Three and Out (22 page)

Needless to say, the first part of Magee's quote, which was very out of character for the warm, friendly, and optimistic man, made the rounds—and then it made a few more, once Rodriguez's critics and defenders started knocking it back and forth.

Even though Rodriguez hadn't said it, it inevitably came back to him, fueling a criticism gaining traction that he frequently blamed his players for his mistakes. If you listened to everything he told his players, you would conclude, without hesitation, that this simply wasn't true. He constantly urged them not to point fingers at anyone else, and after every loss he always told the players at least once, “That's coaching. That's me.”

Likewise, if you added up all his press conferences, you'd find he almost always took responsibility and almost never blamed his players there, either.

The problem, however, was the crucial qualifier: “almost.” In Morgantown, Rodriguez had earned a reputation as a buck-stops-here kind of guy. But at Michigan, he could say the right thing ninety-nine times, but if the hundredth came off as a knock or an excuse, it shocked the faithful, who were accustomed to Coach Carr taking full blame for the Appalachian State game, with no ifs, ands, or buts. The attention Rodriguez's off-kilter comments received set up the expectation of more, until everything he said was filtered to find the gaffe.

Example: When one MGoBlog reader came across the quote “I was prepared for some attrition when I became Michigan's coach. I can honestly say we did not lose a guy who really could have helped us. I didn't lose any sleep over anyone who quit that spring,” his first response was, “Gee, I really wish RichRod had said this in a nicer way, because it seems awfully rude to the people who left.” Then he took a closer look and realized the quote was not from Rodriguez but from Schembechler's last book, talking about the spring of 1969. How things were interpreted at times seemed to depend less on what was said than who said it—and who was doing the interpreting.

But Rodriguez's occasional pleas to be patient while they “rebuilt the program” didn't help, either.

What he was saying was pretty straightforward, especially from a coach's point of view: Whenever a new regime comes in, everybody has to learn to do everything a new way. In Michigan's case, Rodriguez felt they needed to transform how they recruited and trained, to get the right people doing the right things for his system. It was also true that Michigan hadn't beaten the best in years, losing their last four games to the Buckeyes and their last three BCS games, while West Virginia—stocked with two- and three-star recruits—had won BCS bowls in 2006 and 2008 (a few weeks after Rodriguez left) and gone five-of-five against the SEC.

Looked at that way, Rodriguez had a point—similar to the one Dierdorf had made to the current players in February 2008, when he told them their opponents were no longer afraid of Michigan.

It echoed what former All-American center turned attorney Tom Dixon told me on the sidelines before one of the games in 2009. “When I was here, we always had two or three classes of players who'd won Big Ten titles. It was simple: The coaches told you, ‘Just do what the seniors are doing.' That's all. The thing didn't run itself, but they didn't have to reinvent the wheel every year, either.

“Not one guy out here has won a Big Ten title. They don't know what it's like, they don't know what it takes. That's what they need now. Win one title, and everyone
knows—
and you're over the hump. From then on, you tell the freshmen, ‘Just do what they do.'”

But it's one thing for former Michigan All-Americans to say those things privately. It's quite another for the transplanted coach to say them publicly. To some alums, it sounded like a century of unequaled tradition—from “The Victors” to the Big House to the banner to those forty-two conference titles, the most of any school in any league—wasn't good enough, and Rodriguez felt he had to start from scratch.

This problem, at least, was easily solved: stop saying that.

And that's exactly what Bill Martin advised him to do. Martin's subordinates said two negative e-mails were enough for him to reconsider almost anything, and he once stopped by Rodriguez's office after a tough loss to tell him a regent had complained about his use of the word “ain't.” So when he received some feedback saying Rodriguez's “rebuilding” comment had ruffled their feathers, Martin promptly paid another visit. For a man frequently criticized for not helping Rodriguez win over the Wolverines faithful, this time his advice was spot-on. But for some reason, on this point Rodriguez—who as a baby was stubborn enough to hold his breath until he passed out—refused to drop the phrase permanently from his repertoire, angering the Carr crowd every time he said it.

“Bill says you don't need to
rebuild
a program here at Michigan,” Rodriguez told me. “But we do! But I knew from West Virginia never to make any comparisons with the way it was done before—I always tell our players never to say anything we do is
better
, just
different
—I didn't then and I'm not doing that now.”

Rodriguez sincerely believed this, and he had often bitten his tongue about the state the program was in when he arrived. But he had let slip enough comments that the average fan would disagree with his assessment of his restraint.

And, as was often the case, the man who suffered for it more than anyone else—albeit all out of proportion to the crime—was Rich Rodriguez.

If Rodriguez's trusting nature was his Achilles' heel in negotiations, his candor was his downfall in public relations. The sealed-lips approach Carr had made famous in the Fort Schembechler era might have been boring, but it rarely generated distracting controversies.

At the coaches' meeting the following morning, Rodriguez let himself and his coaches have it. He knew they were in Phase One, he knew they knew they had a very inexperienced offense, and he knew recruiting would be the key. He'd been through it all before. But enough was enough.

“We just got outworked, outplayed, and outcoached,” he said, sitting at the end of the long meeting table. “Everything. And now we have to get their spirits up. This is getting
old
!”

The defense was especially puzzling. The experienced group was supposed to be the strength of the team, but it didn't seem to be getting better. Rodriguez, who had hired Shafer virtually sight unseen, wasn't sure what was happening, or
wasn't
happening, on that side of the ball—Was it the players? Was it the coaching?—but he would be watching all of it more carefully in the days ahead.

Rodriguez had also decided they had a better chance to be aggressive with his favored 3-3-5 defense than with the more conventional 4-3-4 that Shafer used, and insisted it be installed for the upcoming game against Purdue.

But it was more than defensive schemes that were bothering him.

“Something is fundamentally messed up. This is the eighth game of the damn year, and we're still doing basic things
wrong
. Either we're
coaching
them to do the wrong things, or we're
letting
them do the wrong things. Either way, I'm getting my nose in it. You can call it micromanaging if you want, but if I've got to, I'll get into every damn position.

“We're going over every damn play today—offense, defense, and special teams—and I'm going to tell you one more time exactly what I expect from you and your players. There won't be a
lick
of doubt when we leave this room today.”

And that's exactly what they did. They watched play after play after play, every single one of them. And they didn't just watch them but went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, stopping, commenting, and correcting each and every one. It took the coaches three hours to finish this grueling exercise, after which they finally escaped into the well-lit hallway, rubbing their eyes like they'd just finished an FBI interrogation.

A few hours later, Rodriguez gave the team a similar message.

“Because shit runs downhill, it ran on your coaches today,” he told them in the team room. “I was all over them. And this is something I don't share with anyone else because it ain't nobody's business but ours, but you've got to know that everyone is held accountable. Always. And when we're not doing our jobs the way we should be on the field, your coaches hear about it—and so do I, every day.

“Everyone's asking me, ‘You're 2–6, are you gonna change your approach? Whatya gonna do differently?'

“Whatya gonna do differently? You guys know me pretty well by now. Whatya think? And the answer is:
nothing.
”

Here he was obliquely addressing the frequent criticism that he should have waited until he had the right players before installing the spread. When I asked him about this, he replied, “The players always struggle at first. But if we tried something else, then
no one
would know what the heck's going on. Is that better?”

In fact, the adapt-to-your-talent argument is largely a canard, one rarely made by experienced coaches. Football is now so complicated that just learning a new offensive or defensive system usually takes more than a year, and few coaches are allowed much more than that if they plan on keeping their jobs. So trying to teach your players one system, then the other, is a waste of valuable time and risks confusing your players and possibly your assistants, too. Yes, coaches can adapt their play calling—witness Rodriguez's shift from running to passing when he went from Jed Drenning at Glenville State to Shaun King at Tulane—but they cannot easily adapt their
systems.

“We're not going to start having picnics or hit every day,” he continued, “and I ain't trading you in, either. I'd still rather have you guys than their guys. We're just going to do what we
know
how to do like we
know
how to do it! That's it!”

They would have been thrilled to win the next four games, including Ohio State, and get back to a bowl game, but that's not why Rodriguez was taking this tack. He was a realist about the odds they were facing. What he was insistent on, however, was that they get rid of some bad habits, develop some better ones, and become a better team by 2009. He also wanted to determine which players were all in and which weren't.

Of course, Rodriguez had directed this play before. As usual, the older players didn't like the tougher conditioning regimen or the intensity of the coaching.

One change none of them liked was the new Sunday schedule. At West Virginia, the players didn't complain to Rodriguez about coming down for a meeting or weightlifting, then going home for an hour or two off before returning for an evening practice. The upside was getting Mondays off.

But when Rodriguez brought the same schedule they had followed in Morgantown to Michigan, some of the players grumbled to outsiders about it.

It was bad scheduling. But as the 2008 season wore on, Rodriguez reduced the Sunday schedule until it was a simple walk-through, and changed it altogether before the 2009 season. But some things weren't going to change, including the intensity of their new coaches.

If some of the players found Rodriguez and Barwis shocking, that was true about Bear Bryant at Texas A&M and Alabama, Woody Hayes at Miami and Ohio State, and Bo Schembechler at Michigan. It is the well-worn formula for just about every football movie ever made.

But, as Rodriguez said in the coaches' meeting, “something is fundamentally messed up.” He sensed that something was different this time, though he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Rodriguez knew he didn't have all the seniors. That was typical, too, of this phase and mirrored his first year at West Virginia. But he didn't realize that many of them were still meeting regularly with associate athletic director Lloyd Carr across the parking lot. You could certainly argue this was normal, even healthy. Most of the seniors had a deep and abiding affection for their former coach, which Carr reciprocated. Depending on what was said, the meetings could very well have been helpful to Rodriguez and the team. But a reasonable inference could be drawn from what Carr was saying on behalf of Rodriguez in public: nothing. With just a handful of brief exceptions, he avoided the press, the alums, and the subject altogether.

The only model Michigan had of welcoming an outsider into the fold was too old for anybody in the building to remember: the transfer of power from Bump Elliott to Bo Schembechler almost forty years earlier. Elliott is an erudite, modest Midwesterner—who happened to be a celebrated All-American—who rarely swore or even yelled, and if you said you were hurt, that was enough for him. Schembechler yelled, screamed, and swore like a sailor. He grabbed your face mask, literally kicked you in the ass, and cracked your backside with a yardstick—and his were special models, twice as thick and four feet long. He also drew a distinction between being “hurt” and being “injured.” The latter was serious and got you medical attention. The former was just pain, and if you missed a practice because of it, you got left in Ann Arbor when the team flew to Minnesota in 1969.

Needless to say, the players who had come to Michigan to play for Elliott, not this raving madman, were less than enthusiastic. It was the casual attitude of thirty or forty players, mostly walk-ons suddenly walking off, that prompted Schembechler to put up his famous sign,
THOSE WHO STAY WILL BE CHAMPIONS
.

But before they were champions, some of them went to see their former coach, Bump Elliott, who had stayed on as the assistant athletic director, to complain about the new guy.

“If he wanted to,” Schembechler said in
Bo's Lasting Lessons
, “Bump could have made life very difficult for me. Hell, he could have set me up for failure. His players loved him, really loved him—and remember, that first year I was coaching all
his
players. I was an outsider, they didn't owe me anything, and it wasn't like I was making life easy for them, either. Bump was a former Michigan All-American, and a whole lot nicer than I was! They could have complained to him—he was still working in the athletic office—and I bet some of them tried, but he would have none of it. He made it clear to everyone that he was on my side.”