick to set up a chance for a game-winning field goal.

  In the Michigan locker room, the players had taken a knee by the door and wondered what was holding up their coaches.

  “All that work we did, all winter, all summer, that’s money in the bank,” Brandon Graham said. “Well, this is where we spend all that money we saved up. Don’t save a cent.” Then he added, “Damn, this is the longest five minutes of my life!”

  Back in the coaches’ room, they had all gathered to watch Central’s field goal attempt sail just wide. Game over.

  But no. The referee called the Spartans for roughing the kicker. Central’s do-over went straight between the uprights to seal the 29–27 upset.

  “‘Play up’?” Rodriguez asked, recalling Dantonio’s rallying cry. Rodriguez stood and adjusted his cap. “Think you forgot Central, Coach!” He marched out of the room, already pumped up.

  When the coaches finally emerged from their cave, they told the players, “State lost!”

  There was something in the air that day.

  * * *

  When the two head coaches met at midfield before the game, the equally weary Weis shook Rodriguez’s hand and said, “So, are we having fun yet?”

  They both laughed, proving a maxim: Only head coaches can understand what head coaches go through.

  “No kidding,” Rodriguez said. “We’re the mayors of the two drama capitals of the country.”

  Michigan mounted a 79-yard drive to open the scoring 7–0. After a Notre Dame field goal, Darryl Stonum caught the kickoff at the 6, then cut straight up the middle for a 94-yard return. A true gift for the Wolverines an
d a contrast to all the dropped kicks in South Bend a year earlier.

  But Clausen engineered two touchdowns and a field goal to go ahead 20–14, outgaining Michigan 302 yards to 119.

  “They’re kicking the shit out of us!” Dusty Rutledge said on the sidelines. “I mean physically. We’re working hard, but man, it’s seniors versus sophomores out there.”

  On the final drive of the half, however, Michigan took over at its own 30-yard line, where Forcier hit Stonum for 24 yards and Denard Robinson ran for 14. On fourth-and-11, from Notre Dame’s 37, Rodriguez decided to go for it. For all the storms he’d endured over the previous two years, his confidence was clearly intact.

  Forcier rolled out, found Greg Mathews, and connected for a 15-yard play down to Notre Dame’s 22-yard line. Jason Olesnavage lined up for a 39-yard attempt—and hit it, making the score 20–17 at the half.

  “We are in better condition,” Rodriguez told his team before the second half. “This is our half. We’re gonna get the ball first, take it downfield, and stuff it down their throats! Every man, every play!”

  “Time to beat these bastards!” Minor added.

  When the third quarter ended, Michigan had a 24–20 lead, and had compiled 320 yards to Notre Dame’s 329. They were battling the big boys. The team ran down the field, just like Rodriguez had been exhorting them to do for two years, but for the first time they seemed to do it with pleasure.

  The Wolverines finished a 17–0 scoring streak to give them a 31–20 lead in the fourth quarter. It was time for Jimmy Clausen to show if he really was a Heisman candidate after all. He was, masterfully directing two long touchdown drives—picking on cornerback Boubacar Cissoko every chance he had—capped by a perfect Statue of Liberty play, to go ahead 34–31.

  With 3:07 left, Notre Dame took over again on its own 16-yard line. Michigan’s defense had to get a stop, and soon, or it would end there. Everyone on Michigan’s sidelines stood up to cheer them on.

  After gaining a quick first down, Weis inexplicably called for two consecutive pass plays, both incomplete, to set up a fourth-and-10. The man who once claimed his players would enjoy a “decisive schematic advantage” in every game they played was making the kinds of mistakes no self-respecting high school coach would commit.