Three and Out (35 page)

Rodriguez paused again, separating the drama around them from the work in front of them. They would not discuss the former again the rest of the day.

“Okay, let's watch the special teams.”

The lights went out, the screen came on, and the coaches, once again, settled in to do what they liked doing best: preparing their team.

An hour later, the door cracked open. Bruce Tall poked his head in and said, “He's here, Coach.”

Much to Rodriguez's relief, Tall was referring not to the Compliance people or the NCAA investigators but to Will Hagerup, younger brother of Chris, who had punted for Indiana the day before. Will was ESPN's third-ranked punting prospect. Rodriguez left the room.

Zoltan Mesko, who had had only two punts returned in the first four games, had worked hard to recruit Hagerup. “He liked the B-school, way into that,” said Mesko, who got his BBA before pursuing his master's in sports management. “So I said, ‘If that's your thing, why wouldn't you go to a top ten B-school? And you don't want to miss out on the Big Ten championships to come.' That pretty much did it.”

Fifteen minutes later, the door opened. “Hey, we found our punter!” Rodriguez announced. “Gentlemen, please meet Will Hagerup, future Wolverine!”

Hagerup's commitment gave Michigan nineteen for the recruiting class of 2010. For a team that had gone 3–9, breaking almost every school record in the wrong direction and having an NCAA investigation hanging over its head, it was an impressive effort.

For all the obstacles, Rodriguez knew that if his team kept winning and recruiting, his problems would eventually fade away, along with his critics.

*   *   *

In Schembechler's day, the players would hit on Tuesdays and Wednesdays—“full line,” as they called it, twenty plays a day, and more if he felt they needed it. But since scholarships were capped at 125, then reduced to 85, few coaches felt like risking injury that often. They hit only on Tuesdays—and even then quarterbacks were off-limits, no one left his feet, and once you got close enough to tackle the ball carrier downfield, the whistle blew and he was “down.” Even so, most coaches considered Tuesday the most important day of practice.

On Tuesday, September 29, 2009, with Michigan State looming, Rodriguez watched dozens of coaches and players go in and out all day to talk with the NCAA investigators. And then, during practice, he noticed a cabal of university administrators collect on the sidelines. He'd coached only sixteen games at Michigan, but he already knew that was never a good sign.

His instincts were correct. Before and after dinner, Rodriguez had to meet with Scott Draper, Bruce Madej, Dave Ablauf, and another PR official from the Hill.

The previous December, Rodriguez had asked the academic counselors a simple, direct question: What was highest GPA the football team had ever achieved? He had to ask several times before someone finally came back with an answer: 2.60.

“So that's the highest ever?”

“Well,” Rodriguez said he was told, “it's the highest in the last five or six years.”

“What about before that?”

“No team would have been close before that.”

Rodriguez left the conversation with the reasonable interpretation that 2.60 was the highest grade point average the team had achieved since the most veteran academic advisers started at Michigan more than two decades earlier. It wouldn't have mattered much if he'd been told it was 2.3 or 3.2; all he needed was the right answer, something to shoot for.

When the players came back in January 2009, he started writing that number on the whiteboard and mentioned it at just about every team meeting when school came up—which was just about every team meeting—telling them it was their job to beat it. Rodriguez knew football players responded to numbers and peer pressure, and he knew this was an effective way to get athletes to take school more seriously. He hammered this home all semester, especially as finals approached, and the players responded, finishing with a 2.61—again, according to the people in Academics.

But the
Free Press
questioned Rodriguez's claim. And to Rodriguez's surprise, Michigan's public relations and academic people decided to back off, partly out of fear of receiving another stream of FOIAs asking for the collective GPAs of every Michigan varsity team, which the academic people wanted no part of. Given the scrutiny Michigan had received from the time Harbaugh's comments made news in 2007, their skittishness was understandable. But their solution—throw Rodriguez under the bus—naturally did not sit well with the head coach.

They sat in the big comfortable chairs circling the new annex to his office, built for recruits and their parents. The meeting was civil, professional, and occasionally lighthearted, but Rodriguez's frustration was often plain, especially after they showed him a draft of a press release in which they had him saying the GPA was only “an estimate,” and “I regret any misunderstanding about this matter.”

“This is bullshit,” Rodriguez said flatly. “I asked for a number, they gave me a number, and we beat it. End of story. What do they mean, they can't calculate a team grade point? They estimate it by eyeballing it? How lazy is that?”

“But they don't calculate [all] GPAs,” the PR person from the Hill said. “They know which ones are not worth calculating.”

“What does
that
mean?” Rodriguez asked. “And anyway, that's still a calculation. It might be a rough one, but it's still a numerical assessment. And also, I regret nothing! What should I be regretting here?”

They had no answer. Rodriguez continued. “It bothers me that this release makes it look like I'm just saying it, now, as a response to the
Free Press
article, out of thin air! I'm not making this stuff up, and I've been saying it since the spring—when none of us knew anything about all that
Free Press
crap.”

In short, Rodriguez was doing exactly what any Michigan alum would want him to do, and what every player's parent hoped he would do, and he was being punished for it. They compromised by hashing out a new press release, and the meeting ended amicably. Rodriguez closed it with “This is just mouse turds” and a smile.

Over dinner, he said, “I spent five hours today on nonfootball stuff, on the one hitting day of State week: three hours talking with Compliance, one hour talking with my attorney after that, and one hour on the whole grade point thing.

“But this is the first time in twenty-one months the university asked
me
how we should respond, so I guess that's progress.”

Or it would have been, if the university had not later scrapped the new press release they had created and returned to the original without consulting Rodriguez.

Rodriguez had enough perspective to recognize that the NCAA investigation, which had just kicked into high gear, was of a different magnitude altogether. Initially, Michigan's compliance director, Judy Van Horn, interviewed the coaches, staffers, and players herself—in a clear conflict of interest, since the quality of her performance was one of the central questions to be answered. Yet she did not stop the practice until Rodriguez's lawyer—not the university's or the NCAA's—insisted that the U-M and NCAA lawyers should conduct the interviews. When the investigators asked Van Horn directly if she had told Rodriguez of the missing CARA forms, she replied, “I wish I had.” If she had, it's doubtful Labadie would have been able to put them off for more than a year, that a university audit would have been deemed necessary, and that
Free Press
reporters would have learned about the situation, prompting their FOIA request—and sparking the bigger story, and the NCAA investigation that followed.

Van Horn's reply didn't answer the question, but it was apparently enough for the investigators to drop the issue. And then things got a little stranger. The only coaches kept from Carr's staff were tailbacks coach Fred Jackson and strength coach Jim Plocki, and neither the university nor the NCAA asked to interview Plocki, and no one asked Jackson, or anyone else, about anything before 2008, including policies and practices that had been constant throughout.

Around this time, Mike Parrish discovered on his university computer the résumé of one of Carr's quality control people, Tom Burpee, on which he boasted about all the coaching his role required, one of the very NCAA rules Rodriguez's regime was being accused of violating.

After Parrish showed it to Rodriguez, he faced a dilemma. If he turned it in to the NCAA, he risked the entire university being found guilty of the dreaded “lack of institutional control,” which would hurt him more than anyone else and for which he would no doubt be blamed. But if he kept it from investigators, he would violate the legal pledge he signed at the outset of the investigation, stating that he would dutifully report any potential violations he came across—which was one of the rules Jim Tressel broke, launching his investigation in 2011.

Rodriguez concluded that he had to submit Burpee's résumé to the Compliance people at Michigan and the NCAA. He did so with some trepidation, fearing the consequences, but to his surprise, no one cared. Burpee's claims of coaching were assumed to be simple résumé padding—and the NCAA agreed. No one ever considered the possibility that Burpee was telling the truth—which he was. In the words of one former player, “Burpee coached his ass off.”

For whatever reason, Michigan and the NCAA had no interest in investigating Michigan, just Rodriguez.

But it's also true that after the scope of the investigation had been limited to the 2008–2009 school year, no rock within that time span was left unturned. Van Horn told me that President Coleman insisted their mission was simply to “find the truth,” wherever it led.

“That really impressed me,” Van Horn told me. “I have such great respect for President Coleman.”

“With Compliance,” Rodriguez said, while finishing his meal, “it was pretty clear that the NCAA person was there to find any little thing she could to make sure she looked like a tough guy. They spent about two hours asking about the role of quality control. I said, on the record, that U-M Compliance should know exactly what they were doing, since they were there for plenty of the practices.”

During the six weeks I worked out in the weight room and Oosterbaan Field House, I saw every member of the compliance team pass through many times. The doors were always open, and the coaches were not hiding anything. While the coaches should have had a better grasp on the many rules regarding quality control and seven-on-seven drills, if they were committing violations, they were doing so in plain sight of the people whose sole job it was to make sure those violations didn't occur.

“And I also said,” Rodriguez continued, “on the record, that the only reason the NCAA is here is because of some completely irresponsible story in the
Detroit Free Press.

“‘Oh, no, no,' the NCAA person said. ‘We look at all our schools.'

“Bullshit,” Rodriguez said at the table, digging into his dessert.

His response was not elegant but accurate. The Big Ten and the NCAA might have started as governing bodies, set up by university presidents solely to ensure that all players on the field were unpaid amateurs, bona fide students, and safe, but their roles had fundamentally changed since then. For decades, the Big Ten's and the NCAA's main source of money had been members' dues, which they used to enforce the rules. Simple enough. But their roles started growing when the Big Ten discovered that enormous profits could be had through expanded bowl bids, conference basketball tournaments, TV contracts, and now its own TV network, while the NCAA's current TV contract for March Madness alone is worth more than $10 billion.

The sheriffs had become the saloonkeepers, and nobody can do both jobs equally well.

The Big Ten and the NCAA now seemed less concerned with actual integrity than the appearance of it. That's what sells. It's image, not substance, that those organizations are now designed to protect. Truth might have been on Rodriguez's side—time would tell—but one question had already been settled: The marketers who run modern college sports had far more power.

“I think this will all be done in a few weeks,” Rodriguez said. “They might get us for secondary violations, about Quality Control supervising seven-on-seven drills, but I might fight that, too.”

He was wrong about at least one thing: In the NCAA's twisted lexicon, even those violations are called “major.” But he had made up his mind about something else: “I've been run over too many times. So I'm going to speak for myself.

“I haven't been able just to coach football for two years. That's all I want to do.
That's
why I came here, to get rid of all the distractions building up at West Virginia. That was our
goal
in coming here—to get rid of the distractions! We figured Michigan was the place.”

He didn't say it, but he didn't have to: He would have been hard-pressed to name any school with more distractions than the one he had picked.

Another problem: Rodriguez knew his players were being called in for NCAA interviews all week, but he didn't grasp what this was doing to his team.

“In my opinion,” Brad Labadie told me, “none of the players knew the rules, even when they were being interviewed. They were just pissed about having to deal with the whole thing.”

Because they didn't know what the rules were, they weren't sure what to say. Had they been violating one of the NCAA's countless and often senseless prohibitions, which allow the school to offer players a breakfast of bagels and butter, but not cream cheese or jelly? (I am not making this up.) Were their off-season workouts voluntary or involuntary? Were the Quality Control guys conducting seven-on-seven drills or not? The average player didn't make distinctions among assistant coaches, graduate assistants, volunteer assistants, or Quality Control personnel in the first place. They didn't know what to say, and they didn't know what their teammates were saying, either.