Three and Out (2 page)

Despite the distractions and the seemingly nonstop negative nationwide publicity, the 2009 Wolverines, led by freshman quarterback Tate Forcier, started the season with four straight victories—including a thrilling last-minute win over Notre Dame—but then fell apart, going 1–7 the rest of the way, once again falling out of the bowl picture.

Wolverine Nation winced. How much of its pain derived from Rodriguez's 8–16 record at Michigan and how much from the taint of the NCAA's ongoing investigation was impossible to say. But when you added it all up, by the time we had that conversation in Rodriguez's office in July 2010, just about every sports outlet in the country had Rodriguez sitting squarely on the hottest seat in college football.

*   *   *

The opportunity to write this book popped up largely through dumb luck, and it's been luck—of all kinds—that has reshaped it every year since.

After graduating from Michigan, I taught history and coached hockey at Culver Academies in northern Indiana. One of my star students, Greg Farrall, went on to become an All–Big Ten defensive end at Indiana, before pursuing a career in finance. One of his colleagues, Mike Wilcox, just happened to be Rich Rodriguez's financial adviser. In 2008, when Farrall sent Wilcox my most recent book,
Bo's Lasting Lessons
, Wilcox asked if I'd be interested in following Rodriguez's first Michigan team at close range.

The idea was to publish a series of stories to a magazine, in the hope of turning them into a book coauthored with Rodriguez, similar to the one I wrote with Bo Schembechler in 2007. After that first season ended at 3–9, however, I came to two obvious conclusions: this story wasn't over, and I had to write it myself. A bit to my surprise, Rodriguez didn't think twice.

The deal we arrived at was simple: I would be granted unfettered access to the team's meals and meetings, practices and games—from the sidelines to the locker room—an almost unheard-of opportunity for any journalist. In exchange, Rodriguez would get to read the manuscript for factual accuracy, period, though I was under no obligation to agree to his suggested changes. I was free to report whatever I observed and experienced. It is fair to say that no one involved in this project had any idea what we were getting ourselves into, but to everyone's credit, no one ever tried to renege on the agreement.

Rodriguez never flinched, I believe, because he firmly believed he had nothing to hide and was willing to bet that a fair portrayal of him and his program, warts and all, would be a considerable improvement over the rumors and recriminations coming out of West Virginia after he left. Rodriguez thought it was a chance worth taking.

Of course, at that time it might not have seemed like that big a gamble. When I first met Rodriguez in August 2008, he said, “I've told my wife, Rita, that Charles Manson is also from West Virginia, and right now he's more popular than I am.”

As someone who has spent nearly two decades researching and writing about Michigan football, I found the offer especially enticing. I was born at University of Michigan Hospital, grew up in Ann Arbor, and earned two degrees from the school. After a couple of years away, I returned to Ann Arbor and started my writing career at the local paper, covering high school football games for fifty bucks a pop. I moved on to the
Detroit News
, where my position as a sports feature writer allowed me to produce longer pieces on, among other things, Michigan's 1996 NCAA-champion hockey team, its storied football stadium, and its resident living legend, Bo Schembechler.

Most reporters will tell you Michigan has done as good a job running a big-time college athletic department as has any school in the nation, but it surely has not been perfect. I was the first reporter to expose Fielding Yost's racist past and initiated the investigation into the Michigan basketball program, which culminated in serious NCAA sanctions. I wrote a feature piece for
The New York Times
in 1999 explaining how the very department that once stood for unequaled stability, achievement, and integrity was about to hire its fifth director in a decade, under the cloud of a $3.9 million deficit and investigations into its basketball program by the NCAA, the IRS, and even the FBI. “Michigan's problems run deep,” I wrote, “and the consequences will spread nationwide.”

I left the
Detroit News
in 1999 to freelance for magazines and write books, but I never thought I'd be writing one like this.

*   *   *

The book you have in your hands is not the book I expected to write.

I started out thinking I was writing
Rocky
—the small-town outsider who gets his shot on the big stage. By the middle of 2009, though, the story had morphed into something more akin to
The Shawshank Redemption
, and there was reason to wonder whether Rodriguez would ever be able to escape his detractors. But when Rich Rodriguez's tenure as Michigan's head football coach came to an end on Wednesday, January 5, 2011, I realized I was witness to the final moments of college football's
Titanic
. The unsinkable ship had just gone down.

Now the most pressing question is this: How did the game's hottest coach combine forces with the game's strongest program to produce three of the worst seasons in school history?

Many other questions, however, arose unexpectedly.

I thought I knew college football, and particularly Michigan football, as well as anyone. But after three years of seeing everything up close, I can tell you this unequivocally: I had no idea.

Looking at Michigan's past three seasons, it's not hard to divine dozens of management lessons—starting with the perils of arrogance on just about all fronts—but none of them would resolve college football's central conflict: It's a billion-dollar business whose revenues can fund entire athletic departments and whose leaders personify our biggest universities, but it's all built on the backs of stressed-out coaches and amateur athletes.

The contemporary college athletic department now resembles a modern racehorse: bigger, faster, and more powerful than ever but still supported by the same spindly legs that break with increasing frequency. Michigan's $226 million renovation of its stadium—already the largest in the country, and almost twice as big as many NFL stadiums—the spiraling salaries (Rodriguez made $2.5 million a year at Michigan, the market rate), and the seemingly insatiable desire for new facilities for the university's twenty-eight other varsity programs all depend on selling football tickets, seat licenses, luxury suites, and TV rights.

And all that still depends on the arm of a nineteen-year-old quarterback and the foot of a twenty-year-old kicker.

From the inside, I soon discovered how complicated the game had become, requiring coaches to work 120-hour weeks recruiting, practicing, and watching endless hours of film—only to see that twenty-year-old kid miss the kick. When that happened, Rodriguez would get hundreds of nasty e-mails and very little sleep, and have to hear stories of one of his daughter's teachers making jokes about her father being fired in front of her classmates.

Big-time college coaches ask their players to work almost as hard—not just on the field but in the weight room and in the classroom, too. I followed quarterback Denard Robinson for one day, which started at seven a.m. with treatment for his swollen knee, followed by weight lifting, classes, an interview with ESPN Radio, more treatment, meetings, practice, a third round of treatment, dinner, and film. When he walked out of Schembechler Hall after ten p.m., two middle-aged men who had been waiting all night for him in the parking lot asked him to sign a dozen glossy photos.

I went home exhausted, and all I'd done was follow him around and take notes. But working out with the strength coaches proved to be far tougher. In just six weeks, they doubled my bench press and tripled my squat. They also showed me you could puke from running
or
lifting weights (I hadn't known that). After each workout I collapsed on my couch—not to nap, mind you, but to whimper in the fetal position for a couple hours.

How those players got any work done after their morning workouts was a mystery to me—and thanks to Michigan's self-imposed penalties, the Wolverines actually worked fewer hours than the NCAA allowed.

If Robinson—or any of the 124 other players—did any of these things poorly, or not at all, that was Rodriguez's problem. And whenever such missteps hit the papers, the talk shows, or the blogs, they quickly became much bigger mistakes before breakfast the next day.

This beast Michigan has created is just about the biggest, strongest, and fastest animal of its kind, but the coach's job security and the athletic department itself still rest on kids who weigh three hundred pounds and can squat twice that but can't grow respectable mustaches.

*   *   *

Everyone knew Rodriguez was on trial in 2010—not least Rodriguez, who hadn't had a single good night's sleep since he had moved to Michigan.

What seemed to get lost in the endless discussions about him and his future, however, was that Michigan was on trial, too.

Michigan has long been considered one of the game's “destination jobs.” It is not the means to some greater position but an end in itself. When you accept this job, you've arrived once and for all.

Only one head coach in Michigan's long history went on to become a head coach anywhere else. That coach, Gary Moeller, left only because he was fired for one bad night at a restaurant. When the NFL's Detroit Lions later hired him, it was considered a demotion. They fired him after only seven games, perhaps because he had become the only Lions coach to post a winning record since 1972, a no-no in the Motor City.

Michigan has a lot to offer a head coach—as much as any college program in the country—but, like most elite programs, open-mindedness, flexibility, and patience are not among its selling points. Because the Michigan family had not needed those attributes in decades, they had atrophied by the time Rodriguez arrived.

Rodriguez shared many of Michigan's blind spots, including his soaring ambition and admitted impatience, which occasionally created secondary problems. He made his share of mistakes, no question, but Michigan was hiring him, not the other way around. Its very constancy meant it had no recent experience accepting an outsider and preparing him to succeed.

The last time Michigan did so, in December 1968, Bo Schembechler asked his new athletic director, Don Canham, how many years he had. Canham, characteristically, pulled no punches. “You've got the same tenure I have. I think we have about five years. If you guys don't succeed [by then], we're all going to be out of here.”

Schembechler knew where he stood, and Canham's word was good.

But by December 2007, Schembechler was gone, Canham was gone, and so was their way of doing business. Thanks to a century-old tug-of-war between Michigan's presidents and athletic directors, which had turned decisively in the presidents' favor after Schembechler retired as athletic director in 1990, Michigan's presidents had hired four straight athletic directors who did not have a single day of experience coaching or administering college athletics. Before Rodriguez's third season, Michigan hired a fifth.

They all brought serious strengths to the post, but none of them seemed to know what coaches went through and how best to help them.

The questions about Rodriguez started the day he arrived in Ann Arbor and multiplied each year he coached the Wolverines.

Could Rodriguez adapt to the unique culture that is Michigan football? Would he embrace the tradition, or fight it? Could his high-flying offense succeed in the stodgy Big Ten, and could he build a defense to match?

But questions about Michigan arose, too. Would the Wolverines, who cherish their past like no one else, seize the future in the form of the spread offense? Could they accept an outsider for the first time in four decades—and the first West Virginia accent in a century—and give him the support he needed to get the Wolverines back to BCS games, where everyone felt they belonged? How would the Michigan family respond if Rodriguez failed to win enough, fast enough?

Many Michigan Men would come to Rodriguez's aid and help him any way they could—sometimes at considerable personal cost. Others immediately rejected him as a “bad cultural fit.” Still others came to that conclusion only after the losses piled up.

*   *   *

Rodriguez had not made it all the way from tiny Grant Town, West Virginia, to the biggest stage in the nation by playing it safe. As we sat in his office that July day in 2010, he told me that, for the third straight season, he would be starting a new quarterback in the opener—sophomore Denard Robinson, this time—with former freshman phenom Forcier demoted to third string.

Rodriguez knew he had to win, and he had to do it the right way—just one more reason the outcome of the NCAA investigation seemed so important. He also had to become, in the well-worn phrase of the day, a “Michigan Man”—a leader so exemplary that alums and fans were proud to see him serving as the voice of the program and, truly, the face of the university itself.

Sports fans invest great hopes and dreams in their teams. College football fans invest even more, I think, because of the stronger connection they feel with the school and the players. But I've never seen any fans ask more of their team than Michigan football fans ask of theirs.

There are only two groups who are more devoted to the Wolverines—the coaches and the players themselves. They have the most to gain and the most to lose. They know the stakes. And they accept them—even embrace them. It's why all of them, from Rich Rodriguez to Tate Forcier to Denard Robinson, came to Ann Arbor. Not to be average, or even good, but “the leaders and best.”

Anything less would not do.

This book attempts to explain how the coach and his team fell short—and what happened when they did.