Three and Out

by John U. Bacon

  “And look at this, Tate,” Rodriguez said, showing a play in slow motion, then stopping it. “How many steps are you supposed to take?”

  “Three.”

  “Three steps. That’s right. And is your man open after three steps? Yes, he is! Imagine that! You know why? Because the play is designed that way. We’ve actually done it before! We designed this fucking offense twenty years ago—before you were born!—and I can assure you it works! But it only fucking works when you do what we tell you to do.”

  A shaft of light came from the doorway into the dark amphitheater. An assistant poked his head in. “It’s 2:45. Defense is ready, Coach.”

  “Well, I’m not. Tell them to go watch some film. Probably be the first time they see film this week too.”

  When he showed the play again, the anger built up in him, then came out: “DAMN IT!” He threw the remote at the screen. This time, it was no act.

  On the next play, just three seconds after the snap, Rodriguez stopped the tape. “Tate, you are in fucking Division I football. You drop back three steps—not four or five or fucking six!—THREE! You hitch up and hit the seam in cover-fucking-three. And if they’re not open, if their guys run with our guys, you hit the pull-up. Just that simple. That. Fucking. Simple.”

  The next play was the last before the half, when Forcier squandered their chance to take another shot at the end zone.

  “Now, this is what really pisses me off. You fumbled it, but you got it back, and we have enough time to try another play left in the half before we have to kick it. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Cut it to 19–14 going into the locker room?

  “But no. Look at this. You’re just lying there.

  “Get up! Get the fuck up! The clock is running!

  “Everyone’s milling around and we’ve got no time-out because we had to waste one because we had twelve guys on the field earlier in the half. So get up!”

  At 3:15, Rodriguez had finally finished with the offense and asked Phil Bromley to turn the lights on.

  “Crissakes,” he said to himself. Then, to the team: “And this was our good half!”

  Rodriguez wasn’t much happier when he addressed the entire squad. He expressed his general discontent with the way things were going—more angry and determined than hurt and defeated—and how that forced him to apologize for the team whenever he had to address a group of alums or a local Rotary Club.

  But not with them, he clarified.

  “You want to be Leaders and Best? You want to be Big Ten champs? Let me tell you something right now: You cannot hide from that fucking field. It does not lie.

  “I saw enough of this shit last year to last me a lifetime. I hated walking off that field—and I never want to again—when I think: They didn’t beat us at our best.

  “We’ve got bullshit investigations here, we’ve got freshmen there—all this shit, none of it matters. It’s just eleven guys on the field. I got rid of all the soft asses, I got nothing but men who care about each other and want to go into battle.

  “We are not reverting back. We are not reverting back!”

  It was stated as an order—but it was also his greatest fear.

  The players and coaches got dressed, then jogged out through the doors of their state-of-the-art practice facility to meet a picture-perfect fall day—Ann Arbor’s best season. They had about twenty seconds to enjoy it before Rodriguez got them running and stretching and warmed up. He was all over them, all day long. He installed Sheridan at quarterback ahead of Robinson, and Robinson ahead of Forcier. He was out to make a few points. The players, including Forcier, all responded as Rodriguez had hoped they would. Football players respond better than anyone to “attitude adjustment.” They seem to welcome it.

  But the fracture lines within Schembechler Hall were now visible. Dave Ablauf, for one, was not in a better mood. “I’m sick of all this,” the normally upbeat football spokesman confided, and he looked like it. “Every time my phone rings I cringe and think, ‘What’s next?’ There are too many factions and they’re all working against each other. Why can’t they all just pull for Michigan?”

  Inside the building, Jon Falk pointed to the floorboards. “Bo always told me, ‘Jonny, we’re winning, and we’ve got a strong foundation. But you look close at that foundation, and you’ll see a lot of termites in there. You start losing, and those termites come out, and start eating away at your foundation, and try to take over.’ And that’s exactly what’s happening.”

  The next day, Rodriguez had the unpleasant task of kicking Boubacar Cissoko off the team—something he loathed doing, even when a kid wasn’t contributing—while the Free Press probably had more fun reporting it.

  * * *

  On Thursday nights, offensive line coach Greg Frey led a group of players over to Mott Children’s Hospital. On the way, Frey asked me, “Who’s bad-mouthing us? The guys at State? You expect that. But the former Michigan coaches? What’s up with that?”

  They had learned this from their recruits, who told them which former coaches were telling them not to come to Michigan, and why.

  “The thing is, all these rumors, all this crap—the underclassmen don’t care about any of this. It won’t affect them too much. But I think about guys like Moosman and Ortmann and Brandon Graham. Man, those guys work their asses off. They care about their teammates. They stayed. They get pushed aside in all this, and that’s all right? That’s sad.

  “If it is former coaches going after us, what about the kids you recruited? The families you visited and the living rooms you sat in and the promises you made that you would make him a better player and a better person and look out for him. Where are those promises now? You broke them just to take a few swipes at the guys who came after you?

  “You know, all these people who say they hate us, do they even know us? All I ask is you get to know me before you start hating me. After that, go right ahead!”

  He shifted gears. “I always wanted to meet Lloyd Carr. I’d heard a lot of good things. I looked forward to meeting him when we came here. But I still haven’t met him.”

  * * *

  The rain let up for the Friday walk-through in Illinois’s grand old Memorial Stadium, the same field where Red Grange had run wild on the Wolverines in 1924, costing first-year coach George Little his job.

  While Rodriguez addressed each unit about their assignments, a few insiders were treated to an update of Rhett Rodriguez’s school spelling bee final, which had taken place that morning. Although only a fifth grader, he competed against the sixth graders in a schoolwide contest. Under pressure, onstage, the kid was ice—and won. For his tutors, Dusty Rutledge and Mike Parrish, it was the first good news they’d had in weeks.

  “Hey, Spell Check,” I said. “If you’re so smart, spell ‘cat.’”

  “Use it in a sentence,” he said, not missing a beat.

  “The DOG chased the CAT.”

  “Cat. C-a-t. Cat.”

  “Lucky!”

  The same kid his dad had described as being “too damn serious” the year before was loosening up.

  At the hotel the night before the Illinois game, Rodriguez told his team, “I was given a family name. My kids have my family name. I want them to represent the family name with honor. Nothing wrong having that sense of pride. No matter where you come from, you’ve all got a name—you should be proud of it. Every time you sign your name, I hope you sign it with pride.

  “What I hope you sense now is that when we come together, all of a sudden we have one name—Michigan—that we represent. You need to have as much pride in Michigan as your own name, and if you do, we’ll have no problems.

  “We’ll stick together.”

  * * *

  The biggest guys on the team can eat 13,000 to 14,000 calories during two-a-days. Yet it’s never enough. These guys can eat anywhere, anytime. Even after their huge team dinner and a postmovie snack—which would be a normal dinner for you—the big guys liked to sneak pizzas up to their rooms wh
enever they were hungry, which was pretty much every Friday night.

  Brandon Graham was enjoying a large pepperoni with the self-described “fat boys” when he started talking about two big events in his life: when Rodriguez’s regime showed up in 2008, and when his mom was mugged that past summer.

  “I can say I had the opportunity to play under Coach Carr and Rich Rod,” he said, and he had respect and affection for both. “When I first met [Rodriguez], I just felt he was going to fight for Michigan. I knew people were going to pressure him, and I didn’t want to make it that much worse.

  “Before Barwis arrived,” Graham continued, “I was just big. Gittleson called me fat every day. He never let me run the golf course. Said I’d kill myself. I never ran it. Coach Rod came in the next year and said, ‘No more of that.’ Then I went from 300 pounds to 260. That was the hardest thing ever—but I did it.

  “I used to bench 300. That was it. Now it’s stupid.” Graham was on his way to increasing his bench press to about 500, more than doubling his squat from 275 to 625, and tripling his clean. “Mike [Barwis] takes us to a place we hadn’t been before. I like my body a lot more now.”

  Given his improvement, some thought Graham might apply for the 2009 NFL draft. But he was already leaning toward coming back to get a better draft position—and a degree. During Graham’s first two years, he was a shaky student at best. But since all the academic reports started going directly to Rodriguez’s desk instead of Draper’s, Graham’s attendance was near perfect, and he was scheduled to graduate in four years that May.

  But the decision to return came with a price. That summer, when his mom had just gotten in her car in their Detroit neighborhood, two local thugs busted the glass on the passenger side and reached in to take her purse—a clear indication they had not met Mrs. Graham before.

  “I know my momma, I know her!” Graham said. “We’re the same way. If someone’s trying to take something that’s not theirs, we’re gonna fight.”

  In the melee that followed, they got her purse and broke her arm.

  Carr, Rodriguez, and Barwis are all great motivators, but there is simply nothing any of them could ever say or do to equal the incentive that scary scene had given Brandon Graham to get his mom out of that neighborhood. “That’s why,” Graham said, “I play like you’re taking my lunch money.”

  Barwis knew the personal stories of most of the players, including Graham’s, and what motivated them—and he used that information to great effect. During the Iowa game, Barwis talked with Graham for six minutes on the sideline—thanks to a good drive and TV time-outs—reminding him what happened to his mom last summer and what he was playing for.

  “This is your chance,” Barwis recalled, telling him, “you need to fight for it. Don’t give up, and don’t give in. This is your chance to make it all right.”

  During the Rodriguez era, however, few good deeds went unpunished. After the game, Judy Van Horn called Barwis to discuss ABC’s broadcast. She had already told the entire staff that none of them could discuss football with any of the players anytime outside the allowed twenty hours. That meant, she said, if a player in the hallway or on the team plane asked, “How’d I do today?” the coaches were not permitted to answer.

  Apparently, someone watching at home had called Van Horn, concerned that Barwis was “coaching” Graham. Barwis told her he wasn’t coaching football—“We have coaches for that, and I never played football”—he was motivating players. “That’s what I’m paid to do.”

  “Yes,” Barwis recalled her saying, “but it’s the perception.”

  If there was one lesson to be learned from Rodriguez’s first twenty-two months in Ann Arbor, it’s that perception trumps everything.

  In Van Bergen and Martin’s room, the concerns were more immediate: Save the season. “If we start dropping the ball and making the same mistakes,” Van Bergen said, “we could lose, and it’ll be a lot harder to rally and finish strong. There could be some doubts growing on the team.

  “I think this is a determining game for how the rest of the season is going to go.”

  Tate Forcier was doing some thinking of his own. “I have to go back to playing the way I was in the beginning of the year,” he said, going over his worksheets. “I haven’t been playing well. I haven’t been making my reads, and even when I do make the right read a lot of my throws have been late. Especially at this level, you can’t be late, you’ve got to make them right away.”

  Rodriguez’s decision to crank up the intensity seemed to be having the desired effect. But, as he often said, you can’t hide from the field.

  * * *

  Friday’s rain clouds gave way to sunny skies in Champaign on Saturday, October 30, 2009.

  Paul Schmidt spent the warm-ups watching Brandon Minor run plays, seeing if his ankle looked better, while sharing some of the wisdom he had gained over his long career.

  “I was telling Molk, ‘You played every snap last year because you’re tough, and you’re lucky. You start twenty-four games, you’re really tough, and you’re really lucky. You start fifty-three games like Jon Jansen—you are a beast, and you are damn lucky. You’re telling me Tom Brady isn’t tough?’” he asked, referring to the former Michigan quarterback who had suffered a season-ending injury during an exhibition game a few months earlier. “It was just his time.”

  “I think if we had Molk, we beat State and we beat Iowa. He makes that much of a difference. We’d be 7–1 and in the hunt for a lot of good things. We still wouldn’t be a great team, but we’d be that much better.

  “He’s tough, but he wasn’t lucky. Not this year. It was just his time.”

  And, partly as a result, it wasn’t Michigan’s.

  When they gathered by the door on one knee, Brandon Graham said, “This is gonna be our sixth win—not their second!”

  Rodriguez took a more serious tack. “Listen to me clearly. Don’t dare take your ass out on that field unless you are fully prepared to lay it all on the line for Michigan. All out, every snap.”

  The Illini were lead by Juice Williams, the same quarterback who had set records at the Big House the year before. He looked just as good opening the game with a ten-play drive straight to Michigan’s end zone.

  “Hey, Blue!” one fan wearing an Illinois No. 7 jersey said, hanging over the railing by the bench. “Don’t be fooled by the record! We comin’ after ya!”

  Forcier wasn’t rattled. He looked calm, confident, and decisive, connecting on all three of his passes for 31 yards. On first-and-goal from the Illinois 2-yard line, Michigan blocked and read the play so well that Carlos Brown—filling in for Minor—simply walked into the right corner.

  The Wolverines added two field goals through a wild wind to take a 13–7 lead into halftime.

  “This is when you start having fun,” Jon Conover said, “when you’re playing well and kicking ass!”

  When the teams trotted back to their locker rooms, the home crowd booed the 1–6 Illini, and the game already seemed over.

  The stat sheet didn’t lie. The Wolverines had bested the Illini in every offensive category, including eleven first downs to five. They had to punt only once.

  But Rodriguez was in no mood to let up. He was an experienced general who sensed the moment, a crossroads for their entire mission. “So let’s get after ’em now. They don’t want this like you want this! So let’s keep hittin’ ’em and grind ’em down!”

  The Wolverines had shown they could take a punch, time and again. But could they deliver one with their opponent on the ropes?

  On third-and-7, from Michigan’s own 23, Forcier dropped back with plenty of time to look around. He found Roy Roundtree cutting across midfield and fired it to him right in stride. Roundtree caught it and cut down the middle of the field, going hell-bent for the end zone on as straight a line as any geometry teacher could draw. The defensive players on the bench interrupted their conference to turn and cheer him on, thrusting their helmets into the air.


  This was it, the moment when the Wolverines would break the Illinis’ backs and put them away. It would mark their fourth scoring drive, putting them up 20–7. The Illini, their season ruined, would take out the dangerous Juice Williams and put in their backup, who was already warming up on the sidelines, and surround him with underclass understudies, hoping to get them ready for the next season.

  For the Wolverines, this play would mark the Continental Divide of their season—and Rodriguez’s reign. They would end their Big Ten losing streak, getting their sixth win and the monkey off their backs. They’d sing “The Victors” in the locker room once more, with gusto, and enjoy a happy bus ride to the airport in the fading fall sun, take a little hopper home, and still have plenty of time to get out for Halloween parties. The next day’s film sessions would be lighthearted, and on Monday, they’d start to think about improving their 6–3 record to 7–3 by beating 3–6 Purdue. Then—who knows?—maybe their momentum could push them past Wisconsin and perhaps even the Buckeyes.

  But there would be no overwhelming pressure. The heat would be off. They would start a new streak of bowl games and get the vital fourteen extra practices that come with it. That, in turn, would give a great boost to recruiting, and the train would be rolling.

  The particulars didn’t matter right now. Just get into the end zone—win match point—and all good things will come your way.

  All those visions were riding on the slender shoulders of Roy Roundtree, the freshman receiver running straight to the end zone—but Illinois’s Terry Hawthorne had other ideas. Instead of conceding the footrace, the touchdown, and the game—like all his teammates behind him—Hawthorne decided to give full chase to Roundtree, closing the gap bit by bit. When Roundtree crossed the 5-yard line, Hawthorne knew that was his last chance. So he made his move, leaping at the skinny receiver and—incredibly—bringing him down right around the goal line, where Roundtree fumbled the ball into the end zone, and an Illinois player recovered it.

  All eyes turned to the referee—who thrust his arms into the air. Touchdown! The Wolverines’ cork popped off, and they celebrated, knowing almost everything they wanted was going to be theirs. Their season was saved—and so were their coaches. They had outrun the avalanche.