Three and Out (45 page)

You'd think each position coach would recruit the players who play his position, but in the cross-country, six-week sprint that is the final leg of recruiting season, assigning each coach a territory is far more efficient. This creates the somewhat odd scenario of quarterback coach Rod Smith recruiting defensive lineman Richard Ash, receivers coach Tony Dew recruiting defensive back Sean Parker, and offensive coordinator Calvin Magee recruiting safety Demar Dorsey. Then the position coaches hope like hell the guy assigned to recruit their future players comes through.

Chris Singletary, Michigan's recruiting coordinator, who looked as though he'd aged ten years in the last month, walked in with a cell phone in his hand.

“Demar's dad,” he whispered to Magee. Singletary handed the phone to Magee, then collapsed in a chair, equal parts fatigued and anxious. “This is my Rose Bowl,” Singletary said, which was no small thing from a man who played in one, beating Washington State to win Michigan's first national title in a half century. “But if we get that one fax from Demar, it's my National Championship, my Super Bowl, and my Pro Bowl all wrapped into one. That'd be bigger than my
wedding
day!”

“Don't tell your wife that,” one coach cracked.

“Oh, she knows,” he said. “She's with the program.”

Magee spoke to Dorsey's father in a calm, soothing voice. “No, no. No problem. Always happy to talk with you.” He listened for almost a minute. “I understand. This is a hard decision. But don't let anyone get into your head at the last minute. I got my cell phone right there. You can call me anytime. Okay. Sure. All right. We're right here.”

All eyes were on Magee, who said, “I told him, ‘You fax us your letter first,
then
you do your press conference at one!'”

“Dorsey's a five-star, and a
real
five-star,” Greg Frey said. “ESPN's got him ranked number twelve player overall nationwide, and I think that's about right. You know when you're a D-back in Southern Florida, you can cover some guys, because they have the best receivers in the country.”

Tony Gibson dragged a desk chair into the copy room so he could babysit the fax machine three feet away. Nothing, but nothing, would be left to chance on this day.

“This is like game day, man,” Gibson said. “It's miserable.”

Secretary Mary Passink, who's worked for every Michigan head coach since Schembechler hired her in 1979, appeared in the doorway of the War Room.

“Big hand for Mary Passink, everybody!” They eagerly cheered for the woman who had fought through a four-hour traffic jam the night before to travel about twenty-five miles to Livonia, a Detroit suburb, just to get toner for the fax machine—which it turned out they didn't need anyway, but they were not taking chances.

“It's something every year,” Draper said. “You test everything the night before, then the fax machines jam, or they're not getting the signal, so you have to haul the one up from the training room. Always something.”

Just a few minutes past 7:00 a.m., Gibson opened the door to the War Room waving a freshly sent grainy fax. “Courtney Avery's in!” Avery was a three-star cornerback from Lexington, Ohio, whose commitment to Michigan was never much in doubt. But the nods around the table were vigorous. One-for-one. They were on the board.

At 7:54, Fred Jackson opened the door. “Dorsey just came in!”

“I need to see this!” said Gibson, who would be coaching Dorsey, and ran back to the copy room. He picked up the fax and admired it as though it were the Rosetta stone. He pointed to Dorsey's signature. “Right there, you've got the future of Michigan football's defense.”

Even Rodriguez left his office to examine the fax. He looked as tired as the rest, having gotten no sleep the night before, but he permitted himself a slight grin, then quickly recovered. “We're waiting on quite a few more,” he said. “One or two guys don't make a recruiting class. That's how they rank you, but that's not how you win. Takes a lot of guys to make a good team, and you're only as good as your weakest link.”

Another maxim: Fans follow stars; coaches count seniors. The flash and dash of a marquee player sells tickets, but the solid unsung heroes making tackles win games.

“We'll know in a few years what we have,” Rodriguez said.

Could Dorsey really be an impact player that fall?

“Did you see us last year?” Gibson replied.

With that gem in their hands, they could sit back and see if the news would leak before Dorsey's press conference at one that afternoon.

By 8:25, Rashad Knight had chosen Rutgers—which broke Rod Smith's heart; Smith had spent two years recruiting him—but almost all the other commitments had sent their faxes in, allowing their recruiters and future coaches to relax. A little.

Only a few questions remained, the biggest being Sean Parker, who would be holding a press conference on ESPN from Los Angeles at 10:00 eastern time. “He hasn't said anything to us,” said Tony Dews, who recruited him. “He wants the drama.”

They also still hadn't heard from Richard Ash, a four-star defensive tackle from Pahokee, who had told his recruiter, Rod Smith, “five times this week that he's coming, he's coming.” But without the fax in hand, it didn't mean anything. By 9:17, Fred Jackson retired to his office to start watching tape of the class of 2011. The interim between recruiting classes lasted exactly nine minutes.

Cory Zirbel, surfing the recruiting sites, laughed, then announced, “Rivals has Dorsey going to Florida State!”

“This is always the best part,” Mike Parrish said. “When everyone's saying some hotshot is going somewhere else, and you've got the fax in your hand. Now you just sit back and listen to all the BS until it's time for the press conference. Then you just smile.”

They killed the time by telling a few more war stories.

“Last night I was making love to my wife,” one coach said, on the condition of anonymity in the hopes of remaining married, “when the cell started buzzing. ‘Um, I need to get that.' Five minutes later, it goes off again. My wife says, ‘You need to get that?' ‘Um, yeah, is that cool?'”

There is no group of men anywhere in America who have more pressure to come through on Valentine's Day than college football coaches.

At 10:00, ESPN's full-blast signing day show started. They teased Michigan's coaches by running down the national scene, starting with the Florida Gators' 15 recruits in the top 150 overall. Michigan had two—Demar Dorsey and Devin Gardner.

Finally, they cut to Sean Parker's press conference. Parker, sitting at a table with his parents and with an unnamed adviser behind him, had three baseball hats in front of him: Michigan, Washington, and USC, in that order.

After a too-long preamble, Parker asked his adviser to pick the cap of the school he would be attending. He reached over Parker's shoulder and picked the purple hat with the “W” on the front, prompting the small group gathered there to cheer.

“Would somebody go make sure Dews hasn't got a rope?” Gibson asked the room. “He worked like hell for that guy. He had his mom, his coach. He had everybody.”

“Everybody except Sean, apparently,” another said. “And whoever that adviser is.”

The entire recruiting process now centered on just one player: defensive tackle Richard Ash.

By 10:30, Magee was restless. “I can't watch all this shit anymore.”

Even Gibson had had enough. “Go work out, C-Mag?”

“Sure, let's go.”

Twenty minutes later, while the coaches were starting their workouts, Richard Ash's fax slid into the tray.

Well before lunch, Michigan's 2010 recruiting class was complete. They had lost out on Sean Parker and Rashad Knight but had gotten everybody else on their list—six four-stars and twenty-one three-stars, some of whom could probably be counted on to help in the coming season. Dorsey alone elevated the class from good to very good—and when you considered that Michigan had finished dead last in the Big Ten in 2009, it was exceptional.

The four major recruiting services ranked Michigan's class from twentieth to tenth—which worked out to a twelfth overall ranking, behind only Penn State in the Big Ten.

The coaches also took solace in the fact that the two big fish that got away were not “public losses,” meaning only they knew Parker and Knight had at different times orally committed to Michigan before Washington and Rutgers pulled them away. Avoiding such public embarrassments matters greatly to college coaches.

And if they had to pick one of the three safeties to sign up with Michigan, Dorsey would win hands down.

“What we gained is greater than what we lost,” Dusty Rutledge said. “They say Dorsey could be another Woodson.”

After hosting a catered thank-you lunch in the Commons for the hundred or so people who had helped with the recruiting effort—from campus tour guides to hotel owners to pilots—Rodriguez and his entourage drove to the Junge Champions Center to conduct a press conference about their recruits.

They figured the tone of the event would be a rather matter-of-fact recitation of the recruiting class. But this was Rodriguez, this was the new media, this was Michigan football in 2010. No press conference could ever go that smoothly.

He ran through his twenty-seven recruits, starting with the seven who were already on campus, taking classes and working out with Barwis and company.

“Where are we lacking?” he asked rhetorically. “Last year we had only twenty-five scholarship players on defense, where normally you'd have between thirty-eight and forty-four.” So that, Rodriguez said, was clearly his team's most urgent need, and he felt this class would go a long way toward filling it.

When Rodriguez got to Demar Dorsey, he handled him no differently than the rest. “Demar Dorsey, defensive back out of Fort Lauderdale. He had been committed to another school for a long time, and he came open only in the last few weeks. We found out because he's Denard's cousin. Cal was his main recruiter, but Denard was a close second. Denard pointed out that he's 100 percent on his recruits.”

Mark Snyder of the
Free Press
asked if Rodriguez knew of Dorsey's arrests.

The smile left Rodriguez's face, but he was still composed. “Every guy we've recruited we've researched. We get to know them. We've been in their homes, and they've been up here. We get to know the whole story. We feel every guy we've recruited will be a whole fit, not just on the field but in the community.”

If Rodriguez believed that closed the issue, he was badly mistaken.

“Are you confident the charges were not true?”

“Anytime we look at a situation, there's more to the story than people understand. A guy's in the wrong place at the wrong time, then you have to look at why he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

More questions, more answers.

“There is no one on this team that has a felony conviction or a misdemeanor conviction.”

After a repeat question from another outlet about Dorsey's record, Rodriguez lost all humor and patience. He grabbed the podium, paused, and finally said, “It's amazing. We have such a great place here, we have such wonderful people, we have such a great university, and players who are working hard and doing a good job in school.”

The questions stopped, but Rodriguez had to know, when he left the podium, that any relief or joy he felt about this recruiting class would soon be wiped out by the stories that were certain to follow.

Sure enough, the next day the
Free Press
rolled out three pieces on Michigan's class: a scathing column by Drew Sharp, another column by legendary prep sportswriter Mick McCabe, and a big feature by Nicholas Cotsonika and Jim Schaefer.

Cotsonika had traveled to Florida to get some answers, and he returned with a thorough, thoughtful piece that was truly “fair and balanced.” From their story, you could understand why Dorsey represented a real risk, both academically and socially—one that previous Michigan coaches would likely have passed on—but also why Rodriguez might reasonably consider assuming it. It did not provide any final answers, giving the readers the information necessary to come up with their own.

But Cotsonika and Schaefer's fine work on that piece was soon overwhelmed by the cacophony of criticism for Dorsey and especially Rodriguez, who was depicted as running a renegade program with no feel for what Michigan represented.

A popular blog authored by a Florida fan, “Every Day Should Be Saturday,” provided another perspective: “The Michigan press is the polar opposite of SEC press corps, and we mean that in the good and bad way: not fawning, but also convinced there's a potential Watergate beneath that Gatorade bucket over there.'”

By the time the Demar Dorsey saga ran its course that summer, the coaches might have wished they had never landed him.

 

32   RALLIES AND REPORTS

After the 2009 season ended, businessman Pete Nichols approached Rodriguez about staging a “Victors' Rally” in late February to show his support for the coach and his program. So on Sunday, February 21, 2010, an estimated crowd of six hundred to seven hundred filled most of the lower level of the Michigan Theater. Rick Leach emceed the event, which lasted a couple hours and included a video of Michigan's teams under Schembechler, Moeller, and Carr.

Lloyd Carr himself did not attend, while Dave Brandon, who had been named Michigan's next athletic director on January 5, sat near the front but did not speak. It was an accurate symbol: He would not go out of his way to help Rodriguez, but he was not out to hurt him, either.

The supporters heard speeches from Jim Brandstatter, Frank Beckmann, Brandon Graham, and Larry Foote, who said, “I'm down there working out with Barwis. It's true what they say, he's a lunatic. [But] there's no cheating going on … They do it by the books. We do it right here. So stick with them—and Go Blue!”