They were down 14–3 at halftime, and, as usual, it could have been much closer. But the defense was holding up—something no one expected—giving U-M a slight edge in overall yardage.
Brandon Graham, of course, knocked himself out on every play, making those who knew his situation pray that he didn’t blow out a knee in what would probably be his last college game.
But if it wasn’t? If Michigan found a way to beat Ohio State? What problem did Rodriguez and his team really have that beating the Buckeyes wouldn’t solve?
Forcier engineered an impressive drive to start the second half, ending in a touchdown. The defense did its job, limiting the Buckeyes to a single score that half to leave Michigan down only 21–10. The offense was doing its job, too, matching Ohio State yard for yard. But Forcier committed five turnovers—five—including three interceptions in the fourth quarter alone. And that was the difference: freshman mistakes.
In the locker room, there wasn’t much to say.
“I’m proud of the way we fought today,” Rodriguez told them. “We can beat anyone when we don’t beat ourselves.
“Don’t embarrass the program tonight. You still have classes this week, and we expect you to be there.
“You seniors, I’m proud of you. You played your asses off. You set a foundation for all our future success. This program will be back, ON TOP. And when we win the Big Ten championship next year, we’ll give you the credit. You deserve it.
“People are trying to divide us, and it ain’t gonna work. Nothing and nobody—nothing and nobody!—will divide this team, this family.
“Let them cockroaches stay out there. They got nothing to say to us. And we don’t have anything to say to them. What we have to say, we’ll say in nine months.
“UNDERSTAND THIS! You guys have come a long way and overcome a lot, and if they don’t understand that, I don’t care. And our ass will be back next year, on the top!”
Graham yelled out, “Let’s sing ‘The Victors’ one more time!”
They sang it loudly, not with joy but with conviction—exactly what the circumstances warranted. When Forcier hugged each senior, he apologized: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He was crying. Rodriguez interrupted the process to give Forcier a big hug. Before it was over, they were both crying.
At the press conference, Rodriguez was asked if he had gained some humility.
“Got humbled last year. Been humbled before and will be humbled again. In this profession, there’s enough humility to go around for everybody … I’m getting tired of being humbled.”
The questions kept coming: “At what point does patience run out?” “Have you been told anything about your job?”
He brushed them aside.
But Rodriguez’s fatal flaw flared: saying too much, and saying it artlessly.
While trying to explain how they got to 8–16 after two years, he mentioned his small senior class this year and the next, and having to start a true freshman at quarterback.
A reporter asked, “What have you learned in two years about what you’ll need to—”
“It didn’t take me two years,” Rodriguez interrupted. “It didn’t take me two years to figure out what we needed and what we needed to do. I knew it after a couple of games.”
That’s when someone should have pulled him off the stage with a hook. If he had stopped, he might have avoided another national lambasting. But when reporters asked follow-up questions, he eventually offered the following: “The last three Februaries, or four Februaries, have hurt us,” he said, referring to recruiting. In politics, Michael Kinsley has defined a gaffe as being caught telling the truth. This was a gaffe.
More questions drew more answers. “There’s a faction—and certainly I wouldn’t accuse any of you-all—of creating a negative type of environment that wants to see drama, and wants to see people pointing fingers.” As usual, it was all true. And as usual, it would boomerang on Rodriguez himself, who felt compelled to go to Carr’s office to apologize.
These answers gave the writers what they needed, perhaps best captured by CBSSports.com columnist Gregg Doyel. In a column titled RODRIGUEZ SPOILS IMAGE WITH SPOILED DISPLAY IN DEFEAT, he wrote: “After the loss Saturday to Ohio State, Rodriguez knew exactly where the blame should go.
“At Lloyd Carr.
“And at the media.”
He concluded: “Longtime football coach and athletic director Bo Schembechler never specified what he meant in 1989 when he made his famous ‘Michigan Man’ proclamation.
“But he didn’t mean someone like Rich Rodriguez.”
As was usually the case when it came to Rich Rodriguez, however, there was a gap between the mainstream media and the bloggers, and an even bigger gap between the fans, who generally supported Rodriguez.
In a poll taken by Annarbor.com (which had replaced The Ann Arbor News) hours after Michigan’s seventh loss, a surprising 72 percent of respondents said Rodriguez deserved more time, something most pundits would never have guessed.
At the end of Rodriguez’s second year, two things were certain: He wasn’t giving up, and time was running out.
30 MEET THE NEW BOSS
After Bill Martin announced on October 21, 2009, that he would be stepping down effective September 4, 2010—coinciding with the season opener and the debut of his luxury suites—the search for his successor was on.
Three strong candidates immediately surfaced who were all Division I athletic directors with close Michigan ties: Buffalo’s Warde Manuel, Oregon State’s Bob De Carolis, and Miami of Ohio’s Brad Bates. It speaks to the strength of the program Canham and Schembechler built that Michigan had no trouble finding three alums with such pedigrees. Any of them would have been a good selection.
But there was a fourth, less conventional candidate, who seemed to have the inside track. Schembechler often stated that he hoped one day Brad Bates, one of his former players, would be the university’s athletic director and Dave Brandon, another former player, the state’s governor. While Brandon was building a world-class business résumé—which culminated in an eleven-year run as the CEO of Domino’s Pizza and enough wealth to start his own charitable foundation—he had also been deeply involved in Republican politics. Many considered his election to Michigan’s board of regents in 1998 the first step toward bigger things, including a run for either governor or the U.S. Senate. But his failed reelection bid for regent in 2006, in the wake of a Democratic landslide, showed him just how vulnerable any campaign could be to forces beyond the candidate’s control.
Although Brandon had never ruled out running for public office in the future, he shifted his attention to Michigan’s athletic department. Brandon had never coached or worked in college athletics, but that was also true of the four ADs who followed Bo Schembechler. Thanks to Brandon’s eight years as a regent, he had much closer ties to President Coleman—to whom he often lent the Domino’s corporate jet—and the regents than any of the other candidates, all working in different states.
When the search officially started, Michigan interviewed Manuel, De Carolis, and Bates, but often at inconvenient times, just one indication that the job was Brandon’s if he wanted it—and he did. And that is how Michigan would end up hiring its fifth straight athletic director with no experience leading college athletics.
Some criticized the selection as simply another manifestation of Michigan presidents giving more weight to their comfort level than the candidates’ credentials, a list that includes the Duderstadt-Roberson duo and the Bollinger-Martin pairing, too. (James B. Angell, at least, would understand.)
While there was something to it, Brandon was not Bill Martin. The campus and accounts Martin left will serve Michigan athletics for decades to come. In fact, you could argue that because Bill Martin had done such a good job being Bill Martin, Michigan did not need another one, allowing Michigan to focus on other needs, including public relations, marketing, and unifying the fractured Michigan family. Running a private company with
a staff he could count on one hand had not prepared Martin for managing 250 employees, especially coaches, in the fishbowl that is Michigan athletics.
Brandon, in contrast, had spent eleven years running a company that operates over 9,000 stores in 65 countries run by 175,000 people. His job entailed dealing with millions of customers, thousands of stockholders, and dozens of board members, executives, and Wall Street analysts every day.
If there was one thing Brandon could handle, it was public relations. And if there was one thing Michigan and its embattled coach could use, that was it.
31 JIMMYS AND JOES
The most important day of the year for a college football coach is not the home opener, the game against the big rival, or even January 1.
It’s National Signing Day, which falls every year on the first Wednesday in February.
On this day, the end zone is not grass, Astroturf, or FieldTurf but a Xerox FaxCentre 2218. And only when a signed National Letter of Intent hits the receiving tray can you count it.
It can all be traced back to 1945, when Crisler concocted the platoon system. That spawned specialization, and that in turn gave birth to year-round nationwide recruiting. It was no longer enough to round up the best athletes on campus and teach them football. You now had to get the biggest offensive tackle from Dallas, the fastest receiver from Florida, and the quickest quarterback from California. When the competition for those specialists heated up, schools felt compelled to offer scholarships for athletic prowess, something unheard-of before the platoon system. (Even Heisman trophy winner Tom Harmon washed dishes at the Union to make ends meet.)
The race for the biggest and the best was on—and Crisler hated it. He even despised the idea of athletic scholarships, and tried to put the genie back in the bottle. In his long tenure on the NCAA rules committee, he attempted to limit substitution—starving his own baby—but he couldn’t control the monster he had created or its many offspring.
In the battle between Crisler and recruiting, recruiting won in a landslide.
Recruiting season now lasts all year, and is far more exhausting than football itself.
It starts with collecting information on over a thousand high school football players, watching hundreds of hours of film, then making the entire coaching staff take dozens of trips each across the country, from Pasadena to Pahokee, to meet with hundreds of high school players, parents, and coaches. They follow that up with thousands of calls, e-mails, and texts, all in the hopes of getting the twenty-five players you think will help you win a national title three or four years down the road.
During Lloyd Carr’s last three seasons, ESPN ranked Michigan’s recruiting classes eleventh, tenth, and thirteenth, respectively. In Rodriguez’s first full season, Michigan finished tenth, a pretty remarkable effort, given the Wolverines’ 3–9 season. But despite Michigan’s marginally improved record in 2009, recruiting was harder because of the ongoing NCAA investigation. Most coaches knew better, but some of them were not above telling recruits Michigan could lose scholarships, bowl games, TV appearances, and even its head coach.
Rodriguez sought to get the skill position players he needed to run the spread before doing anything else. But given the team’s progressively weak defense in Rodriguez’s first two seasons—which finished sixty-seventh and eighty-second in total defense, due partly to a bare-bones twenty-five scholarships devoted to defensive players, where most teams use about forty—he knew he now had to load up on the other side of the ball.
The one exception Rodriguez made was quarterback. After the injuries and inconsistency of 2009, he decided to recruit one serious quarterback candidate every year. This year, it was Devin Gardner, one of the top two players in the state. The fact that Michigan had two capable quarterbacks ahead of him didn’t scare him—or Michigan.
Michigan was happy to let Gardner, a good student, enroll early, along with six other recruits. But Inkster High School, hard by Detroit’s Metro Airport, held up approval until mid-January, when Gardner’s principal called him into his office.
“You need to get your stuff and go.”
Gardner wasn’t sure what that meant.
“The school board approved your graduation. You’re going to Michigan.”
“That,” Gardner said on signing day, “might have been the happiest day of my life.”
* * *
It wasn’t that long ago that Dan Dierdorf told his parents over breakfast he had decided to go to Michigan—and that was it. No press conference, no hat ceremony, no mention in the Michigan papers. Schembechler would simply give the list of his recruits to Bruce Madej, who sent that out to the beat writers.
Just a few years ago, it was not unusual for a team to have ten recruits still on the fence on signing day. But ESPN and the recruiting websites have made the process so public that fewer recruits flip-flop. Those outlets have transformed recruiting season from a sleepy insiders’ game into an intense full-blown season in its own right.
Why the fuss? As the veteran coaches say, it’s not Xs and Os, it’s Jimmys and Joes.
On Tuesday, February 2, Rodriguez made a final round of calls to his remaining twenty prospects. They had all pledged their fealty to Michigan many times over, and most recruiting experts predicted Michigan would have a top-twenty class. But as Rodriguez knew too well, until that signed fax comes through, all you have is air.
Michigan’s recruiting class rank could jump up dramatically if three recruits signed with the Wolverines.
They all played safety, Michigan’s weakest position in 2009, which looked even weaker for 2010 after junior Donovan Warren declared for the NFL draft. There would be no getting Boubacar Cissoko back, either. After he was kicked off the team in the middle of the 2009 season for missing class, he then dropped out, held up a cabdriver with a pellet gun, and was sentenced to nineteen months at Jackson State Prison—an already sad story turned much sadder. As bad as it had been, getting these recruits could turn Michigan’s weakest position into its strongest, literally overnight. They were:
Rashad Knight, from Jacksonsville, whom ESPN ranked the nation’s twelfth best high school safety. He would decide between Michigan and Rutgers.
Sean Parker, out of LA, whom ESPN ranked fifth at safety and forty-ninth among all players. He was also considering USC and Notre Dame.
And Demar Dorsey, from Fort Lauderdale, whom ESPN ranked second at safety and twelfth overall—thanks partly to his 4.25 time in the forty-yard dash.
Not surprisingly, Michigan coveted Dorsey the most.
Dorsey looked like a lock for Florida, which dominated the 2010 recruiting wars nationwide, until Gators assistant coach Vance Bedford, Florida’s point man on Dorsey, left to become Louisville’s defensive coordinator. Dorsey cooled on the Gators and finally wrote them off when they told him they would rescind their offer if he visited any more schools.
Suddenly, Florida State, USC, and Michigan were scrambling to get this phenom. But there was a catch. Two years earlier, Dorsey had been involved in three burglaries with some high school friends and was arrested for two. Although he had been acquitted of one charge and the other had been dropped, in the era of FOIA requests and Internet recruiting research, any coach pursuing him would have to assume that Dorsey’s past would get out, and the coach would have to answer for it.
That didn’t stop them from beating a path to his parents’ door, however. USC and Florida State could offer Dorsey warm weather and winning records. But Bedford, a former assistant coach under Carr, felt he couldn’t ethically recruit Dorsey to Louisville, so he told Dorsey he should go to Michigan. It so happened that one of Dorsey’s cousins was Denard Robinson, one of Michigan’s best student recruiters.
But Rodriguez knew no school would scrutinize such a recruit like Michigan, and no coach would receive more media attention than he would. So he followed up Cal Magee’s visit with his own.
Because Dorsey was behind in his studies, he was attending two schools at once to catch up. Rodriguez w
ent to both to talk to his coaches, principals, teachers, classmates, and even custodians, plus his parents and Vance Bedford.
“They are all vouching for him,” Rodriguez said. “We’re taking a chance, but not as big a one as it looks from the outside. We know him. We know the people around him. And this is not the first time we’ve taken a chance on a kid.”
When Rodriguez and his staff were still at West Virginia, they recruited Pat Lazear out of Bethesda, Maryland, even though he had served ten days in jail for stealing $463 from a Smoothie King. At the time, Rodriguez said, “We have talked to a number of people, and after a thorough review, I am reassured that Pat Lazear will be a successful student athlete and a positive member of our university community.”
Two years later, Lazear made the honor roll at West Virginia.
“There’s a reason they call them juveniles and not adults,” Rodriguez said, back in his Ann Arbor office. “They do dumb things sometimes. So when we get them, we’ve got to accelerate their learning and their development.”
In 2007, Jim Harbaugh got national attention when he accused Michigan’s athletic department of having “ways to get borderline guys in.” This is true: It’s called admissions—the very same means, we learned in 2011, Stanford used to get Harbaugh’s borderline players in.
To its credit, Michigan has never denied giving student athletes preference in admissions, just as it does for children of alumni, kids from Alaska, and, until the courts recently outlawed it, racial minorities.
The question is, how far should Michigan—or any school—lower its standards to get a talented athlete? In Michigan’s case, the answer has long been: not as far as its peers.
While it’s undeniable that many Michigan football players, from Oosterbaan’s era to the present, would not be admitted without special consideration, the majority of them have been solid students who get Bs and Cs—and often better—and a degree from the University of Michigan. Just as important, these Michigan Men do exceedingly well after college, generally outpacing their classmates in grad schools and especially the workplace, thanks to their uncommon drive and support system.
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