Three and Out (11 page)

*   *   *

History is usually presented as something that simply rolls along, one year after the next, and what it produces is the inevitable result of broad, sweeping trends that no one individual or single moment can alter.

Not true. Individuals matter. Moments matter.

Michigan football has plenty of proof: Louis Elbel. Fielding Yost. The 1945 Army game. Bo versus Woody, 1969.

But on September 1, 2007, Appalachian State added one of its own, pulling off what many sportswriters consider the greatest upset in the history of college football. Its effects were both immediate and long-lasting.

A few grown men left Michigan Stadium in tears, and the bars became morgues. You couldn't escape the story, which was broadcast on virtually every channel, even MSNBC.

In one of the easiest journalistic decisions of all time, the editors of
Sports Illustrated
didn't bother to send anyone to cover the game, yet in an equally easy decision, they put the game on the next cover. “My job is to help put major college football developments into perspective…,” Stewart Mandel wrote. “But in the case of Appalachian State 34, Michigan 32 … I feel utterly unqualified …

“What every coach tries to tell his players and the media every week only to be met by perennial skepticism has now been confirmed as true. No one is unbeatable in college football anymore. Anything can happen.”

Brian Cook, creator of MGoBlog, the most popular college football website in the country, couldn't even address it, instead opting to run a screen that simply said “Kittens!” It took him three days to bring himself to write about “the Horror,” running his story under the headline “Unconditional Surrender,” and a picture of a mushroom cloud.

“Let the record show that Lloyd Carr never learns, and that you are right. We suck. We promise not to hope or expect anything except misery until someone named Tedford or Rodriguez or Schiano is coaching the team and to regard all good events as mere preludes to a fall. We are a defeated people. Give us your treaty. We will sign it.”

That night the e-mail boxes of Carr, Martin, and University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman overflowed with vitriolic missives, occasionally disturbing enough to forward to university security.

But the fans' emotions were real enough. And what many wanted was to see Carr go. The various websites devoted to Carr's departure—
sackcarr.com
,
FireLloyd.com
—did brisk business that night. The talk shows didn't need to give out their numbers to get irate fans to call in.

The game was a stinker of historic proportions. There was no spinning it. “We were not prepared,” Carr said afterward, “and that's my responsibility.”

But it was only one game, hardly dwarfing Carr's accomplishments on the field or off. Carr had won more Big Ten titles than Fritz Crisler and more national titles than Bo Schembechler, yet he remained the Harry Truman of college coaches—unappreciated in his own time.

I stopped by his office later that week to drop off the book I had coauthored with Bo Schembechler, which Carr had helped fact-check after Schembechler passed away, adding a few stories in the process. I found him in his office, the lights off, tilting back in his chair before the reflected glow of a big-screen TV dancing on his face. He looked as though he had swallowed a live grenade and his insides had been hollowed out.

He was philosophical. “I've been warning these guys for years that one of these days a MAC team is going to beat us,” he said, “and you don't want to be the team that gets beaten.”

I didn't have the heart to tell him that Appalachian State was not even a MAC team. Appalachian State was probably better than most of them, but they still played in the FCS, not the BCS.

A week later, Oregon, a bona fide BCS team with another mobile quarterback running the spread offense, humiliated the Wolverines on their home turf 39–7.

Nationwide, just about every sports pundit said Lloyd Carr was “on the hot seat.” But the custom since Charles Baird became Michigan's first AD was clear: Only one vote mattered, and Carr had it. He would leave under his own power, at his own pace. But the rest of the season would be dominated by predictions of Carr's retirement and speculation about who would replace him.

The Wolverines rebounded when they got back to the bigger, slower, less imaginative Big Ten. Despite injuries to Michael Hart and Chad Henne, the Wolverines willed themselves to eight straight wins. Nevertheless, the Horror cast a long shadow. The 2007 season was not the victory lap Carr had hoped for, or deserved.

The Appalachian State loss not only lowered the stock of Carr's coordinators, it also diminished his power to boost them. The ability to name his successor was something he badly wanted, but unlike Schembechler, Carr was not the AD, and the 2007 season confirmed concerns that his assistants were not the next Lloyd Carr.

In Carr's final Ohio State game, with the Big Ten title on the line, the banged-up Wolverines managed a mere 91 yards of total offense en route to a fourth straight loss to the Buckeyes and an 8–4 record.

Two days later, on Monday, November 19, Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr announced he would retire after Michigan's bowl game.

*   *   *

Two of the University of Michigan's worst-kept secrets that fall were Carr's likely retirement and the possibility of Les Miles replacing him. Both seemed like obvious calls. Miles had played for Schembechler, coached for Schembechler, and was about to lead Louisiana State University into the BCS title game in January.

Hiring Miles would have followed the oldest script in college football: promoting a school's former player to lead his beloved alma mater. Gustave Ferbert was the first alum to coach Michigan to a Big Ten title in that famous 1898 win over Chicago, and Harry Kipke, Bennie Oosterbaan, and Bump Elliott—all great players—followed suit. Miles had not been a star player, but he was clearly a heck of a coach. But a third poorly kept secret was that Carr preferred that someone else get the job—
anyone
else.

Exactly why has inspired both honest speculation and ridiculous rumors. The two most likely theories include bad feelings left over from conflicts when both served on Schembechler's staff—something Schembechler often intentionally stirred up between the old guard and the young Turks, just to get the best ideas out on the table—and the friction generated after Miles took over LSU in 2005, when they found themselves recruiting the same players.

But ultimately, it was less important
why
Carr didn't like Miles than the simple fact that he didn't, which no one denies.

Carr wanted his offensive coordinator, Mike DeBord, or his defensive coordinator, Ron English. But Martin wasn't convinced that either was ready. DeBord had been a successful assistant, but in his four-year stint as head coach of Central Michigan, he compiled a 12–34 record. English had been a coordinator for just two years, with mixed results.

Whatever your opinion of what happened thereafter—from the scattered search to Rodriguez's three tumultuous years in Ann Arbor—all of it could have been easily avoided had Carr prepared a worthy successor from his ranks. In Schembechler's twenty-one years, he hired thirty-six assistant coaches, eleven of whom became Division I head coaches. Three won national titles, and Larry Smith and Don Nehlen came very close.

In his thirteen years, Carr had nineteen assistants, four of whom became Division I head coaches: Stan Parrish, Mike DeBord, Ron English, and Brady Hoke, who had just finished the 2007 season at Ball State with a 7–6 record, giving him a career mark of 22–37.

With no candidates from the Carr tree deemed ready, Bill Martin had to look elsewhere—and that's when things got interesting.

 

6   A STRANGE SEARCH

Since leaving Iowa to become Michigan's thirteenth president in 2002, Mary Sue Coleman had gained a loyal following among Ann Arborites and the alums nationwide. A former biochemist, she impressed just about everyone as professional and likable, though she could be surprisingly tough when needed.

She earned particularly high marks for recognizing the economic troubles ahead and deflecting them by spearheading a $2.5 billion fund drive that ultimately produced $3.2 billion—a record for a public university. Then she and her team wisely protected a far larger chunk of the university's endowment than did its peer institutions before the crash of 2008. She also struck groundbreaking partnerships between Michigan's seven-million-volume library and Google (whose cofounder is Michigan alum Larry Page). Coleman would be named by
Time
magazine as one of the nation's ten best college presidents in 2010.

She had more important things to do than monkey around with a coaching search—just one reason why she had given Martin complete autonomy over the search, as she had when he had hired sixteen other coaches. She was neither intimidated by nor mistrusting of Bill Martin, forging one of the best working relationships in college athletics. The month after Carr retired, however, would test all of that.

A year earlier, Martin had decided Kirk Ferentz, whom Coleman had hired when she was Iowa's president, would be his top candidate. Schembechler respected Ferentz, and Carr would have supported him. Martin did not check with President Coleman, however, and she did not tell him until after Carr stepped down that Ferentz was not to be considered, perhaps because numerous Hawkeyes had serious off-field problems that fall. Whatever her reasons, the result was the same: Another solution had been eliminated.

Martin put together a six-man search committee representing a cross section of university leaders, successful businessmen, and former Michigan football stars who'd done well after their playing careers had ended—the kind of opinion leaders a wise executive would work hard to keep on his side.

About a week after Carr's announcement, the committee met for the first time in the glass meeting room in Weidenbach Hall. Martin told them what he was looking for and mentioned that Tony Dungy was his favorite candidate. Dungy had played high school football for Jackson Parkside, a half hour from Ann Arbor, but turned down Bo Schembechler to play for Minnesota. His Indianapolis Colts had just won the 2007 Super Bowl the previous winter, and his book,
Quiet Strength
, had been on the bestseller lists much of the year. Exactly why Martin thought Dungy might be interested in Michigan, however, is a mystery.

The committee then briefly discussed Cincinnati's Brian Kelly, who had won two NCAA Division II titles at Grand Valley State in Grand Rapids and a MAC title at Central Michigan before finishing the 2007 regular season in Cincinnati 9–3 while graduating 75 percent of his players. But Kelly had a well-earned reputation for being unpleasant—even basketball coaches had strong opinions about him—and Martin made it clear he was not a serious candidate.

What was most striking about that first meeting, however, was the number of candidates they barely discussed, if at all: Mike DeBord, Ron English, Jeff Tedford, Rich Rodriguez, and even Les Miles, the committee's first choice. “Bill didn't want him,” recalls Ted Spencer, the director of admissions and a committee member. “I have no idea why. He never gave us a reason.”

When the first meeting adjourned, the committee had been given no serious candidates to consider, nor any real direction. There was no urgency, no plan. The members left mystified—and miffed.

“If I had to put my finger on anything,” said longtime faculty representative Percy Bates, “it's this notion that ‘this is Michigan. Once the job is open, they're going to be banging my door down, and I'm going to pick and choose among all these great candidates. The only question is, which of these great coaches will I invite to accept the honor of coaching at Michigan?'

“But never having conducted a big-time football coaching search before, Bill may not have realized how it works. They're not going to be knocking down your door.

“Anybody watching the scene at Michigan would know our program was not where it had been, and there were people who would think twice about coming here.”

The takeaway was clear. “There hadn't been any preparation for this that I could see,” Bates concluded. “Nothing that said, ‘We need to get ready for this.' And then it started to unravel.”

Many observers seemed eager to believe that the very absence of any real news or activity emanating from the department was all part of some supersecret master plan that would result in Miles being hired after LSU's bowl game. But the truth was that the silence was simply the result of a slow, sloppy search. There was nothing newsworthy to report.

The public also didn't know that Miles's representatives had been repeatedly trying to connect with Martin after Carr's announcement, without success. Miles's people placed more calls on Thursday, November 29, but Martin and his wife were heading out for a three-day trip to Florida. When Jamie Morris, who worked in the development side of the athletic department and served as an unofficial liaison to the former players, presented Martin with a short stack of pink message slips before Martin left that Thursday, Martin told him he planned to call Miles when he returned on Sunday and left it at that.

All this came to a head two days later, on Saturday, exactly two weeks after Michigan's loss to Ohio State, when Miles was preparing his team to play the SEC title game that afternoon against Tennessee. That morning, ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit announced that Miles had accepted Michigan's offer to succeed Coach Carr.

Even while Herbstreit was talking, Miles's agent was trying desperately to get in touch with Martin in Florida, to no avail.

“My weekend starts,” Morris recalled, “and I'm sitting on the couch about to watch some football when Kirk Herbstreit announces Les is going to Michigan. My phone starts going crazy! I'm getting calls from everyone—the committee members, the regents, people at Schembechler Hall—and all I can say is, ‘I can't confirm this.' Then they start asking, ‘Where's Bill?' Now
I'm
thinking he must have stopped in Atlanta [where LSU was playing Tennessee] to meet with Les and get him signed before going to Florida.”