Three and Out (39 page)

“And I'm gonna call Tate and Denard both in. Tell them either start becoming quarterbacks or start looking over your shoulder.”

When they moved on to the weekly awards, Rodriguez was no happier. “No crunches, no hammers, no nails,” he summed up, leaning back in his chair, manila file in his hand, clearly disgusted. “No turnovers, two weeks in a row—and we weren't even close to getting one.

“That's it,” he said, slapping the file down. “Let's watch special teams, so I can get in an even shittier mood.”

*   *   *

For the coaches, a bad loss means bad moods, bad press, bad pressure. It is part of a coach's wife's compact that her husband is allowed to brood over a loss for twenty-four hours, but then he has to drop it.

For the Big Boys, it means bad fans and bad Facebook.

“There's always a different feel on the streets, around town, even on-line, after a win or a loss,” John Ferrara said over Sunday pizza at the Commons. “After Notre Dame, there's a little more pep and excitement. And after Penn State, it feels dead.”

“After a game like that,” Perry Dorrestein said, “I get e-mails—lots of them—explaining why I suck. Not just
telling
me I suck, but
explaining
why. That's helpful.”

“The worst,” Jon Conover said, “are the ones in the Victors' Walk cheering you on and shaking your hand and patting you on the back, and that night they're on their blog ripping you a new one. And what really pisses me off is these are people who don't know much about the game and know almost nothing about what it means to be a college athlete. The greatest adversity they face is running into a traffic jam on the way to work.

“Facebook's worse. I have to deny a dozen people a day who want to friend me, who I know are fans. You feel bad, you don't want to be unappreciative, but they're not your friends, and I'm just too hard-pressed for time. Then the same guy will be on some blog saying what a jerk you are. And then that gets back to your parents—and who needs that? So now I have six hundred ‘friends' on there, and probably one hundred are my real friends.”

“Cut the Facebook, mon,” said Renaldo Sagasse, a lineman from Montreal known by his teammates as “the Big Maple.” “Too many people you don't want to talk to.”

“My mom was saying some people behind her were swearing all game, F-in' this, and F-in' that, ‘You guys F-in' suck,' all that,” said Ferrara, from Staten Island. “When Junior [Hemingway] was hurt, they said, ‘Drag his ass off the field! We want to see the game!'

“So she finally turns around, right? And she says, ‘Do you know you're sitting in the Friends and Family section?' And this guy says, ‘I've been coming here thirty years! There is no fucking friends and family section!'”

Linda Ferrara, the wife of a New York fireman, remained poised. “Where'd you get your tickets?”

“The trainers.”

“Right,” she said. “And that means?”

“They didn't get it,” Ferrara said, ending his story.

“A fan who'd stayed for the whole game came up to me and said, ‘Keep working. We're proud of you,'” Dorrestein said. “I said, ‘Thanks. We appreciate it.' People like that, they make it all worth it.”

*   *   *

Just in case the past week wasn't bad enough, the next one started out with another press release.

“ANN ARBOR, Mich.—University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman today (Monday, Oct. 26) announced that the University has received a ‘Notice of Inquiry' from the NCAA, indicating it will continue its investigation of allegations made about the U-M's intercollegiate athletics football program.”

In other words, the NCAA had concluded that the initial round of research warranted digging deeper. Not unexpected, necessarily—the threshold for such decisions was pretty low—but not good news, either. It would provide enough fodder for the media to write whatever it wanted and force the players to wonder who had said what to the investigators, and why. Those questions would remain in the air for twelve more months.

A few hours later, Rodriguez learned center David Molk hadn't sprained his knee. He had torn his ACL and was gone for the season.

At 5–3, and 1–3 in the Big Ten, the Wolverines' early optimism had diminished, but they could still go to a good bowl game. All they needed was one more win to qualify, and they were not likely to get a juicier target the rest of the way than Illinois. For all those reasons, Rodriguez felt his team simply had to make a stand that Saturday and stop its three-game Big Ten losing skid.

From the offensive meeting to the team meeting to the practice, Monday set the tone for the entire week: Get your act together,
now
, and get back to Michigan football—before it's too late.

In the offensive meeting, while going over the game film, Rodriguez interrupted his dissection of another broken play to call Forcier out in front of every offensive player—a last resort. Calling out your quarterback in front of his teammates can always backfire, but Rodriguez figured the way Forcier was playing, he didn't have a lot to lose.

“All we ask is that you run
our
offense and quit making shit up as you go along. Penn State did not do
one
fucking thing we did not see on film—not one fucking thing!—and you'd know that if you ever saw a second of fucking film. But you didn't because you're too worried about going out on the town instead of doing your actual work to be a better quarterback and lead this damn team.

“And it ain't just him,” Rodriguez said, pointing his laser to the screen, frozen with football players. “It's all of them.
All
your quarterbacks are letting you down.” He didn't actually mean that. Sheridan had been an ideal role model for Forcier, and Rodriguez knew it. But he also knew Denard Robinson hadn't been working much harder than Forcier, and he wanted Robinson to know that he was on notice, too.

“And look at this, Tate,” Rodriguez said, showing a play in slow motion, then stopping it. “How many steps are you supposed to take?”

“Three.”

“Three steps. That's right. And is your man open after three steps? Yes, he is! Imagine that! You know why? Because the play is
designed
that way. We've actually done it before! We
designed
this fucking offense twenty years ago—before you were born!—and I can assure you it works! But it only fucking works when you do what we tell you to do.”

A shaft of light came from the doorway into the dark amphitheater. An assistant poked his head in. “It's 2:45. Defense is ready, Coach.”

“Well, I'm not. Tell them to go watch some film. Probably be the first time they see film this week too.”

When he showed the play again, the anger built up in him, then came out: “DAMN IT!” He threw the remote at the screen. This time, it was no act.

On the next play, just three seconds after the snap, Rodriguez stopped the tape. “Tate, you are in fucking Division I football. You drop back
three
steps—not four or five or fucking
six
!—THREE! You hitch up and hit the seam in cover-fucking-three. And if they're not open, if their guys run with our guys, you hit the pull-up. Just that simple. That. Fucking. Simple.”

The next play was the last before the half, when Forcier squandered their chance to take another shot at the end zone.

“Now, this is what
really
pisses me off. You fumbled it, but you got it back, and we have enough time to try another play left in the half before we have to kick it. That'd be nice, wouldn't it? Cut it to 19–14 going into the locker room?

“But no. Look at this. You're just lying there.

“Get up! Get the fuck up! The clock is running!

“Everyone's milling around and we've got no time-out because we had to waste one because we had twelve guys on the field earlier in the half. So get up!”

At 3:15, Rodriguez had finally finished with the offense and asked Phil Bromley to turn the lights on.

“Crissakes,” he said to himself. Then, to the team: “And this was our
good
half!”

Rodriguez wasn't much happier when he addressed the entire squad. He expressed his general discontent with the way things were going—more angry and determined than hurt and defeated—and how that forced him to apologize for the team whenever he had to address a group of alums or a local Rotary Club.

But not with them, he clarified.

“You want to be Leaders and Best? You want to be Big Ten champs? Let me tell you something right now: You cannot hide from that fucking field. It does not lie.

“I saw enough of this shit last year to last me a lifetime. I hated walking off that field—and I never want to again—when I think: They didn't beat us at our best.

“We've got bullshit investigations here, we've got freshmen there—all this shit, none of it matters. It's just eleven guys on the field. I got rid of all the soft asses, I got nothing but men who care about each other and want to go into battle.

“We are
not
reverting back. We are
not
reverting back!”

It was stated as an order—but it was also his greatest fear.

The players and coaches got dressed, then jogged out through the doors of their state-of-the-art practice facility to meet a picture-perfect fall day—Ann Arbor's best season. They had about twenty seconds to enjoy it before Rodriguez got them running and stretching and warmed up. He was all over them, all day long. He installed Sheridan at quarterback ahead of Robinson, and Robinson ahead of Forcier. He was out to make a few points. The players, including Forcier, all responded as Rodriguez had hoped they would. Football players respond better than anyone to “attitude adjustment.” They seem to welcome it.

But the fracture lines within Schembechler Hall were now visible. Dave Ablauf, for one, was not in a better mood. “I'm sick of all this,” the normally upbeat football spokesman confided, and he looked like it. “Every time my phone rings I cringe and think, ‘What's next?' There are too many factions and they're all working against each other. Why can't they all just pull for Michigan?”

Inside the building, Jon Falk pointed to the floorboards. “Bo always told me, ‘Jonny, we're winning, and we've got a strong foundation. But you look close at that foundation, and you'll see a lot of termites in there. You start losing, and those termites come out, and start eating away at your foundation, and try to take over.' And that's exactly what's happening.”

The next day, Rodriguez had the unpleasant task of kicking Boubacar Cissoko off the team—something he loathed doing, even when a kid wasn't contributing—while the
Free Press
probably had more fun reporting it.

*   *   *

On Thursday nights, offensive line coach Greg Frey led a group of players over to Mott Children's Hospital. On the way, Frey asked me, “Who's bad-mouthing us? The guys at State? You expect that. But the former
Michigan
coaches? What's up with that?”

They had learned this from their recruits, who told them which former coaches were telling them not to come to Michigan, and why.

“The thing is, all these rumors, all this crap—the underclassmen don't care about any of this. It won't affect them too much. But I think about guys like Moosman and Ortmann and Brandon Graham. Man, those guys work their asses off. They care about their teammates. They
stayed.
They get pushed aside in all this, and that's all right? That's sad.

“If it
is
former coaches going after us, what about the kids
you
recruited? The families you visited and the living rooms you sat in and the promises you made that you would make him a better player and a better person and look out for him. Where are those promises now? You broke them just to take a few swipes at the guys who came after you?

“You know, all these people who say they hate us, do they even know us? All I ask is you get to know me before you start hating me. After that, go right ahead!”

He shifted gears. “I always wanted to meet Lloyd Carr. I'd heard a lot of good things. I looked forward to meeting him when we came here. But I still haven't met him.”

*   *   *

The rain let up for the Friday walk-through in Illinois's grand old Memorial Stadium, the same field where Red Grange had run wild on the Wolverines in 1924, costing first-year coach George Little his job.

While Rodriguez addressed each unit about their assignments, a few insiders were treated to an update of Rhett Rodriguez's school spelling bee final, which had taken place that morning. Although only a fifth grader, he competed against the sixth graders in a schoolwide contest. Under pressure, onstage, the kid was ice—and won. For his tutors, Dusty Rutledge and Mike Parrish, it was the first good news they'd had in weeks.

“Hey, Spell Check,” I said. “If you're so smart, spell ‘cat.'”

“Use it in a sentence,” he said, not missing a beat.

“The DOG chased the CAT.”

“Cat. C-a-t. Cat.”

“Lucky!”

The same kid his dad had described as being “too damn serious” the year before was loosening up.

At the hotel the night before the Illinois game, Rodriguez told his team, “I was given a family name. My kids have my family name. I want them to represent the family name with honor. Nothing wrong having that sense of pride. No matter where you come from, you've all got a name—you should be proud of it. Every time you sign your name, I hope you sign it with pride.

“What I hope you sense now is that when we come together, all of a sudden we have one name—Michigan—that we represent. You need to have as much pride in Michigan as your own name, and if you do, we'll have no problems.