Three and Out

by John U. Bacon

  Greg Robinson told his defense, “You guys stepped up big-time right there!”

  Michigan got the ball back on its own 43-yard line with 2:13 left and two time-outs in its pocket. On first down, Forcier’s quick toss to Greg Mathews gained 9 yards. It was especially gratifying for Rodriguez, because Mathews was one of the current players who had spoken to the media. He had been urged by Toney Clemons, who had transferred to Colorado, to join a three-way call with him and ESPN’s Joe Schad. After the story broke, Mathews went directly to Rodriguez’s office to confess and apologize. Rodriguez thanked him for his honesty and assured him all was forgiven.

  On first-and-10 from Notre Dame’s 28—within field goal range, on a good day—Forcier hit LaTerryal Savoy for 6 yards, but Savoy couldn’t get out of bounds, forcing Michigan to spend its third and final time-out. Without Weis’s help, that play probably would have marked the end of the game.

  On the next play, Forcier scrambled back and forth with the Irish in hot pursuit. A sack that far back, with no time-outs, would either have put Michigan out of field goal range or out of time, or both. The coaches were unanimous: “Throw it away! Throw it away!”

  But the confident freshman had other ideas. He eluded the tacklers and fired the ball on the run to Savoy on the left sideline. Savoy clamped it down and got out of bounds at the 5.

  “That’s one of those Tate plays,” Rod Smith said, “where you say, ‘No no no no no NO! YES!’”

  At that point, down 34–31, some coaches might have lost their nerve and taken the field goal and the momentum into overtime. But not Rodriguez. On second down, Forcier rolled to his left, saw the recently repentant Mathews running right to left along the goal line with a defender right behind him, and threw the ball exactly where it needed to be so the defender couldn’t touch it but Mathews could catch it in stride. Mathews made the catch and glided into the end zone.

  His teammates mobbed him, the players on the sidelines leaped for joy, and, thanks to the skyboxes going up, the crowd’s cheer might just have been the loudest noise ever heard in the Big House.

  Forcier had covered 57 yards in nine plays in 2:02. The spread offense at its best.

  Michigan had earned the 38–34 victory—and the respect of the college football world.

  The student section was a sea of arms. The players jammed “number one” fingers into the air, with Rodriguez getting mobbed in the middle of it all. When he took the Michigan job, this is surely what he had in mind.

  Back in the locker room, a few dignitaries gathered to greet them, including Rick Leach, Bill Dufek, Jamie Morris, LaMarr Woodley, and George Lilja. A few other alums, however, who had been suspected of feeding the Free Press, also lurked in the hallways, perhaps as cover. One insider asked, “Where will those guys be if we start losing?”

  Rodriguez led the players in singing “The Victors” before telling them, “I’m damn proud of you men. Damn proud. But that’s just one game on the road back to redemption. So remember, stay humble, and stay hungry.”

  “YES, SIR!”

  “Here’s a story worth writing,” Rodriguez told the press afterward. “They have four five-star players on their team, and we’ve got Jordan Kovacs, who joined the team when school started. He tries out with the general student body in the spring, and here he is, playing safety against Notre Dame. To me, that’s something special.”

  “Did you feel sorry for Charlie Weis and Notre Dame?”

  Rodriguez smiled. “Do you think they’d feel sorry for us? Their linemen are so much bigger than ours, they could eat peanuts off our linemen’s heads.”

  He added, reflexively, “The tradition of this program cannot be beat.”

  * * *

  With the sun setting as they left the stadium, Rodriguez did not seek a bar or even a fancy Main Street restaurant, just the quiet of his home, family, and friends, a few pizzas, a couple cold ones—a Coke Zero, that is, and a bottled water—and the USC–Ohio State game on the kitchen TV. He sat watching on a stool, with a freshly socked foot on the counter.

  “These two hours,” he said, “are like gold. You don’t have to think about the game you just played, and you don’t have to worry about the one coming up next.

  “You can watch some other poor bastard be miserable.”

  If the win over Western offered salvation, the upset of eighteenth-ranked Notre Dame sparked a celebration: The Wolverines were back.

  The AP pollsters put them in the Top Twenty-five—just barely, at number twenty-five itself.

  In his second college game, Tate Forcier created 310 yards of total offense, five touchdowns, and completed 6-for-7 passes on the final 55-yard drive. The Big Ten named him the Offensive Player of the Week.

  ESPN’s veteran college football writer Ivan Maisel wrote, “This was Michigan’s answer to the charge that coach Rich Rodriguez wiped his feet on the 20-hour-per-week rule. This was the Wolverines’ reply to former teammate Justin Boren, the offensive lineman who transferred to Ohio State, and all the other players and onlookers who believe that Rodriguez is turning Michigan into something it isn’t … With a freshman quarterback too goofy to be nervous, and a few well-placed seniors throughout the lineup, Michigan stunned No. 18 Notre Dame 38–34 in one of the most exciting games ever played in one of the sport’s great rivalries.”

  Jamie Foxx, Rodriguez’s new friend from the Chicago steak house, sent him a text via the Adidas rep: “Tell coach congrats on the win.”

  20 COCKROACHES

  The Wolverines had taken two big steps back to respectability, but they were still a young team—for the second year in a row, they had only fourteen scholarship seniors—and more prone than most to getting too high or too low. It would be too easy, Rodriguez knew, for his impressionable players to believe their clippings, get big heads, and look past their lowly cross-county competition, the Eastern Michigan Eagles, who reside just a few miles down Washtenaw Avenue but a lot farther down the rankings. Sports Illustrated put them at 114 out of 120 in its preseason listing.

  That would be a big mistake. The Eagles had just lost a close one 27–24 at Northwestern, a team that had won four of the last twelve games against Michigan. Further, EMU was coached by Ron English, Carr’s defensive coordinator in 2006 and 2007, who had applied to succeed him.

  For those given to conspiracy theories—and, thanks to the Free Press report, there were growing numbers of them in the department—this game marked the highlight of the season. Many of these detectives traced a link from English to Jim Stapleton, a Michigan alum and EMU trustee who made his living making business deals. Stapleton is also a public figure who often writes editorials for regional publications. In them, he frequently mentions his status as a former student athlete at Michigan. Although Stapleton was also a private critic of Martin’s and a public friend of Rosenberg’s, just about everything beyond that was subject to conjecture and rumor.

  But, in many ways, it would have been much better for Rodriguez and his program if someone actually had proof of sabotage, which they could then address directly. Instead, Rodriguez had to work under a cloud of suspicion—about which he could do almost nothing. But he knew that if they lost this game, that cloud would produce a severe storm.

  * * *

  In front of his team, Rodriguez never mentioned any of their detractors by name or spelled out what they were doing, instead referring to them collectively as “cockroaches.” Because, he explained, they were cowards who came out only when it was dark. But when the lights were on, they scurried for cover. And the best way to keep the lights on, of course, was to win football games.

  “Now, can you hear that?” Rodriguez put his hand to his ear, from the podium of the team room before Monday’s practice. He had a mischievous grin. “Know what that is? That’s all them cockroaches … silenced. Two weeks ago all those cockroaches were sniping at us, talking behind our backs about how bad you are and how bad your coaches are and all this doom and gloom.

  “Now, I’ve got my p
iss a little hot for the folks right across the street at EMU. I know you know some of their players and some of their coaches. But some of those coaches were across the street talking trash about our team, our coaches, and what’s going on at Schembechler Hall.

  “Now, I’ll play nice, but on Saturday they better know: If you want to talk trash about this program, you better show up and back it up. Because your ass is coming to the Big House. And that’s our house.”

  He paused to gaze about the room, making eye contact with the players, left to right. They were leaning forward, alert and alive.

  “I can see you’re hungry. Big-time. And if you ain’t hungry I’m gonna starve your ass the rest of the week!”

  That got a good laugh.

  “Like I said, you got your respect back, but just as fast as you got it back, you can lose it. If you run down that tunnel like you did last week—boy, those guys across the street are in for something. And I can’t wait.

  “The cockroaches are out there, men, but we ain’t gonna let ’em get to us. Keep working, stick together, and we’re gonna keep the lights on.”

  The coaches had shielded their players from a lot of the stirrings outside Schembechler Hall, but the players spent far more time online than their coaches did, and unlike their coaches, who simply drove from home to Schembechler Hall and back every day, the players were on campus and around town, talking to classmates, dealing with the public. They knew what the buzz was.

  At the team dinner that night, receiver LaTerryal Savoy, a kind and thoughtful young man, said, “It was just crazy to hear the stuff that was going on,” referring to the Free Press. “Took me by surprise, because we’re playing by the rules.”

  Sophomore center David Molk picked up where Savoy left off. “All the shady characters are gone,” he said, plowing into his dinner. “Mass extermination. It’s weird how close we are as a team now, almost eerie. No outsiders. No cliques. Everyone’s in sync.”

  “I think in the next couple years they’re going to win a national championship,” Moosman concluded. “And if Molk doesn’t,” he said, nodding to his dinner partner, “I’m going to kick his ass.”

  * * *

  It was a week to savor. Or it would have been, if the school wasn’t Michigan, and the coach wasn’t Rich Rodriguez.

  In the second quarter of the Irish game, Notre Dame’s Eric Olsen had knocked Jonas Mouton down with a clean hit, then leaned over him to rub it in after the play had ended. Mouton responded by shoving the heel of his right hand against Olsen’s chin and face mask. The referee saw the entire exchange and told both players to settle down, which seemed about right. It was, in short, nothing.

  But Weis had apparently complained to the press and Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany. By Thursday, right before practice, Delany’s office let Rodriguez know they would be imposing some form of disciplinary action against Mouton. They didn’t say what, but if they ruled for a game suspension, it was too late to prepare to start someone else. Mouton had been practicing on the first team all week.

  “You lost to a bunch of freshmen, Charlie,” Rodriguez said to his assistants over dinner. “Just admit it! Instead of crying about some nonpunch.”

  The next day Rodriguez woke up to find still more bad news on his doorstep: the Detroit News, this time, printed its own front-page story, whose headline U-M COACHES BORROWED FROM ATHLETIC DIRECTOR’S BANK ran over a large color photo of Rodriguez’s home.

  “Michigan football coach Rich Rodriguez and seven of his assistants have received $3.3 million in mortgages and lines of credit from the bank founded by U-M athletic director Bill Martin, records show.

  “The disclosures raise questions about whether Martin can be objective about the coaches’ performance at U-M when their dismissal could affect their ability to repay the bank.”

  Martin, with his tin ear for public relations, made matters worse when he told the paper, “‘Now that I know, I don’t like it necessarily,’ he said. ‘When you don’t know, you don’t have a conflict.’”

  The Detroit News reporters did a good job looking at all sides of the story, however. They sought out a “recognized expert on conflicts of interest” at Carnegie Mellon University, who said, “In the scheme of conflicts of interest, this doesn’t seem that major.”

  Nonetheless, it was another front-page story calling Rodriguez’s integrity into question, and it reinforced the sense that he and his staff were under siege and that nothing was off-limits.

  It was certainly feasible that everybody within the department was “all in,” and the local media was simply on an enterprising streak. But on a deeper level, it really didn’t matter if anyone was leaking to the press or not. The mere possibility made everyone a suspect and got everyone in the department gossiping about who the leakers might be—and that’s enough to break down the bonds of trust that keep any organization healthy and disease-free. The endless stories sorely tested the immune system of the athletic department.

  The banking story might not have been the worst news of the day.

  A little after lunchtime that Friday, Rodriguez got word that the Big Ten was going to suspend Mouton for one game—the next day’s—so Rodriguez called Delany.

  “You’re caving to the press,” Rodriguez told him.

  “No, no, this has got nothing to do with that. We just need to do what’s right for the league.”

  “What’s right for the league? When Joe Tiller called me a snake-oil salesman, I don’t recall you rushing to protect the league’s honor then.”

  Then Rodriguez lit the fuse on a little bomb that would blow up later. “And I’ll tell you something else: I’m going to be watching every Big Ten game from now on, and the next time I see a six-inch jab, you’re going to hear about it.’”

  In another context, from another man, such a statement would be taken for what it was: an idle threat from an aggrieved coach just blowing off steam. But from Rich Rodriguez in 2009, it would have repercussions.

  It was the head coach’s job to defend his players, his team, and his program. But when Rodriguez did it, he struck some as petulant, defensive, or just plain passing the buck. But if he didn’t take a stand, who would?

  Countless Michigan veterans told me that if Canham were still the AD, there would never have been a Free Press feature, an NCAA investigation, or even a Big Ten suspension for Mouton. Any internal saboteurs would know they would be discovered and fired, and the NCAA and Big Ten would trust Canham to handle his department himself. He would call them, tell them the situation, and assure them he had it under control. And the media loved him—a relationship lubricated by his famous Friday night pregame parties at his company’s office down on State Street.

  Martin did not know how to intervene on behalf of his coach, instead emitting gaffes about how, if they went 3–9 again, he and Rodriguez would be posting For Sale signs in their lawns—just the kind of statement opposing coaches loved to use against Michigan in recruiting.

  The power vacuum was filled by the university’s lawyers and public relations people. They almost always advised Rodriguez to keep quiet and let them handle it. Which, all too often, was tantamount to advising him to disregard the fact that someone was pissing on his leg. Among the lessons Rodriguez had taken with him from Grant Town, following such advice wasn’t among them. But out of respect for Michigan, he usually went along—and just as often regretted it.

  Rodriguez knew he would have to tell Mouton that night that he would not be playing against Eastern, and he also knew Mouton’s mom had already bought a plane ticket to watch him play.

  Rodriguez put his feet on his desk, waved the air, and concluded, “Shit.”

  In the locker room before the game, Dan Ewald relaxed outside Big Jon Falk’s stadium equipment room. Ewald is a well-respected, mild-mannered former Detroit newspaper writer turned Detroit Tigers public relations man turned author, who cowrote one of Schembechler’s books, Michigan Memories, and was working with Falk on his memoirs. “In all my
years,” he said, “I have never seen anything in the Michigan media like what’s been going on the last year. There were so many holes in [the Free Press’s] piece, I’m surprised it could hold ink.

  “You have to wonder if there’s an agenda there for all this to happen.”

  The theme continued up in the press box, where Bruce Madej pulled me into a little-known utility room filled with ladders and pipes. He clearly had something he wanted to get off his chest but couldn’t say publicly. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told me, marking the third time that day I’d heard someone express that thought. “I’ve never seen such a good guy take so much shit. And it’s endless.

  “The Mouton shit—Jesus! How does Weis get to override the Big Ten refs? They saw the play and they were right on it. And if you look at the film you’ll see a Notre Dame guy slug one of our guys in the groin on the same play!

  “And the bank story? Jesus! How does a reporter come up with that one? I’ve got university officials calling me up: ‘Why don’t you tell us this stuff before it hits the papers?’ Because we didn’t know! Who would?

  “This whole thing makes me sick.”

  The “Battle for Washtenaw County” didn’t matter to anyone who couldn’t find Washtenaw Avenue, but insiders knew the stakes.

  * * *

  After Michigan opened the scoring with a field goal, Eastern came right back with a 49-yard drive—occasionally picking on Cissoko, which suggested they had studied the Notre Dame game carefully—that ended in its own field goal to tie the game.

  Michigan countered with an impressive 60-yard drive, capped by Carlos Brown’s 9-yard touchdown run. 10–3 Michigan. But once again, Eastern fought back with a similar drive and tied the game at 10–10. Forcier’s offense countered with another strong touchdown drive: 17–10.