Three and Out (17 page)

Rodriguez was both mystified and furious. “Boren was barely
here
,” Rodriguez told me. “He never wanted to be here. We never said
anything
to him. And Rosenberg had never been to a single practice—and our practices are
open.
I'd never even met him, and he writes all that?”

It would not be the last Rodriguez would hear from Rosenberg.

*   *   *

Because Michigan Stadium was under construction, the Wolverines had to play their 2008 spring game at Saline High School. Given the cold, gray weather and the equally ugly play, it might have been just as well.

“I knew then we weren't going to be very good,” Rodriguez said six months later. “During the search, I didn't even look at the roster, because I just figured, it's Michigan. They've got to have some players. Just throw 'em out there and you'll get eight or nine wins.”

But when he realized he would be going into battle with only one returning starter on offense—sophomore lineman Steve Schilling—and a starting quarterback, Nick Sheridan, who had played his high school games on the very same field they used for their spring game, earning All-Conference honorable mention, Rodriguez knew he had to recalculate his timetable. He still believed they would be going to a bowl game, but he already figured it would take more than three years to get where he wanted to be.

Rodriguez's revised projections were on his mind when he received a call in June of 2008 to meet Mary Sue Coleman and Bill Martin at the president's house. When Rich and Rita arrived, it quickly became clear his bosses were not there to talk football.

“There was a sense of urgency,” Rodriguez recalled. “As soon as we sat down, Mary Sue said, ‘The lawsuit's becoming a problem.'”

Of course, it had been a problem for Rodriguez for six months—including West Virginia's smear campaign and the gag order U-M had given him—but it became Coleman's problem when West Virginia sought to depose both her and Martin.

This had them suddenly concerned, and Rodriguez soon found out why: Neither Coleman nor Martin had ever told the regents about the buyout agreement they had signed with Rodriguez in December. To avoid that getting out, they wanted Rodriguez to settle with West Virginia immediately.

But Rodriguez wanted his day in court to counter all the claims from West Virginia and had been keeping a legal pad of notes for that purpose. Further, he knew if he settled, it would look like Michigan was bailing him out, and he'd be the bad guy all over again.

Both Rich and Rita remembered President Coleman telling them, “If they find out, I'll be toast.”

“And so will I,” Martin added.

“I don't want anyone to lose their job over this,” Rich finally said, “but I want the truth to come out.”

Coleman turned to Rita and asked, “What do you think?”

“And then I got emotional,” Rita recalled. “I said, ‘What I need to know is that you're still happy you hired us, and you still want us to be here.'”

“Oh, yes,” Coleman and Martin said. “Absolutely.”

Rich, Rita, and their financial adviser, Mike Wilcox, talked it over in a separate room, then returned to say they'd do as Coleman had asked and settle. But while they were there, they wanted to make sure they understood that Rodriguez had more work ahead of him than he had originally anticipated. Coleman and Martin agreed to adjust his contract to provide for a $4 million buyout from Michigan if they let him go during any of the first three years, instead of his original buyout deal, which diminished by $500,000 after each year. After January 1, 2011, however, it would fall to $2.5 million.

After thanking them, Rodriguez repeated his prediction that it would take him more than three years to get where he wanted the team to go. Coleman and Martin nodded, but both added, “You'll have to remind us, in case we forget.” It was an odd comment but, in view of the day's events, easily put aside at the time.

*   *   *

When the press ran the story of the settlement the next day, there was no mention of any prior agreement between Rodriguez and Michigan.

“And sure enough,” Rodriguez remembered, “the writers rip my ass for the settlement, with the perception being that Michigan helped bail me out.”

Two thousand and eight was one off-season Rodriguez did not mind coming to an end. Almost lost in the nonstop drama of the transition was the upcoming season. For Rodriguez, even with a shaky squad, it couldn't come soon enough.

In the spring of 2008, Rodriguez made a fateful calculation: If he could never say enough of the right things to satisfy the new media and the old guard, and if divulging his deal with Michigan and rebutting Morgantown's rumor mill were prohibited, then his only hope was to win games fast enough to keep his detractors from bringing him down.

There was one problem with this plan: Beneath the enviable tradition the Wolverines had built over a century was a team in need of serious work.

 

8   THE EVE OF A NEW ERA

Before he had coached a single game at Michigan, Rich Rodriguez had probably received more coverage in 2008 than any coach in the country. As the season approached, the attention only increased.

Rodriguez's Michigan debut seemed to be the top story of almost every media outlet's college football preview, from
The Kansas City Star
to
Sports Illustrated
, and it wouldn't stop all season. ESPN's College Game Day ran a story or commentary every week, augmented by almost daily pieces on “Around the Horn,” “PTI,” and “SportsCenter.” The lead story changed, but some mention of “Rich Rod” was a constant, right up to Malcolm Gladwell's piece comparing teachers and spread option quarterbacks in the December 15, 2008, issue of
The New Yorker.

In
Sports Illustrated
's 2008 college football preview issue, Austin Murphy devoted his main story to Rodriguez, whom he described as “the progenitor, the Kevin Bacon, the fountainhead of the spread … which dominates the sport at nearly every level … the most influential trend in offensive football.”

The article ran through the checklist of truisms about the spread. You don't need a world-class bulldozer to run the ball in the spread, just a handful of speedy, skilled receivers who can run perfectly timed routes and a quarterback who zips through a protocol of decisions in a few seconds. Problem is, it takes time to recruit and develop players to do all that, and Rodriguez hadn't had much of either before his first kickoff.

That's why, Murphy wrote, “If past is prologue, the Wolverines will grind their offensive gears in Rich Rod's first season. After that, stand back.”

The night before his first game as Michigan's eighteenth head coach, and eleventh since 1901, Rich Rodriguez stood on the second-floor balcony of the Campus Inn, gazing over the lobby below. “I usually have a pretty good idea what we have going into battle,” he said, standing at the rail. “Not this time. I have never had so many unknowns going into a football game in my entire life, not even in high school.”

Rodriguez could no longer kid himself that this team would compete for a Big Ten title that season. The question was, could he get them across the finish line with the program's streaks alive?

He certainly wasn't conceding the upcoming Utah game. They knew Utah ran the spread offense, and they probably ran it better than Michigan would. But Rodriguez hoped his more experienced defense could keep the Utes from lighting up the scoreboard and give the Wolverines' embryonic offense a chance to win.

Beat a solid Utah team, and Miami of Ohio was next. Take a 2–0 record into South Bend the following weekend, where Charlie Weis was already fighting for his job, and who knows? Success breeds success.

Mulling it all over, Rodriguez held on to the railing and stared at the dark windows across the lobby. “I honestly have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow. No idea.”

His uncertainty was justified. If ever there was a team with more questions than answers, it was the 2008 Wolverines, beginning with quarterback. Steven Threet had been a four-star prospect out of Adrian—a rural town just forty minutes from Ann Arbor—where he had been the class valedictorian and a baseball star. When it didn't work out at Georgia Tech, he transferred to Michigan in 2007.

After sitting out a season, he was eager to make his mark. He always leaned forward in the quarterback meetings, eyes wide open, nodding and agreeing so vigorously—“Uh-huh, uh-huh”—that sometimes the quarterback coach Rod Smith lost his train of thought.

The coaches considered Threet a nice kid, hardworking, and very smart, but his unorthodox form gave them fits. When he threw the ball, he leaned back on his left foot and flicked his right foot up behind him, like a second basemen flipping the ball to first. They worked every day on it, but it always returned, like a stubborn cowlick, especially under pressure.

The second candidate was walk-on Nick Sheridan. His father, Bill, had assisted Lloyd Carr, but after his dad took a job with the New York Giants, Nick was content to stick to intramural football until one of the former coaches, knowing Nick wanted to become a coach himself, told him to come out for the team. His disposition in meetings was the opposite of Threet's. He leaned back, eyelids relaxed, and rarely made a sound.

Perhaps Sheridan's calm demeanor tipped the balance, since neither quarterback had ever played in the Big House and the coaches knew that jitters would be an issue. The coaches decided they had a slightly better chance starting Sheridan.

*   *   *

When I asked Rodriguez, at the team breakfast before his first game as Michigan's head coach, how he felt about getting back to football, he paused briefly and answered, “Thank God.”

The Wolverines piled into four university buses at 1:00 p.m. for the 3:00 kickoff. But this year, instead of just pulling up to the tunnel at the Big House, Rodriguez had the buses park a hundred yards away to let the coaches and players walk through a roped lane with the band playing and—they hoped—fans cheering them on.

When Rodriguez and his troops got off the buses, the Michigan Marching Band was right on schedule, blasting “The Victors.” The fans were standing twenty-deep at the rope line, packing the old staircase by the tunnel, and covering the hillside leading up to Crisler Arena. Michigan maniacs were everywhere, clapping and cheering and punching their fists in the air.

When Rodriguez entered the locker room he passed Jon Falk, Michigan's equipment manager since Bo Schembechler hired him in 1973. Falk turned to him, waved his arms over the fans, and yelled, “Was that cool or what?” Rodriguez beamed and nodded.

Then it was back to the coaches' room—which, even at the Big House, isn't very big—where Rodriguez tried to kill time by sitting in his folding chair in the corner, going over his play chart, jotting down a couple of notes for his pregame speech, and looking up at the muted TV bolted to the wall by the door.

Right over that door they had installed a digital clock—the same kind of no-nonsense one-foot-by-half-foot model that littered Schembechler Hall. Unlike those, however, this one didn't tell you the time of day but counted down the big red minutes and seconds until kickoff, reminding you of a time bomb.

For the most part, the players appeared much calmer than Rodriguez, with the possible exception of Steven Threet, whose already eager personality seemed amped up for the occasion. Sheridan remained characteristically cool.

Freshmen Sam McGuffie and Michael Shaw tried to force themselves to mimic Sheridan's calm. The seniors were a mixed bag, about half on board with the new program and the other half unsure at best.

A guy like Will Johnson would work his tail off no matter who the coaches were, and he did, setting weight room records under Barwis. Mike Massey might have felt more comfortable with Coach Carr, but he wasn't going to undermine anyone's efforts to lead the team, even if the spread offense eventually cost the big tight end playing time.

Perhaps no one responded better to the change than junior Brandon Graham. When Rodriguez and his staff arrived, Graham weighed 315 pounds, could bench his weight only once, and was just as weak in the classroom, where his attendance was spotty. But in nine months, he had gotten his weight down to 275, and he was well on his way to bench pressing over 500 pounds, increasing his squat from 275 to 625, and his clean from 185 pounds to 450. He had also become a conscientious student, emerging as a viable candidate for both an NFL contract and a bachelor's degree.

“I just listen to the coaches,” he told me, “and do what they tell me. They're not trying to mess you up. They're trying to make you better.”

But not all the older players were buying into the new coaches' program. Much of the resistance was the normal consequence of any coaching change, when all seniors lose the goodwill they had accrued with the previous coaches and resent having to start over just like the freshmen. The seniors also had to adjust to an entirely new approach to just about everything, including conditioning, where they could no longer come in to lift when they liked but had to join the morning or afternoon group. And some of them were disappointed by Rodriguez's decision not to name permanent captains but rotate them every week.

More fundamentally, the loss of not only the graduating seniors but also half the rest of their offense—from Mallett to Manningham and Arrington to Boren—gave them a shaky outlook for their senior season. Like everyone else, they did not come to Michigan to be mediocre, and they were genuinely concerned that, with all the changes and departures, they might end their careers that way.

Since Schembechler had posted that famous sign in 1969, the promise at Michigan was straightforward: Those who stay will be champions. But these seniors
had
stayed, and their odds of winning their first Big Ten title that year looked pretty slim. If they fell short, they would be only the second senior class since 1969 to leave without a ring, and the first since 1996. This was not the deal they had signed up for.