“We want respect, we’ve gotta go get it,” Van Bergen told his teammates.
“The offense is doing their job,” Stevie Brown said. “We gotta go do ours!”
“C’mon, D!” Kevin Grady told the defense as they were taking the field. “Look at the scoreboard! Let’s knock ’em out.”
They did as Grady commanded, stuffing the Eagles and giving the offense the ball back on their own 10-yard line. On the first play, Carlos Brown cut straight up the middle, virtually untouched, and busted 90 yards to the end zone.
With Michigan up 24–10, it looked as though the Wolverines were poised to deliver the knockout punch. But when Denard Robinson took over, he threw an interception that the Eagles converted to a touchdown two minutes later to close the gap to 24–17—burning Cissoko once again—and that’s how the half ended.
If it wasn’t for Brown’s 90-yard run, the game would have been tied.
The fans hanging over the tunnel didn’t seem to care.
“You get ’em, Blue!”
“You guys are playin’ great!”
The players knew better. Not one of them returned the high-fives.
If ever there was a good opportunity for this team to panic, this was it. Back in the locker room, Brandon Graham summed it up best: “Ain’t got no swagger. Nothin’!”
The coaches didn’t need to be reminded how costly a loss to Ron English could be. When Rodriguez addressed the team, it was clear his goal was to avoid worrying his players at all costs.
“We’re all right. Don’t hang your heads. Let’s have a little fun out there!”
On second-and-goal from Eastern’s 13, Forcier gave the ball to Tay Odoms on a reverse. He made a great cut and trotted into the end zone to give Michigan a 31–17 lead. It also marked Odoms’s first touchdown from scrimmage, elevating his nickname from State Street, where he excelled in practice, to Main Street, where they played their games.
On Eastern’s next possession, the Eagles faced a third-and-6 from their 23-yard line when Andy Schmitt’s pass was tipped by Obi Ezeh and landed, quite by accident, in Craig Roh’s outstretched hand.
“I didn’t even realize I had it until ‘Whoa, what’s this?’” he said later. That didn’t stop the freshman from starting a rather spastic dance, for which he was roundly razzed in Monday’s film session.
Three plays later, Denard Robinson ran up the middle for Michigan’s second touchdown in a little over three minutes.
Michigan 38, EMU 17. The game was finally out of reach, the danger passed. The game would end 45–17, with Eastern shut out the second half. There were no moral victories here, and nothing for English or anyone else to hang their hats on.
* * *
After the game, Rodriguez found English. “He shook my hand but didn’t say anything. Man, that’s low.”
But three weeks into the season, the overriding fact was the Wolverines had three wins, no losses. Rodriguez soon found out, however, that he had no center, either.
“They say my best lineman is out,” he said in the coaches’ room, referring to David Molk, who not only didn’t miss a single game as a sophomore, he did not miss a single play. What knocked out this iron man was not some bruising defensive lineman or a concussion or even a twisted knee. Sometime in the second quarter, Molk simply planted his left foot to block his man—and that was enough to snap the fifth metatarsal.
He told trainer Paul Schmidt, “Something popped,” but he was walking fine, so he went back in, played, and played well. Everyone figured he was okay. He wasn’t.
“He’ll be out only three to four weeks,” Rodriguez said, taking off his coaching clothes. “That’s the good news. The bad news is, he’ll miss our first three Big Ten games—Indiana, Michigan State, Iowa, and maybe Penn State, too. And his backup’s out, too,” referring to guard David Moosman and his chronically screwed-up shoulder.
“Right now, we’ve got two seniors on defense and four seniors on offense. We don’t have a lot to spare.”
21 BIG TEN, BIG RINGS, BIG GAMES
When Rodriguez walked into the coaches’ meeting the following Sunday, you would not have guessed he was coaching an undefeated team. Head coaches at this level are not in the business of kidding themselves. They hadn’t played very well, they weren’t healthy, and harder games were ahead.
Paul Schmidt started the injury report with center David Molk: Surgery Monday, out four to six weeks, twice as long as hoped. “Might be back a little sooner, due to his position and toughness.” Rodriguez growled, but there was nothing he could do. In some ways, Schmidt was the most powerful person on the staff. He was the only person no one ever questioned.
Schmidt continued. Forcier had a bruised rib, cornerback Donovan Warren had a sore ankle, and tailback Brandon Minor was just plain beat-up. But David Moosman would return and fill in for Molk at center.
“Game evaluations,” Rodriguez said. “Quarterbacks.”
“Tate,” Rod Smith started. “I wasn’t too pleased with some of his decisions. Not looking very sharp.
“Denard played thirteen snaps. His reads were not very good at all.”
On defense, Cissoko had bombed again. “He used to be aggressive,” Rodriguez said. He acknowledged Cissoko had been injured, but he was fine now and had not returned to form. “I need to talk to him and tell him, ‘You’re just embarrassing yourself.’”
After they finished giving every player who saw the field a grade, Rodriguez said, “We have to understand who we are. We are an undersized team that runs well and usually plays hard, but if we’re not good fundamentally, we’re in trouble.”
What he didn’t have to tell those assembled was that if they suffered too many injuries, they’d be in more trouble.
One of the support staffers mentioned that Michigan was ranked twenty-two in the USA Today poll and twenty-three in the AP poll, but that barely got a grunt out of the coaches present. The polls mattered to them only when they were recruiting, or when bowl invitations were at stake. Still, it must have been a bit reassuring to this beleaguered bunch to see Penn State ranked fifth, Ohio State thirteenth, and Michigan twenty-third—the usual Big Ten teams all in the Top Twenty-five, just like old times.
Or more like it, anyway. A decade earlier, as many as nine Big Ten teams would pop up into the Top Twenty-five at some point during the season, and seven could be listed at once until conference play started, when the Big Ten began eating its own. With Michigan’s 1997 national title and Ohio State’s 2002–03 crown, and a handful of BCS bowl wins in between, for a while the Big Ten had been on par with the SEC and ahead of just about every other conference in the country.
But the new millennium had not been kind to the nation’s first athletic conference. Since Ohio State upset Miami in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl, Big Ten teams had been invited to fifteen BCS bowls and won only six. If you took out the Buckeyes’ seven invitations, the rest of the Big Ten’s record falls to an anemic 2–6, with all six losses suffered in the Rose Bowl, just barely ahead of the ACC’s 2–7 record and far behind the Big 12’s, the Pac-10’s, and especially the SEC’s mark, which was 10–3 over that same span.
How bad were the last eight years for the Big Ten? If you replaced all eleven conference teams with just Boise State, Utah, and West Virginia, you’d be 6–0 in BCS bowl games, not 6–9.
What do almost all those title teams since Ohio State have in common? The spread offense.
“The hardest thing to do in football is tackle in space,” Rodriguez explained. “The spread is designed to make you do exactly that. If you see your opponent tackle in space consistently, you’re in for a long day. But if not, you’re in for a good day—and not many teams can do that all day long.
“The hardest thing to find in the Big Ten is a fast defensive lineman. You see plenty of those in the SEC. Down there, those guys were tailbacks in Pop Warner, and they just grew up. When they do, you’ve got a first-class D-lineman: fast and big. To pull them out of their backyard, you need to sell t
hem on academics here or a connection you might have. It’s not easy for us.”
Nor for the rest of the league, apparently.
* * *
Rodriguez was worried about the future, but the players were enjoying the present. “We’re getting a lot more questions this year,” Van Bergen said about his classmates over Sunday pizza. “This year, you’re a status improver. They not only want to see you, they want to be seen with you.”
Mark Huyge laughed at that. “Not on North Campus, man.” Huyge was enrolled in naval architecture and marine engineering, whose classes were a ten-minute bus ride from Central Campus, along with the art, architecture, and music students—an odd mix if ever there was one. “I don’t think people up there even know what football is. The professors definitely have no idea.”
“Yeah, well, that’s better than having them hating on you,” Van Bergen said.
For Patrick Omameh, a 6'4", 299-pound redshirt freshman lineman with a 3.7 GPA, anonymity was the ideal. “I never wear my letter jacket,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to know I’m a football player. And I can usually pull it off.”
“I just want to be there to learn, man,” Martin said. “I don’t like people knowing who I am. I get sick of it.”
“I don’t like people knowing I’m a football player,” Van Bergen said. “I’m less likely to speak up. Because if I get one wrong, it’s not just wrong, you’re a dumb football player.”
“Exactly, man,” Martin said. “That’s exactly it.”
When they started clearing their trays, Van Bergen summed it up: “It’s all kinda cool, but we haven’t really been tested. I don’t even know how good Notre Dame is. Michigan State should have beaten them yesterday. Apparently anyone can beat anyone. Look at USC losing to Stanford. You can’t look past anyone.
“We’re 3–0 in nonconference, but we’re still winless in the Big Ten. I think Indiana will be a good test, especially with all the injuries we have.”
* * *
At the Monday afternoon team meeting, Rodriguez announced that Carlos Brown had won Offensive Player of the Week, not only for Michigan, but also for the Big Ten, following in Forcier’s footsteps.
“This other guy had an outstanding game and we didn’t realize he had a bad foot, David Molk.
“Defensive Player of the Week goes to a young guy, a freshman, who plays hard every play, and he had a big sack and a surprising interception! Craig Roh!
“We had these T-shirts made up a year ago but they’ve been in mothballs, so it’s good to pass them out: Our offense, for the first time, had six scoring drives. Go Offense!”
They passed out blue T-shirts with OFFENSE on the back.
“The goal on defense is six three-and-outs, and we had seven! Go Defense!” Their T-shirts had 3 AND OUT on the back.
They weren’t fancy, they weren’t expensive, and they probably wouldn’t mean anything to people on campus. But before the week was out, just about every player could be seen wearing his new shirt at dinner.
Before the first Big Ten game against Indiana arrived, Rodriguez would have to wade through more muck—some of it silly, some of it serious.
Sure enough, Rodriguez’s offhand comment a week earlier to Delany came back to bite him in the backside. Purdue offensive lineman Zach Reckman hit a Northern Illinois player after the whistle. Someone sent the tape to the Big Ten, which gave Reckman a game suspension—same as Mouton—prompting Rodriguez to call Purdue coach Danny Hope directly. “He blamed me for it. I said I had nothing to do with it. That was Jim Delany’s decision. I never sent anyone any tape. We’ve got other things to worry about around here!”
This is probably as good a place as any to say that, in my three years watching Rodriguez at close range, not once did I catch him in a lie. From everything I’ve gathered, he told me the truth every time—even when it was not flattering, including his description of his conversation with Delany the previous week. And, as it turned out, I learned later from Adam Rittenberg’s column on ESPN.com that the person who sent the tape to the Big Ten was someone at Purdue.
Despite the drama surrounding the program, the town was abuzz with the resurgent Wolverines. Outside Moe’s Sport Shop, which had been selling Michigan gear next to the Diag since 1915, the sandwich board announced:
WOLVERINES ARE 3–0!
FOOTBALL’S BACK!
On a Michigan football website, someone posted a photo of a proudly overweight tailgater wearing a too-tight blue T-shirt spanning his gut that said, ROSENBERG SAYS I WORK OUT TOO MUCH.
But inside Fort Schembechler, no one was taking the Free Press story lightly—even if they found it absurd—because it had sparked an investigation by Michigan, and finally the NCAA. For its part, the Free Press was not backing off, filing FOIA requests for everything short of used Kleenex, and printing a front-page defense of the piece a week later from publisher Paul Anger himself.
With the launch of the NCAA investigation, a public relations headache grew into an impediment to Rodriguez’s core job of coaching players and winning games. Investigators started pulling Rodriguez, his coaches, staffers, and players out of meetings, practice, and even class the coming week and especially the next, leading up to the Michigan State game.
In public, Rodriguez repeatedly claimed the Free Press story and its endless ripples had no impact on him or his team. Of course, he had to say that, and he had to believe it, too, or else his players never would. But watching it all unfold from within, it wasn’t true, which in Rodriguez’s private moments he conceded. “The bottom line is, all it’s doing is hindering us from coaching and helping these kids. They’re the ones who suffer. We’re not giving them our undivided attention like we should be.
“All I want is for everyone to get the hell out of our way and let us coach, and do it the right way.” But once the NCAA investigation started, Rodriguez would not get his wish.
On Friday morning, September, 25, 2009, Bill Martin, Lloyd Carr, and Rich Rodriguez all received a four-page, single-spaced fax from the desk of James F. Stapleton.
Dear Bill,
After a good deal of thought and (above all) out of love for a school and Athletic Department that has meant the world to me for as long as I can remember, I write on this occasion to address an astonishing level of lunacy associated with rumors involving you, Coach Carr, me, Coach Rodriguez and Mike Rosenberg.
Among other things, Stapleton sought to explain why he met Rosenberg at the Chop House the night before Michigan’s season opener, five days after the big story came out. “Rosenberg has been a friend of mine for years,” Stapleton wrote, though he added that he often disagreed with his stories and had “serious issues with this latest story on our Program, including its timing and true motives (which was the purpose of our meeting, since I was, as you know … at my home in Scottsdale when the story broke)…”
The rumors of his collaboration with Rosenberg had hit the blogs, he said, and he wanted to clear the air. “In recent days,” he continued, addressing Martin, “as this nonsense has continued, it has come to my attention from people whose credibility I trust that they had heard you or a person in the Department were behind the spreading of a story that Coach Carr and I were trying to ruin the Football Program. Me, I am told, because of my relationship with Rosenberg, and Coach Carr because of his alleged disdain for Coach Rodriguez.”
Stapleton then defended himself, listing the times he had helped Martin by publicly supporting the plan to build stadium suites, by addressing Jim Harbaugh’s attack on Michigan’s bachelor of general studies degree (which Stapleton holds), and by speaking out in Martin’s defense, too, when he had been attacked.
I make no apologies for loving Michigan Football and offering to support Coach Rodriguez in any way I can …
I also make no apologies for being a friend and confidant of Coach Carr, who I have known personally for over a decade and admire like few people I know … I make no apologies for using my influence, expertise, network and statur
e as a Regent to facilitate an improvement in the Football Program at Eastern Michigan University that led to its hiring of Ron English.
He closed by telling Martin, “You are the titular head of the Michigan Athletic Family. And, it is a family that desperately needs healing within its most important unit. This has gone on long enough. I stand ready to do my part if asked but, all of us need to follow your lead.”
The letter was notable as much for what it said as for the author’s apparent need to say it. Rodriguez wisely let it pass without comment—but he didn’t forget it.
Rodriguez met briefly with the team, as he always does on Friday afternoons, wearing his jacket and tie. They had a homecoming pep rally scheduled at 4:30 at Crisler Arena, but because it was so far from campus, with most students and alums deep in happy hour, they expected fewer than a hundred people. But when they walked down the tunnel at Crisler, they heard the band kick into “The Victors” and an estimated one thousand fans break into a now familiar chant, “Rich Rod-ri-guez!”
“I want to thank you for your support,” he told them, “not just in the last three weeks, but in the last twenty months. What your support has meant to me and my family, I cannot put into words.
“I can assure you, our guys are ‘all in’ for Michigan! We have the best atmosphere in the country. We’ve got the best HOUSE in the country. And we’ve got the best university in the world!” Cheers followed each sentence.
“Doesn’t matter what the outside world says, so long as the Michigan Nation knows who we are and what we stand for.
“GO BLUE!”
Later that night, while the players watched their movie, Magee and offensive line coach Greg Frey were hunkered down as usual, watching TV.
“Wait till we get this thing going,” said Magee, the optimist.
“If they let us,” said Frey, the pessimist. “If they let us.”
* * *
“I know how badly you want those Big Ten title rings,” Rodriguez told his team before releasing them down the tunnel. “Well, it starts right here.”
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