Three and Out (6 page)

Quarterback Jed Drenning was so bruised from all those sacks that he begged his coach to use the shotgun formation. Drenning didn't know it, of course, but he was talking to the right guy. Rodriguez had been thinking about using the shotgun on every play since his conversation with Coach Weir on the high school sidelines. The Monday before the game against Wingate, Rodriguez surprised his quarterback by asking, “How often do you want to run out of the gun?”

“Coach, I'll run the clock out in the gun if you want.”

Rodriguez nodded. Ideas that had been knocking around in his head for years started coming together. He thought back to his days as a defensive back and asked himself: What was the toughest thing to defend? The answer came to him in a snap: the two-minute drill.

Rodriguez surprised Drenning when he took it to its logical extreme: “Let's see if we can do that the whole game.” They would skip the huddle, go to a shotgun snap on every play, put four or five receivers on the field, spread them out as far as they could, and throw the ball all over the place—and keep it up for sixty minutes.

Like Army in 1945, Wingate still won—but barely, escaping 17–15.

Using their never-ending two-minute drill, the Pioneers won three of their last four games. Rodriguez was onto something.

“Whatever incarnation of Rich's offense exists today,” Drenning told Tim Layden, “it was born that day when we played Wingate. And he turned the place around pretty quickly after that.”

During a routine practice the next season, in 1992, Drenning inadvertently provided another piece of the puzzle for his coach, who was smart enough to recognize it when he saw it.

As Tim Layden recounts in his excellent book
Blood, Sweat and Chalk
, Drenning bobbled the snap and failed to hand the ball to the running back in time. Normally when this happens, the quarterback simply follows the running back to salvage what he can, but Drenning noticed that the backside defensive end had already started bolting down the line to tackle the running back, whom he thought had the ball. Drenning decided to go in the opposite direction, to the spot where the backside defensive end had started—which was now completely vacant.

Rodriguez blew the whistle. But he wasn't mad. He was curious. “Why did you do that?”

“Do what?” asked Drenning.

“Why did you run
that
way?”

“The end pinched,” Drenning said, though he could have just as easily quoted Wee Willie Keeler: “I hit 'em where they ain't.”

Every football coach in the country has seen his quarterback bobble a snap and run the wrong way on a broken play. And thousands of those quarterbacks probably did so for the same reason Drenning did. But not every coach had the curiosity to ask why and the insight to recognize what he'd just seen and heard for what it could be.

In fact, only one coach did: Rich Rodriguez.

*   *   *

Yost didn't invent the forward pass, of course. But when he saw Benny Friedman toss pass after pass to the sure-handed Bennie Oosterbaan, he knew they were going to change the game.

Likewise, Layden points out that Rodriguez was not the first coach to use the run and shoot with the shotgun, but he was almost certainly the first to come up with the zone read, in which the quarterback is a potential ball carrier, forcing the defensive end to cover him or chase the tailback. Spread them out, and the defender simply can't cover both.

Another secret was changing the way his quarterback gave out the ball. Instead of simply sticking it into the runner's gut, or faking it by holding the ball while putting his empty hand against the runner's stomach, in Rodriguez's zone read, the quarterback holds the ball with two outstretched hands and places it against the runner's belly—and lets it ride for a few feet, like a swinging gate, while he watches to see if the end is following the runner or staying put.

If the defensive end stays put, the quarterback releases the ball, and the runner senses that it's time to clamp down on it—with one fewer defender to worry about. But if the end starts heading after the runner, the quarterback pulls the ball and runs where the end had started.

It is an elegant, simple solution to an age-old problem that any chess player can appreciate. When you have eleven players and your opponent does, too, how do you gain an advantage? Knocking one of them over is one way, but it takes a lot of effort, you can always miss, and unless your guys are a lot bigger and stronger than the other guys, it probably won't work very often. But with the zone read, you force the defender to tip his hand first, and if you read his movement correctly—which any decent high school quarterback can do—you have successfully removed him from the play.

A pianist has eighty-eight keys at his disposal, and a chess master has sixteen pieces—and both of them must use their limited arsenal in ways no one has thought of before. A football coach has only eleven players, but on that fall day, on a scruffy practice field in Glenville, West Virginia, fifteen miles from the interstate to nowhere, Rich Rodriguez figured out a way to eliminate a defensive player without even touching him.

No one knew it yet, but the game had changed forever.

With this new key, the Pioneers started unlocking defenses that had been impenetrable just two years before.

“The defense didn't know what we were going to do next,” Rodriguez said, “and they were chasing their tails, gasping for air. They had to respond to
us.
Given our record the previous year, that really impressed me.”

While Rodriguez and his staff were still learning how their new weapon worked, they soon realized that it forced the opponent's defense to spread out, too. And once they did that, they couldn't help but show you how they planned to defend your play before you even snapped the ball—and not just the ends, either, but the linebackers, the corners, and the safeties, too.

This gave the Pioneers a great advantage, but only if they were smart enough to recognize it. The coaches started teaching their quarterbacks to look where the defenders were setting up and, based mainly on that information, call the play seconds before the snap. Once they got the hang of it, they could not only make the defensive ends chase the wrong guy but also send three or four defenders so far off the scent, they were no more dangerous than rusty tackling sleds sitting in the middle of the field.

That's when Drenning “started picking them apart,” Rodriguez recalled. “
That
was fun!”

Even if the quarterback didn't make a complete read on the defense, or if the defense caught on to at least part of the joke being played on it, Rodriguez still held an advantage. If he could simply force all the defenders to cover all his players—including, crucially, the quarterback—he could make the defense play man-to-man against his receivers. That might not sound like much of an edge on paper, but when you consider that the receiver knows where he is going
and
where and when the ball is coming, it's a considerable advantage over the defender, who can only guess at all three questions.

It
is
like chess, with a catch: You get only three seconds to make your move, the opponent's pieces can weigh up to three hundred pounds, and if you make the wrong move, they'll smash you into the ground. If just one player blew his assignment, not only was the advantage instantly lost, but the ball carrier—usually the fleet-footed quarterback or a speedy little slot receiver—was badly exposed to getting blown up by a big, angry defender who was not going to pass up his chance to hurt the little guy who'd been making him look dumb all day. So, for Rodriguez and his system, being “all in” wasn't merely a motto; it was a necessity. By all accounts, he was not notably tolerant of missed assignments.

Off the field, Rodriguez was tougher. Commitment on the field started with commitment to the program, which entailed a commitment to being at Glenville—not the easiest sell. Dissension in the ranks at any level threatened the efficacy of the spread. “You got to remember these guys who came in who were outstanding athletes but didn't like Glenville,” said Ike Morris, a local millionaire who bought the team a new field, “Rich got 'em out. Didn't care how good they were. This is very important about this guy, and one of those many qualities that endeared [him to me].”

“Being a good player, for Rich, was not a hall pass,” said George, and he knew of what he spoke. More than once, the record-breaking receiver found himself running the hill behind the stadium for missing just one class. “After I graduated, I helped out at Fairmont [State University], and being good there was a hall pass. Good players got preferential treatment, which is usually how it is. Not Coach Rod. I think the world of him.

“You almost want to say he
demands
you're going to win. He instills it. All he needs is guys buying in—and it's over.”

*   *   *

When Rodriguez started coaching, he spent his summers working at a camp run by Florida State University's head coach, Bobby Bowden, who told him, “When you're trying to build a program, you go through four stages: You lose big, you lose close, you win close, and finally you start winning big.”

And that, he said, is how you build a program.

Rodriguez's first year at Glenville State, they mastered the lose big stage. His second year, after they started using the shotgun snap on every play, they learned how to lose close—witness the near-upset over Wingate—and win a few close ones, too, finishing with a 4–5–1 record. Rodriguez's third year, the Pioneers got the hang of winning close, going 6–4.

And by his fourth year, 1993, just as Bowden had promised, they started winning big—
very
big—beating up teams by scores like 45–0, 50–0, and 57–0, the last a whitewashing of former nemesis West Virginia State, the team that had crushed Drenning two years earlier. Fielding Yost himself would have been impressed.

“That year, it all came together,” George recalled. “You didn't have guys who weren't bought in, quitting and falling off. We were all
his
guys.”

The Pioneers had a tenacious defense and strong special teams, too, but the foundation was finding and developing the right players for this new offensive system.

“Jed Drenning was perfect for it,” Rodriguez said. “He threw for more than ten thousand yards! You still see his name in all the record books. And the guy he was throwing to, Chris George, broke some of Jerry Rice's records. Four hundred and thirty catches in his career, and 144 in
one season.
”

To put that in perspective, Anthony Carter, the three-time All-American receiver who shattered just about every Michigan receiving record a decade earlier, caught 161 passes in his entire collegiate career.

“Those guys were posting just ridiculous numbers,” Rodriguez said, “Ridiculous. We had a hell of a team.”

*   *   *

The Pioneers won their league title that year, 1993, with a 6–1 conference mark and took a 9–2 overall record into the NAIA national semifinal game.

The bad news: They would have to face Central State Ohio, a powerhouse. Most teams at that level might have fifteen to twenty-five scholarships to give out. Glenville State had nine, while Central State Ohio had ninety-nine, fourteen more than Michigan, Notre Dame, or any other Division I school, which are limited to eighty-five. Central State used theirs to get Division I players who might have gotten in trouble here or there, or didn't want to sit out a year after transferring.

To say they were loaded is to put it lightly. Their quarterback, Charles Thompson, had started at Oklahoma—the Sooners, that is—but got in trouble with the law and had to resort to the NAIA. They also put two defensive linemen in the NFL, one of whom, Hugh Douglas, would become a first-round draft pick, the Rookie of the Year, a three-time Pro Bowler, and a ten-year veteran. It would be men against boys.

The Pioneers had home field, but their stadium was too small to hold the fans, so they moved the game just down the road to Summersville High School. On game day in late November, “it was a monsoon!” Arleen Rodriguez remembered. “No umbrella could save you that day!”

On the first play, Hugh Douglas all but obliterated the Pioneer ball carrier. “I remember going back to the huddle,” George said, “and thinking, ‘That didn't end well.'”

But Rodriguez's spread offense was still so new that no one else was using it, so it was hard to prepare for the Pioneers. Glenville State didn't score much, but they controlled the ball as well as Central State—well enough to pull off the upset, 13–12.

Rodriguez's players were ecstatic and dumped the water jug on him.

“Rich
dove
in that mud after they won!” Arleen said.

“That was about as happy as I've ever felt coaching,” he said. “Yeah, we were living in a small town, working at a small school, and playing in a small league. But it didn't
feel
any smaller. So that win's as good as it gets for me. It was the culmination of everything we'd been working for.”

 

3   CHANGING OVERNIGHT

After Canham stepped down in 1988, Schembechler accepted the post. But because he was still coaching, President James Duderstadt assigned former campus administrator Jack Weidenbach to assistant AD.

When Weidenbach asked Canham, an old friend, about Duderstadt's offer, Canham said, “Jack, there is no way you're qualified for the job as athletic director at this school or any other school at this level. This is not some backwater high school situation. Someone must be kidding.”

They weren't, but it didn't seem to matter at the time.

When the Big Ten presidents voted Penn State into the conference in 1990 without even informing their athletic directors they were going to do so, “I knew right then and there that the old days were over, when an athletic director was expected to run his department,” Schembechler told me. “That did it for me. I knew I was out that day.”