Three and Out (9 page)

“Oh, that? I thought I might surprise 'em. Honestly, why do you always have to second-guess my decisions?”

“Honey, I just want to
understand.
”

“That's her fallback line,” Rich said. “Hard to argue with that. But man, I already endured three press conferences the day we lost that game, and here's my fourth, three weeks later. And my wife is always the toughest.”

But there was a bigger point: Like all good gamblers, Rodriguez was smart enough to learn his lesson, but strong enough not to be paralyzed by the setback.

*   *   *

Back in Morgantown, on November 4, 2000, Don Nehlen announced he would be retiring at the end of the year. He had delivered twenty-one very good years for West Virginia, breaking just about every coaching record they had, and bringing them to the brink of the school's first national title twice.

About that time, Arleen Rodriguez was sitting in the Clemson stands next to Ann Bowden—Bobby's wife and Tommy's mom—and mentioned that Rich had always wanted to be the coach at West Virginia, where Ann's husband had coached and two of her sons had played in the 1970s.

“I'll never forget it,” Arleen recalled. “She turned right to me, and she said, ‘Honey, you go right home and talk him out of it. They're gonna break his heart and hurt him. I'm telling you that right now.'

“‘Oh, we have lots of friends there.'

“‘Honey, listen to me. Our boys went to high school there and played for Bobby and it didn't matter. They hung him in effigy. You don't know what you're getting into.'”

Arleen would have reason to remember that.

*   *   *

Chris Scelfo would go 37–57 at Tulane, never finishing higher than fifth in Conference USA, proving once again that college football is an objective meritocracy for the players, but a club for the coaches, at least when it comes to getting hired. Rodriguez was learning all this the hard way, so he knew—as much as they loved Clemson—if he got a call from West Virginia, where he had lots of support, he'd better take it.

The athletic director, Eddie Pastilong, had promised Nehlen that he would be able to name his successor. But while he was making that promise to Nehlen, he was calling Glenville and West Virginia booster Ike Morris to get his views on Rich Rodriguez. (Pastilong did not respond to requests for an interview.)

“You got to look at him,” Morris said. “He's won everywhere he went. If you can win here at Glenville, you can win
anywhere
!”

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, Pastilong announced that West Virginia was hiring Rich Rodriguez to lead the Mountaineers.

This came as news to Nehlen, who had promised his assistant coaches they would all have jobs after he left—the same promise Schembechler had made to his staff when he retired.

“Naturally I was a little disappointed that the administration didn't look at one or two of my guys a little closer,” he told me. “But I knew Rich was a very strong candidate, and he was very well connected here, and it's a very political state. They love their own. The governor was from right down the road from Rich's hometown. [Rich] was connected with the AD, and he got the job. But he had good credentials, no question about that.”

In the Music City Bowl, Nehlen's last game, the Mountaineers whipped up on Mississippi 49–38 and put their old coach on their shoulders on the way out—a fitting send-off.

*   *   *

After fifteen years of sacrificing to achieve his childhood dream, Rodriguez had finally become a Division I head coach—at his alma mater, no less. He had arrived.

It looked like his path was paved with gold. The home fans were basking in the return of a native son, one who had played and coached for the Mountaineers, then had gone off to figure out his fancy new offense before his triumphant return to an adoring public.

Rodriguez quickly discovered that the job came with some unexpected perks. People in West Virginia will tell you the Mountaineers' head football coach is more powerful than their governor. “Only one person was ever bigger than the head coach,” Arleen said, “and that was [U.S. senator] Robert C. Byrd.” But some say that's not true: Even Byrd wasn't bigger.

A few months after Rodriguez took over, without any notice whatsoever, the dirt road in Grant Town he had walked on all those pitch-black nights after basketball games suddenly got paved.

Arleen called her son to say, “Thank you!”

“Don't thank me,” he said. “I didn't even know they were doing that.”

That spring, and again without notice, a sign went up in Rodriguez's hometown.

WELCOME TO GRANT TOWN

HOME OF RICH RODRIGUEZ, HEAD COACH

WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY MOUNTAINEERS

It looked like it was built to last.

He would need that support. In his first year, Rodriguez turned a 7–5 bowl champion team with seventeen returning starters into a 3–8 bottom feeder. Rodriguez was accustomed to bumpy starts—in fact, those were the only kind he knew—but that didn't mean everyone else was. Nehlen, for one, wasn't thrilled. “When I retired, my friends said, ‘You're crazy,' because we were going to be 8–3 or 9–2 the next year. We had great talent. But I knew it was easy to sit in the press box and criticize. It was water over the dam.”

It was more than just the losses, though, that separated the two regimes.

“Rich's coaching on the field was so much different than mine, especially after I'd been a head coach for twenty-one years,” Nehlen said. “When you know you're about to step down, you're a little mellower, I guess would be the term. Going from me in my last year to Rich—well, he was such a shock to our guys, they didn't know how to take it. A lot of them rebelled. I could tell just from watching the field that they weren't playing for him.”

But Nehlen knew what Bump Elliott had done for Bo Schembechler, refusing to talk to his former players who were eager to complain about the new coach, and supporting Schembechler every chance he had, publicly and privately. Nehlen also knew just how much Schembechler appreciated Elliott's class and loyalty to the day he died. So, when Nehlen's former players tried to complain to him about the new guy, he told them if they had a problem, they had to talk to their coach—not him.

*   *   *

Rodriguez's second year didn't start off much better. In their fifth game, the 3–1 Mountaineers got humiliated 48–17 by rival Maryland. They had reason to fear that their upcoming seven-game Big East schedule—the same one that had given them a 1–6 record the year before—could crush them again.

But that's when Bobby Bowden's prophecy—you lose big, you lose close, you win close, and then you win big—proved true once more. The Mountaineers took six of their next seven games, the only loss coming to first-ranked Miami. Along the way, West Virginia knocked off number thirteen Virginia Tech and number seventeen Pittsburgh, earning West Virginia a top-fifteen ranking itself. The 1–6 to 6–1 conference records marked the greatest turnaround in the history of the Big East, which named Rodriguez Coach of the Year.

Rodriguez had dodged disaster—and an early departure. But winning came with a price, too.

Perhaps only Louisiana State University, during the reign of Governor Huey Long, could claim such a close relationship between the state's flagship university and its state capital. During Long's one term in the Governor's Mansion, from 1928 to 1932, he picked LSU's president, he doubled LSU's enrollment, he quadrupled the size of its marching band, he wrote some of the songs the band plays to this day, and he even designed a play he wanted the football team to run.

Rodriguez's relationship with Governor Joe Manchin was at least as strange.

“It must have been 2005,” recalled businessman, booster, and Rodriguez friend Matt Jones. He and Rodriguez were playing golf at the Pete Dye Golf Club in Bridgeport, about forty-five minutes from Morgantown; the club also served as the boosters' base of operations. “We're on the third or fourth tee, and he gets a call on his cell phone. We don't know who it is.

“At first he's walking far behind the tee, trying to be quiet, but then he starts screaming. ‘This is bullshit! Why don't
you
run the government and
I
run the football team!'”

“What the hell was that?”

“Damn it,” Rodriguez said. “He's going to make us play Marshall.”

The “he” in question turned out to be Governor Joe Manchin, who had grown up in Farmington, just a few miles from Grant Town, and first met Rodriguez when he was a teenager working in Manchin's carpet store down the street. Manchin had made a campaign promise in 2004 that, if elected, he would get Marshall on West Virginia's schedule. “And that got him the southern vote,” where Marshall is located, Jones said.

The Marshall backers had been begging for the game for years. After Marshall's team plane crashed in 1970 (inspiring the movie
We Are Marshall
, starring Matthew McConaughey), Marshall posted the fewest wins of any major college team the rest of that decade. But they notched the most victories in the 1990s, when Chad Pennington was throwing to Randy Moss. The fans down there were clamoring for a game against their big brothers in Morgantown, who had little to gain and a lot to lose.

Over Rodriguez's private protests, Manchin set up an unconventional three-game series, with the 2006 and 2008 contests to be played in Morgantown, and 2007 in Huntington. Whoever won two out of three would host the game in 2009—with a few hundred thousand in the balance, putting even more pressure on the nineteen-year-old kickers. In 2006, the Mountaineers won big, 42–10, but in 2007, on a blazing-hot day at Marshall's smaller stadium, West Virginia was losing 13–6 at halftime.

Manchin, standing on the sideline near Matt Jones, said, “Boy, isn't this a beautiful day in West Virginia!”

“Governor,” Jones said, “you better hope West Virginia wins.”

“Why's that?”

“Because if they don't, you'll never win another election.”

What would be a joke in almost any other state was probably a fair prediction in West Virginia. The Mountaineers pulled ahead 48–23 and remained undefeated.

Joe Manchin was reelected in 2008 with 70 percent of the vote. Huey Long would have tipped his hat.

After Rodriguez's rough start, the Mountaineers ran off three good marks of 9–4, 8–4, and 8–4, capturing two Big East titles. In 2005, Rodriguez's fifth season, the Mountaineers started winning big, just as Bobby Bowden would have predicted.

The Mountaineers' 2005 conference title and 10–1 overall record earned them a berth in the 2006 Sugar Bowl. But that meant they had to face the eighth-ranked, SEC-champion Georgia Bulldogs. And, because of Hurricane Katrina, the Sugar Bowl moved the game for that year only to the Georgia Dome, right in the Bulldogs' backyard.

Adding to the pressure, the Big East had fared poorly in BCS games. It had never qualified a second-place team for an at-large bid, and had won only three of seven BCS games. Worse, Miami had won all three, then left the Big East for the ACC in 2004. There was serious talk about the Big East losing its automatic BCS invitation.

Finally, all that pressure would fall on the shoulders of three freshman: quarterback Pat White, tailback Steve Slaton, and wide receiver Darius Reynaud. When Las Vegas called the Mountaineers double-digit underdogs, that seemed about right.

“That's one of those games,” Rodriguez said, “when you're looking around during warm-ups, going, ‘Wooo—I'm losing confidence!' But I could tell our guys were dialed in, because in our last three days of practice we didn't have a single MA [missed assignment]. They were ready.”

The freshmen listened to their coach, not Las Vegas, fearlessly leading the Mountaineers to a mind-blowing 28–0 lead early in the second quarter. But the Bulldogs' comeback was just as impressive, cutting the lead to 38–35.

With just 1:26 left in the game, and the Mountaineers facing fourth-and-6 near midfield, Rodriguez contemplated the most courageous call of his career: a fake punt. But after he floated the idea to his assistants on the headsets, they went quiet. Rodriguez thought perhaps they had lost the connection. “Hello? Hello!”

“Sorry, Coach,” one finally said. “We're not making that call.”

Rodriguez, once again trusting his gambler's instincts, put his chips in.

Punter Phil Brady took the snap, hesitated long enough to let his teammates run down the field and draw the Bulldogs out of the way, then took off through the left side of the line for a 10-yard gain—more than enough for the first down needed to seal the upset.

“That fake punt, that was a gutsy call,” Nehlen said. “That won the game and solidified Rich here.” Just as Nehlen's shocking 41–27 upset over the ninth-ranked Sooners at Oklahoma in 1982 established Nehlen as the new leader of the Mountaineers, “the Georgia game really made [Rich] what he was in West Virginia.”

Reynaud scored two touchdowns, Slaton scored the other three, running for a Sugar Bowl–record 204 yards, and Pat White won the first of four straight bowl games. The freshmen had come through.

The upset also saved the Big East's seat at the BCS's big-boy table, it confirmed Rich Rodriguez's status as the hottest young coach in America, and it bolstered his belief that instead of seeking a bigger stage, he could turn West Virginia into one.

It also, perversely, increased the tension with his bosses.

“Rich was without a doubt an icon here,” said Dave Alvarez, another booster, “and he could have been the Bo Schembechler of Morgantown. But you also have to have support. After the 2006 Sugar Bowl, you'd think Eddie [Pastilong] would be right there giving him a big hug and saying, ‘You're awesome!' But Eddie didn't say anything. You could feel it. I think that's when the conflict started.” Pastilong was conspicuously absent from the postgame party.