Three and Out

by John U. Bacon

  The Hoosiers weren’t scared. On two of the their first three plays, they went right at Boubacar Cissoko—the Notre Dame tape was apparently getting around—and took the early lead 7–0.

  Greg Robinson pulled out his whiteboard, but Cissoko was off on his own, fifteen feet outside the semicircle. “Boubacar! Get your ass over here!” Cissoko slumped over to the huddle, in full resentment. They were losing him.

  After Michigan went up 14–7, Indiana came right back with a deep pass, once again burning Cissoko, to set up a tying touchdown: 14–14.

  “Two-minute drill!” Brandon Graham yelled. Then, seeing Cissoko sulking, he said, “Don’t make that face! Don’t let that shit get to you!”

  After Michigan’s defense stuffed the Hoosiers, they returned to a sideline celebration—but Cissoko, who had been pulled for freshman J. T. Floyd, was having none of it. He had dropped his helmet and sat far away.

  At halftime, Rodriguez worked furiously at his desk.

  “Let’s simplify the playbook,” Magee said, “and get Tate on a roll.”

  “He ain’t seeing it!” Rodriguez countered. “He’s not staying in the pocket. He’s leaving too soon.”

  For a quarterback to play the position properly, he needs to sense when the 280-pound linemen who want to break his back are coming after him like enraged bulls—and then ignore them, focus completely on his receivers, and commit to a perfect delivery. The proper follow-through will leave him exposed, of course—which is exactly what defensive linemen dream about all winter when they’re pushing the big weights: the chance to knock a quarterback ten yards into Tuesday.

  That’s why coaches have a special regard for those quarterbacks who can ignore the rush to finish the job. A quarterback can have everything else going for him, but if he doesn’t have the guts to stand in the pocket, make the throw, and take the hit, he will never be great. Tate was good, and getting better—but he was not yet great.

  In the second half, Mouton made hit after hit, tackle after tackle, extracting a few installments on his pledge to “make Indiana pay” for him having to sit out the Eastern game.

  The Hoosiers kicked another field goal to lead 26–21, but Michigan’s defense was not breaking.

  On third-and-4 from Indiana’s seven, Forcier faked the handoff, rolled out, and made a mad dash for the right corner. The Hoosier defenders met him at the goal line. Forcier jumped in the air, broke the plane—and smashed his shoulder.

  Ahead 27–26, Rodriguez decided to go for two. A false start put them back on the eight, but Rodriguez didn’t flinch. Forcier bravely dashed up the middle, his path cleared by tiny Tay Odoms.

  Indiana’s Darius Willis countered by turning a simple running play into an 85-yard touchdown, giving Indiana a 33–29 lead, and two records: its longest run since 1977, and the most points against Michigan … ever.

  Michigan got the ball back with 5:36 left, 52 yards and 4 points to go. The crowd sent Forcier and his teammates out to battle with a standing ovation. Perhaps figuring Forcier had only so many throws left in his shoulder, the coaches went for the whole enchilada. The Hoosiers blitzed, but Forcier was “seeing it.” He ignored the rush and found Odoms wide open. But thanks to his shoulder, he had to sling the ball almost sidearm. Odoms had to slow down for the ball, but it slipped just past the defender’s fingertips, into Odoms’s soft hands.

  Touchdown. Michigan, 36–33, with 2:29 left.

  On Indiana’s first play, Donovan Warren simply wrestled the ball from Ben Chappell’s intended receiver—and the Big House boomed.

  After three kneel-downs—“the best play in football,” Rodriguez liked to say—Michigan had sealed its fourth straight victory of the season.

  The student section belted its now familiar chant: “Rich Rod-ri-guez!” The team sang “The Victors” with the students, then they ran, not walked, up the tunnel, where they were met by Jon Falk: “The ring dream is still alive!”

  Back in the locker room, a new chant went up from the players: “Keep the lights on! Keep the lights on!”

  “Now, we know we’ve got to play a lot better than that,” Rodriguez said, “because you know who we have next!”

  They knew.

  “Ohhh, yeah!”

  “Bring ’em on!”

  “C’mon, Sparty! Let’s see whatcha got!”

  * * *

  Local sports radio host Steve Clark said, “Rich Rod said you can’t play poorly and beat Indiana? Yes, you can!”

  “I’d rather win ugly,” Rodriguez told the press, “than lose pretty.” When every game is practically a playoff game, it’s a rational perspective.

  When he returned to the coaches’ room for his shower, he was clearly in a good mood—they were learning how to win close—until he saw Bruce Madej.

  He was there to chat not about the game, or even the investigation, but about the Free Press’s latest FOIA to look into Rodriguez’s claim that the team had just achieved the highest grade point average.

  “What’s the problem?” Rodriguez asked, untying his shoes. “We got the numbers from the academic people.”

  Rodriguez was not reassured to learn the people on the Hill had taken over this task, too. When that happened, Rodriguez’s distractions tended to breed more distractions.

  22 COACHING ON THE SIDE

  The Wolverines were 4–0, and 1–0 in the Big Ten. And, except for David Molk, no starters were expected to be out of the lineup the next week.

  But cracks were visible: a defensive backfield that was still unsettled a third of the way into the season; injuries to a dozen players, including both starting tailbacks, Carlos Brown and Brandon Minor; and a freshman quarterback, now among the injured, who freelanced too often, from his sloppy three-to-five-step drop to his panicked checkoffs to his inconsistent throwing form.

  On the outside, Michigan looked good to go, but Rodriguez knew his problems were piling up—along with the pressure.

  “Tate Forcier,” Rod Smith said, starting the grading. “In the first half especially, his eyes and feet were everywhere. We’ve got to get that fixed. Fourteen loafs, ten MAs. He didn’t play very well, not compared to what he can do.”

  Tony Gibson gave the rundown on the defensive backs. “Boubacar played eighteen snaps and gave up 14 points. Same old shit. Just killing us.” In his estimation, walk-on Jordan Kovacs was playing better than the former five-star recruit. Much better.

  “They’ve all tried to support him and rally around him,” Greg Robinson said of Cissoko’s teammates. “But nobody wants him around anymore.”

  “If he’s pouting,” Rodriguez said, “but he’s still doing what he’s supposed to be doing, don’t give up on him. Keep coachin’ ’em up.”

  He then shifted to a frank evaluation. “Our offense is screwing around too much. Fourteen knockdowns is a joke. We’re not intense enough. Our concentration’s not there.

  “On defense, we looked confused at times. They got us with some hidden formations, but we’re still too passive. Too often we’ll let them catch it and run 10 yards before we close the gap. We’re playing hard but not with enough intensity on every play. We’re not even breaking on the ball consistently.”

  It was their job to solve those problems. They got the first step right: an objective assessment of the cold, hard facts.

  By 12:47, it was time to put the last game behind them and focus only on the Spartans for six days. Well, almost. Before the staff broke into their groups, Rodriguez asked Brad Labadie, “Do we have the data on the GPA—the 2.61, best in twenty years?”

  “We don’t have that,” he said, “but we have the data for the last few years.”

  “We asked the academic center for that,” Rodriguez said. “That’s where we got the information in the first place.”

  “Those figures were for full years,” Labadie said. “We don’t have it broken down by semester.”

  “Well, I’ve been bragging about it for three or four months, and not just because of that Free Press arti
cle. I don’t want to look stupid on something I was told by the academic center was true.”

  Labadie promised he would check, which brought Rodriguez to the next problem on his agenda: The NCAA investigators had scheduled meetings with dozens of coaches, staffers, and players the coming week—while Rodriguez would be trying to get his team ready for revenge against the 1–3 Spartans. They would be conducting closed practices for the first time in his tenure at Michigan, in the hopes of minimizing distractions.

  Rodriguez wanted to know who decided who gets sideline passes. “Seems like anyone in the country can get on our sidelines,” he said. “To me it ain’t a big deal, but if someone has not been the best to our program, like Jim Stapleton, then why do we need to give them a sideline pass? What do we owe those guys? Can you look into that?”

  “Yes, I can,” Draper said, writing it down.

  “He gets his pass from Denise Ilitch,” Dusty Rutledge said. “She’s a regent.”

  Denise Ilitch’s parents founded Little Caesar’s Pizza and own the Detroit Red Wings and the Detroit Tigers. They had earned great respect for their business savvy and civic pride. Denise had been elected a regent in 2008, with Stapleton serving as her campaign manager. After the 2009 season, she was one of several regents pressing to fire Rodriguez, but President Coleman insisted on giving him another year. So the normally discreet Ilitch, along with a few other regents, often referred to Rodriguez as “Dead Man Walking.” Rodriguez couldn’t do much about that, of course, but he hoped to do something about Stapleton’s sideline pass.

  “I don’t care,” Rodriguez said, declaring himself in a way he could not have without a 4–0 record. He never discussed Stapleton’s fax, but it had apparently not assuaged his concerns the way Stapleton had hoped. “When regents are giving out passes to people who aren’t supporting us, I’ve got a problem. That stadium is my office. That’s where we do our work. If you’re against me or my coaches or my players, you can buy a ticket just like anyone else, and you can scream at me all day long for all I care, just so long as you’re not doing any of that shit on my sidelines or in my building.”

  If Rodriguez was so intent on reducing distractions, bringing this up in front of his staff might seem counterproductive. Of course, it was convenient, with Labadie and Draper right there, but more likely Rodriguez needed to vent his spleen, put those two on notice, and let his coaches see he was fighting back. It was another distraction, but it was almost certainly a calculated one, designed to reduce distractions in the future.

  It’s a safe bet, however, that if Canham were still the athletic director, the head football coach would not have to worry about who was getting sideline passes. “When I was standing in the tunnel at Crisler [Arena] and there was a dirty agent standing four feet behind me,” he told me, “I could smell him—and he was gone.” This is the essential piece Michigan lost when it hired five straight athletic directors without any experience coaching or administering college athletics: knowing what to look for and keeping the department safe.

  Rodriguez paused to take the measure of the room. “Right now the lights are on, so the cockroaches are hiding a little bit. But they’re still there, and I don’t want you guys to get caught in the middle of it, so let’s close this circle.

  “This week, I’ve got to deal with some more bullshit with this investigation, during State week of all weeks, and I just want them to let us coach. I’ve been saying that for twenty months: Just let me do my job.”

  Rodriguez paused again, separating the drama around them from the work in front of them. They would not discuss the former again the rest of the day.

  “Okay, let’s watch the special teams.”

  The lights went out, the screen came on, and the coaches, once again, settled in to do what they liked doing best: preparing their team.

  An hour later, the door cracked open. Bruce Tall poked his head in and said, “He’s here, Coach.”

  Much to Rodriguez’s relief, Tall was referring not to the Compliance people or the NCAA investigators but to Will Hagerup, younger brother of Chris, who had punted for Indiana the day before. Will was ESPN’s third-ranked punting prospect. Rodriguez left the room.

  Zoltan Mesko, who had had only two punts returned in the first four games, had worked hard to recruit Hagerup. “He liked the B-school, way into that,” said Mesko, who got his BBA before pursuing his master’s in sports management. “So I said, ‘If that’s your thing, why wouldn’t you go to a top ten B-school? And you don’t want to miss out on the Big Ten championships to come.’ That pretty much did it.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the door opened. “Hey, we found our punter!” Rodriguez announced. “Gentlemen, please meet Will Hagerup, future Wolverine!”

  Hagerup’s commitment gave Michigan nineteen for the recruiting class of 2010. For a team that had gone 3–9, breaking almost every school record in the wrong direction and having an NCAA investigation hanging over its head, it was an impressive effort.

  For all the obstacles, Rodriguez knew that if his team kept winning and recruiting, his problems would eventually fade away, along with his critics.

  * * *

  In Schembechler’s day, the players would hit on Tuesdays and Wednesdays—“full line,” as they called it, twenty plays a day, and more if he felt they needed it. But since scholarships were capped at 125, then reduced to 85, few coaches felt like risking injury that often. They hit only on Tuesdays—and even then quarterbacks were off-limits, no one left his feet, and once you got close enough to tackle the ball carrier downfield, the whistle blew and he was “down.” Even so, most coaches considered Tuesday the most important day of practice.

  On Tuesday, September 29, 2009, with Michigan State looming, Rodriguez watched dozens of coaches and players go in and out all day to talk with the NCAA investigators. And then, during practice, he noticed a cabal of university administrators collect on the sidelines. He’d coached only sixteen games at Michigan, but he already knew that was never a good sign.

  His instincts were correct. Before and after dinner, Rodriguez had to meet with Scott Draper, Bruce Madej, Dave Ablauf, and another PR official from the Hill.

  The previous December, Rodriguez had asked the academic counselors a simple, direct question: What was highest GPA the football team had ever achieved? He had to ask several times before someone finally came back with an answer: 2.60.

  “So that’s the highest ever?”

  “Well,” Rodriguez said he was told, “it’s the highest in the last five or six years.”

  “What about before that?”

  “No team would have been close before that.”

  Rodriguez left the conversation with the reasonable interpretation that 2.60 was the highest grade point average the team had achieved since the most veteran academic advisers started at Michigan more than two decades earlier. It wouldn’t have mattered much if he’d been told it was 2.3 or 3.2; all he needed was the right answer, something to shoot for.

  When the players came back in January 2009, he started writing that number on the whiteboard and mentioned it at just about every team meeting when school came up—which was just about every team meeting—telling them it was their job to beat it. Rodriguez knew football players responded to numbers and peer pressure, and he knew this was an effective way to get athletes to take school more seriously. He hammered this home all semester, especially as finals approached, and the players responded, finishing with a 2.61—again, according to the people in Academics.

  But the Free Press questioned Rodriguez’s claim. And to Rodriguez’s surprise, Michigan’s public relations and academic people decided to back off, partly out of fear of receiving another stream of FOIAs asking for the collective GPAs of every Michigan varsity team, which the academic people wanted no part of. Given the scrutiny Michigan had received from the time Harbaugh’s comments made news in 2007, their skittishness was understandable. But their solution—throw Rodriguez under the bus—naturally did not sit well with t
he head coach.

  They sat in the big comfortable chairs circling the new annex to his office, built for recruits and their parents. The meeting was civil, professional, and occasionally lighthearted, but Rodriguez’s frustration was often plain, especially after they showed him a draft of a press release in which they had him saying the GPA was only “an estimate,” and “I regret any misunderstanding about this matter.”

  “This is bullshit,” Rodriguez said flatly. “I asked for a number, they gave me a number, and we beat it. End of story. What do they mean, they can’t calculate a team grade point? They estimate it by eyeballing it? How lazy is that?”

  “But they don’t calculate [all] GPAs,” the PR person from the Hill said. “They know which ones are not worth calculating.”

  “What does that mean?” Rodriguez asked. “And anyway, that’s still a calculation. It might be a rough one, but it’s still a numerical assessment. And also, I regret nothing! What should I be regretting here?”

  They had no answer. Rodriguez continued. “It bothers me that this release makes it look like I’m just saying it, now, as a response to the Free Press article, out of thin air! I’m not making this stuff up, and I’ve been saying it since the spring—when none of us knew anything about all that Free Press crap.”

  In short, Rodriguez was doing exactly what any Michigan alum would want him to do, and what every player’s parent hoped he would do, and he was being punished for it. They compromised by hashing out a new press release, and the meeting ended amicably. Rodriguez closed it with “This is just mouse turds” and a smile.

  Over dinner, he said, “I spent five hours today on nonfootball stuff, on the one hitting day of State week: three hours talking with Compliance, one hour talking with my attorney after that, and one hour on the whole grade point thing.

  “But this is the first time in twenty-one months the university asked me how we should respond, so I guess that’s progress.”

  Or it would have been, if the university had not later scrapped the new press release they had created and returned to the original without consulting Rodriguez.