Three and Out (68 page)

In the 2010 off-season, Brad Labadie accepted a job at Blue Cross Blue Shield, but when the hiring generated some negative publicity, the company rescinded its offer. Labadie asked Michigan if he could return to his previous position, but Dave Brandon declined. Labadie now works in the area for Kapnick Insurance Group as a client executive.

In late 2010, Judy Van Horn left Michigan to become the senior associate athletic director/senior women's administrator at the University of South Carolina. About the same time, the NAAC named her the 2010 recipient of the Frank Kara Leadership Award, the highest honor in the athletics compliance profession.

In early 2011, Scott Draper became the director of development for Albion College, about a half hour from Ann Arbor. Joe Parker left Michigan to become the Deputy Athletics Director at Texas Tech.

As of this writing, three of Michigan's nine positions in the Compliance division remain vacant, including director—unusual for a school in the middle of three years' probation.

In the spring of 2011, Lloyd Carr was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame and had a wing of Michigan's C. S. Mott Children's Hospital named after him, for which his former players raised a million dollars.

Rich Rodriguez signed with CBS Sports Network to provide color commentary and some studio work for the 2011 season. He hopes to be coaching again in 2012. The Rodriguezes moved to Naples, Florida, where Raquel will be a tenth grader this fall, and Rhett will enter the seventh grade.

The photo featuring ten-year-old Rhett jumping and stretching to touch the
GO BLUE
banner now rests in a cardboard box in their garage.

It's hard to remember now, but at that sun-soaked moment, captured just minutes before Rich Rodriguez's first game as Michigan's head coach, anything seemed possible.

 

AFTERWORD TO THE 2012 EDITION

After Dave Brandon held a press conference on Wednesday, January 5, 2011, to announce he had fired Rich Rodriguez, then returned to the podium one week later to announce he had hired Brady Hoke, wheels were set in motion that are still spinning to this day.

Virtually all other BCS schools had filled their vacancies by then, so Rodriguez settled for a contract with CBS Sports to analyze games from their New York studio. Raquel and Rhett wanted to avoid moving twice in a year, so the family stayed in Saline.

By the time Hoke had been hired, the Michigan players really didn't have anywhere to go, either, and the semester was already under way. Seconds after Rodriguez had told them good-bye, the juniors became seniors—in the Michigan locker room, at least—and stood up to urge their teammates not to leave, or they'd have to go through the same hell they'd been through just three years earlier.

They listened, sparing Hoke at least one problem Rodriguez had to face his first week on the job. Brandon sought to spare Hoke a few more, by sending him on a nationwide tour to introduce him to virtually every alumni club and former football player in the land. If the Michigan family had some reservations about the relatively unheralded Hoke, his unassuming personality won them over, from his spot-on press conference to his down-home speeches spanning the coasts. It didn't hurt that he knew Michigan's hymn book, and wasn't bashful about singing from it, either—truly music to the ears of Michigan Men everywhere. By the spring game, the alums were “all in.”

The team, however, took much longer to gel.

Despite Brandon's promise that he would keep Mike Barwis, Hoke replaced him with his own strength and conditioning coaches, which is customary. In Barwis's brief, polite meeting with Hoke, Barwis told him, “I wouldn't respect you if you didn't bring in your guys.”

Barwis opened a new gym called BarwisMethods in nearby Plymouth, hired most of his former staffers, and quickly attracted a roster of former Michigan football and hockey players, plus pro athletes like former Detroit Tiger Brandon Inge. The same man who had been vilified as an uncaring tyrant in the
Detroit Free Press
piece has earned a loyal following among Michigan Men, who now pay for his services.

The current players were displeased with the change in strength coaches, but that didn't stop them from giving everything they had to end their careers in much better fashion than they had started. At the 2011 spring game, however, the team looked to be in complete disarray. The defense didn't look much better than the 2010 edition, which finished 110th, and the offense looked much worse.

Few were expecting greatness out of this team, with most pundits predicting a modest seven- or eight-win season. But the senior class, which had seen more turmoil than any other in Michigan's long history, had other ideas.

*   *   *

Coach Hoke led the Wolverines out of the tunnel for the first time against Western Michigan. The Broncos were poised to take a 14–7 lead in the second quarter, when Brandon Herron intercepted the ball on Michigan's 6-yard line, and ran it back for a very unlikely 94-yard touchdown—then ran back a fumble in the third quarter for another touchdown. Thanks to Herron's 14 points, the Wolverines had worked up a 34–10 lead before lightning ended the game late in the third quarter. One game does not a career make, but averting a disastrous debut is always a good idea when you're trying to win converts.

Hoke's good fortune continued the next week, when Michigan hosted Notre Dame. The first night game in the history of the Big House attracted 114,804 people, another NCAA record.

Michigan started the fourth quarter down 24–7, with the ball on Notre Dame's 1-yard line—and fumbled. If the ball had bounced toward the Irish, the fans would have headed for the aisles, and Michigan's first night game would be declared a failure. But on this night, the luck of the Irish had switched to the Wolverines. The ball bounced right to quarterback Denard Robinson, who trotted into the end zone for an easy touchdown.

What happened next is hard to believe, even now. Michigan's coaches switched to the shotgun snap, then watched the Wolverines score two more unanswered touchdowns to take the lead, 28–24, with just 1:12 left. But Notre Dame responded with its first touchdown of the quarter, leaving Michigan with just 30 seconds to overcome a 31–28 deficit.

When you lose, no matter how heroically you played, people talk about what you did wrong. The critics would have asked what happened to the high-powered offense the team inherited, and why the defense wasn't any better than the historic mess from the year before. But when you win, all people talk about is what you did right. And Michigan did a lot right in that fourth quarter.

With eight seconds left, the normally unassuming Roy Roundtree—who hadn't caught a pass all night—told Robinson, “Give me the ball.” And that's what Robinson did, sending the ball soaring to the edge of the end zone. The defender was all over Roundtree—but the ball was his.

Thanks to a full day of partying, the new skybox acoustics, and the almost surreal feeling that night, no crowd, anywhere, could have been louder. And the fans didn't stop. Not when the players jumped into the student section to sing “The Victors.” Not when Denard actually skipped off the field. Not when he returned for a postgame interview. Not even when they turned out the lights. The fans just moved their celebrations elsewhere.

This team had a lot of work to do. But who cared when the fans just witnessed the greatest fourth quarter in Big House history?

The Wolverines rolled through their next four games, with the defense improving every week, before heading up to East Lansing to avenge three straight losses to the Spartans. Michigan's coaches, however, could not seem to decide what to do with the most exciting player in the Big Ten: put Robinson in the shotgun, under center, at tailback, at slot receiver, or on the sidelines, while Devin Gardner tried his luck? They tried all of them, succeeding only in rattling Robinson's confidence. Michigan went down, 28–14.

Yes, criticism followed. But then, a funny thing happened: not much. No one was calling Hoke stupid or a misfit or asking for his head. It was a loss, no more, and the overwhelming consensus was that Michigan was going in the right direction. The era of endless do-or-die games was over.

Three weeks later, the 20th-ranked Wolverines ruined Nebraska's first visit to the Big House with a 45–17 whitewashing, then faced an Ohio State team reeling from just about every problem it could have: an NCAA investigation, Jim Tressel's departure, quarterback Terrelle Pryor's early exit for the NFL, and a 6–5 record, the Buckeyes' worst this century.

This Buckeye team was led by a freshman quarterback, Braxton Miller, and an interim coach named Luke Fickell. Just days before the game, reports surfaced that Urban Meyer would be named the permanent head coach after the game.

All this only put more pressure on the Wolverines. If they couldn't beat the Buckeyes at their worst, when would they? But win this game, and the Wolverines would have ten wins for the first time in five years, and the monkey—scratch that, the full-grown gorilla—would finally be off their backs.

The Wolverines were hanging on to a 37–34 lead late in the game, when Brendan Gibbons kicked a long field goal, something they rarely attempted—let alone converted—the year before.

The Buckeyes still had enough time to score a touchdown—and if they did, the upset would be theirs. When Ohio State wide receiver DeVier Posey slipped past Michigan's defender, making himself wide open with nothing between him and the end zone, a hundred thousand Michigan fans held their breath. But the freshman quarterback panicked, threw it too far, and the Wolverines survived.

Well, survived is not quite the right word. They went crazy—fueled by joy and relief and the secure feeling that no one could take this away from them. The students rushed the field to join the teary-eyed players in a massive group hug replayed on thousands of Facebook message boards that week, a picture of pure salvation.

The record seven-game losing streak to their rivals was over.

No, it wasn't one of the best Michigan–Ohio State games of all time. But for Michigan, it was one of the most important.

*   *   *

This book came out during the bye week between the Wolverines' games against Michigan State and Purdue. Readers were immediately struck by the remarkable access to a big-time football program that no reporter had ever been granted before—and, thanks to this book, probably never will be again.

In the course of three years of research, I filled two dozen notebooks, eight bankers' boxes of documents, and 10,000 pages of single-spaced notes from observing thirty-seven games, hundreds of practices and meetings, and transcribing several hundred interviews. That effort resulted in more than 2,000 pages of copy, which we had to slash to the 438 pages that comprised the final manuscript.

All that cutting forced us to drop photos, source notes, and an epigraph from Oscar Wilde: “The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.”

In researching this book, I did not encounter any angels, but I did not discover any devils, either. Almost everyone involved made some mistakes—most unintended, some not—but everyone in these pages had redemptive qualities, often quite remarkable ones.

People, it turns out, are complicated.

The transition in 2007 was marked by a lack of preparation, communication, and transparency, not to mention severe undermining of the process and the candidates themselves by people inside the program. It resulted in the famously unified Michigan football family fracturing before Bill Martin had even named Rodriguez Michigan's next coach—and it only got worse from there.

For his part, Rodriguez naively assumed he was walking into the same program Don Nehlen had gushed about so often, and he honestly believed the bigger the program, the less time the head coach has to deal with peripheral duties like connecting with former players, alumni, and fans. He was wrong on both counts. The head coaches at schools like Michigan, Texas, and Alabama become spiritual leaders of those schools.

I tried to report unflinchingly on Rodriguez's flaws and mistakes, including his press conference gaffes (starting with his failure to connect with the Michigan faithful at his introductory press conference); the seven missed “match points” I identified in 2009 and 2010, any one of which I believe would have been enough to keep his job; and his historically horrendous defense.

Many readers wanted to hear more about the latter, but there wasn't much more to say. Whatever could have gone wrong—recruiting, injuries, and coaching—went wrong, a perfect storm of failure. Rodriguez's Michigan defenses were historically horrible, but they were hardly mysterious.

When I consider the Rodriguez era, I'm reminded of his comment to his staff minutes after he had been fired: “It was a bad fit here from the start.”

Perhaps it didn't have to be, but even now, more than four years later, it is hard to argue with that simple statement.

*   *   *

Most readers knew many of Rodriguez's mistakes before they picked up this book. Michigan's mistakes, however, tended to be private, and therefore more surprising—particularly the revelation that Coach Carr had played middleman between Rodriguez and Martin, then invited all his players to transfer the same week Rodriguez was hired.

I took no pleasure in these discoveries, nor in reporting them. I have often joked that researching and writing
Bo's Lasting Lessons
was a labor of love.
Three and Out
was labor.

I was not out to take sides. That doesn't mean everyone came out equally well, any more than a fair referee can ensure both teams will be penalized equally. But I tried to call everything as fairly as I could, and let the readers sort the information for themselves. I simply tried to get as close to the truth as I possibly could, no matter the consequences. The reader can decide how close I came to achieving this goal.