Three and Out (44 page)

Brandon, in contrast, had spent eleven years running a company that operates over 9,000 stores in 65 countries run by 175,000 people. His job entailed dealing with millions of customers, thousands of stockholders, and dozens of board members, executives, and Wall Street analysts every day.

If there was one thing Brandon could handle, it was public relations. And if there was one thing Michigan and its embattled coach could use, that was it.

 

31   JIMMYS AND JOES

The most important day of the year for a college football coach is not the home opener, the game against the big rival, or even January 1.

It's National Signing Day, which falls every year on the first Wednesday in February.

On this day, the end zone is not grass, Astroturf, or FieldTurf but a Xerox FaxCentre 2218. And only when a signed National Letter of Intent hits the receiving tray can you count it.

It can all be traced back to 1945, when Crisler concocted the platoon system. That spawned specialization, and that in turn gave birth to year-round nationwide recruiting. It was no longer enough to round up the best athletes on campus and teach them football. You now had to get the biggest offensive tackle from Dallas, the fastest receiver from Florida, and the quickest quarterback from California. When the competition for those specialists heated up, schools felt compelled to offer scholarships for athletic prowess, something unheard-of before the platoon system. (Even Heisman trophy winner Tom Harmon washed dishes at the Union to make ends meet.)

The race for the biggest and the best was on—and Crisler hated it. He even despised the idea of athletic scholarships, and tried to put the genie back in the bottle. In his long tenure on the NCAA rules committee, he attempted to limit substitution—starving his own baby—but he couldn't control the monster he had created or its many offspring.

In the battle between Crisler and recruiting, recruiting won in a landslide.

Recruiting season now lasts all year, and is far more exhausting than football itself.

It starts with collecting information on over a thousand high school football players, watching hundreds of hours of film, then making the entire coaching staff take dozens of trips each across the country, from Pasadena to Pahokee, to meet with hundreds of high school players, parents, and coaches. They follow that up with thousands of calls, e-mails, and texts, all in the hopes of getting the twenty-five players you think will help you win a national title three or four years down the road.

During Lloyd Carr's last three seasons, ESPN ranked Michigan's recruiting classes eleventh, tenth, and thirteenth, respectively. In Rodriguez's first full season, Michigan finished tenth, a pretty remarkable effort, given the Wolverines' 3–9 season. But despite Michigan's marginally improved record in 2009, recruiting was harder because of the ongoing NCAA investigation. Most coaches knew better, but some of them were not above telling recruits Michigan could lose scholarships, bowl games, TV appearances, and even its head coach.

Rodriguez sought to get the skill position players he needed to run the spread before doing anything else. But given the team's progressively weak defense in Rodriguez's first two seasons—which finished sixty-seventh and eighty-second in total defense, due partly to a bare-bones twenty-five scholarships devoted to defensive players, where most teams use about forty—he knew he now had to load up on the other side of the ball.

The one exception Rodriguez made was quarterback. After the injuries and inconsistency of 2009, he decided to recruit one serious quarterback candidate every year. This year, it was Devin Gardner, one of the top two players in the state. The fact that Michigan had two capable quarterbacks ahead of him didn't scare him—or Michigan.

Michigan was happy to let Gardner, a good student, enroll early, along with six other recruits. But Inkster High School, hard by Detroit's Metro Airport, held up approval until mid-January, when Gardner's principal called him into his office.

“You need to get your stuff and go.”

Gardner wasn't sure what that meant.

“The school board approved your graduation. You're going to Michigan.”

“That,” Gardner said on signing day, “might have been the happiest day of my life.”

*   *   *

It wasn't that long ago that Dan Dierdorf told his parents over breakfast he had decided to go to Michigan—and that was it. No press conference, no hat ceremony, no mention in the Michigan papers. Schembechler would simply give the list of his recruits to Bruce Madej, who sent that out to the beat writers.

Just a few years ago, it was not unusual for a team to have ten recruits still on the fence on signing day. But ESPN and the recruiting websites have made the process so public that fewer recruits flip-flop. Those outlets have transformed recruiting season from a sleepy insiders' game into an intense full-blown season in its own right.

Why the fuss? As the veteran coaches say, it's not Xs and Os, it's Jimmys and Joes.

On Tuesday, February 2, Rodriguez made a final round of calls to his remaining twenty prospects. They had all pledged their fealty to Michigan many times over, and most recruiting experts predicted Michigan would have a top-twenty class. But as Rodriguez knew too well, until that signed fax comes through, all you have is air.

Michigan's recruiting class rank could jump up dramatically if three recruits signed with the Wolverines.

They all played safety, Michigan's weakest position in 2009, which looked even weaker for 2010 after junior Donovan Warren declared for the NFL draft. There would be no getting Boubacar Cissoko back, either. After he was kicked off the team in the middle of the 2009 season for missing class, he then dropped out, held up a cabdriver with a pellet gun, and was sentenced to nineteen months at Jackson State Prison—an already sad story turned much sadder. As bad as it had been, getting these recruits could turn Michigan's weakest position into its strongest, literally overnight. They were:

Rashad Knight, from Jacksonsville, whom ESPN ranked the nation's twelfth best high school safety. He would decide between Michigan and Rutgers.

Sean Parker, out of LA, whom ESPN ranked fifth at safety and forty-ninth among all players. He was also considering USC and Notre Dame.

And Demar Dorsey, from Fort Lauderdale, whom ESPN ranked second at safety and twelfth overall—thanks partly to his 4.25 time in the forty-yard dash.

Not surprisingly, Michigan coveted Dorsey the most.

Dorsey looked like a lock for Florida, which dominated the 2010 recruiting wars nationwide, until Gators assistant coach Vance Bedford, Florida's point man on Dorsey, left to become Louisville's defensive coordinator. Dorsey cooled on the Gators and finally wrote them off when they told him they would rescind their offer if he visited any more schools.

Suddenly, Florida State, USC, and Michigan were scrambling to get this phenom. But there was a catch. Two years earlier, Dorsey had been involved in three burglaries with some high school friends and was arrested for two. Although he had been acquitted of one charge and the other had been dropped, in the era of FOIA requests and Internet recruiting research, any coach pursuing him would have to assume that Dorsey's past would get out, and the coach would have to answer for it.

That didn't stop them from beating a path to his parents' door, however. USC and Florida State could offer Dorsey warm weather and winning records. But Bedford, a former assistant coach under Carr, felt he couldn't ethically recruit Dorsey to Louisville, so he told Dorsey he should go to Michigan. It so happened that one of Dorsey's cousins was Denard Robinson, one of Michigan's best student recruiters.

But Rodriguez knew no school would scrutinize such a recruit like Michigan, and no coach would receive more media attention than he would. So he followed up Cal Magee's visit with his own.

Because Dorsey was behind in his studies, he was attending two schools at once to catch up. Rodriguez went to both to talk to his coaches, principals, teachers, classmates, and even custodians, plus his parents and Vance Bedford.

“They are all vouching for him,” Rodriguez said. “We're taking a chance, but not as big a one as it looks from the outside. We know him. We know the people around him. And this is not the first time we've taken a chance on a kid.”

When Rodriguez and his staff were still at West Virginia, they recruited Pat Lazear out of Bethesda, Maryland, even though he had served ten days in jail for stealing $463 from a Smoothie King. At the time, Rodriguez said, “We have talked to a number of people, and after a thorough review, I am reassured that Pat Lazear will be a successful student athlete and a positive member of our university community.”

Two years later, Lazear made the honor roll at West Virginia.

“There's a reason they call them juveniles and not adults,” Rodriguez said, back in his Ann Arbor office. “They do dumb things sometimes. So when we get them, we've got to accelerate their learning and their development.”

In 2007, Jim Harbaugh got national attention when he accused Michigan's athletic department of having “ways to get borderline guys in.” This is true: It's called admissions—the very same means, we learned in 2011, Stanford used to get Harbaugh's borderline players in.

To its credit, Michigan has never denied giving student athletes preference in admissions, just as it does for children of alumni, kids from Alaska, and, until the courts recently outlawed it, racial minorities.

The question is, how far should Michigan—or any school—lower its standards to get a talented athlete? In Michigan's case, the answer has long been: not as far as its peers.

While it's undeniable that many Michigan football players, from Oosterbaan's era to the present, would not be admitted without special consideration, the majority of them have been solid students who get Bs and Cs—and often better—and a degree from the University of Michigan. Just as important, these Michigan Men do exceedingly well after college, generally outpacing their classmates in grad schools and especially the workplace, thanks to their uncommon drive and support system.

But it was also true that Rodriguez took more at-risk students than Carr had—usually about eight or nine per class, roughly twice as many as his predecessor.

Rodriguez did, however, have a plan, which entailed pushing his players harder once they were on campus. Academic reports went directly to Rodriguez, not Scott Draper. Rodriguez ended the policy of allowing players to skip class during rivalry weeks. And lost in the controversy surrounding the team's grade point average—when the academic and PR people backed off Rodriguez's claim that his team had earned the highest GPA in team history—was the fact that Rodriguez's team had, in fact, earned a 2.61, and no one could remember a higher team GPA. In the classroom, his players were doing as well as or better than any in recent memory.

Brandin Hawthorne is one of three players Michigan recruited out of Pahokee, Florida, on Lake Okeechobee, where they race rabbits through the sugarcane—and catch them. It is a tiny, impoverished town, which produces two principal products: mud by the truckload and world-class football players. There, Hawthorne told me, he had no trouble getting a 3.8 GPA, and he picked Michigan partly due to its strong academic reputation.

“I realized you have to compete here, and that made me a better student,” he told me. “And I know the type of student I am. I got a 2.6 here, and I was sad when I got that. Being here, I know I'm not Einstein, but some kids here are! So if I get a B minus, I'm appreciative of that. I worked
hard
to get that, going against students who've been making As their whole life here. So I can accept that.”

When the coaches went home late Tuesday night, they thought they had an outside shot at Rashad Knight, who was leaning toward Rutgers, about a fifty-fifty chance at Sean Parker, and better-than-average odds at getting Demar Dorsey.

But none of that meant anything until the faxes started rolling in.

*   *   *

To make sure he woke up on time for National Signing Day, Wednesday, February 3, 2010, offensive line coach Greg Frey set eleven alarms: two clocks on the left nightstand, two on the right, and two battery-powered clocks on his bureau “in case the power went out,” plus three cell phone alarms spread around the house and two more alarm clocks downstairs—all set at five-minute intervals. That is how important this day was for college coaches, and how tired they were by the time it arrived.

It was the dead of winter, with everything covered in snow and ice. When the coaches' cars began pulling into the Schembechler Hall parking lot, it was still dark. The coaches opened the silent building and turned on the lights on their way to the meeting room. They put ESPNU on the big screen and dropped three boxes of doughnuts and two huge bags of McDonald's on the table, and enough coffee for everyone. It would not be a healthy morning.

Sitting and waiting, they started looking up the calories and fat grams of all the junk food they were eating. The news was not good.

“This job's gonna kill me,” Gibson offered.

“Gimme one of them doughnuts,” Magee said, pointing to the box. As he munched on it, he said, “I lost thirty pounds before recruiting started, and recruiting season put it right back on.”

Bleary-eyed and exhausted from six weeks of nonstop, no-days-off recruiting, the coaches settled in for a long day, waiting for seventeen-year-old kids to determine their collective fate.

“We had Demar rock solid until last night,” Magee said. “But now you've got the kid double-checking everything, and his parents asking the same questions all over again. And then they stop answering the phone, so then you start getting as nervous as they are. ‘He didn't sound like that on Monday!'

“You look at what this does to us,” Magee continued, waving an arm over the exhausted troops, wolfing down glazed doughnuts and Egg McMuffins, “and you figure this has got to wear kids out too. Got to.”