Three and Out
Authors: John U. Bacon
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To my mom, who always told me, “Your character is what you do when you think no one's watching.” And to my dad, who said, “When you're on the floor, you can't fall out of bed.” This book proved them right many times over.
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CONTENTS
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TITLE PAGE
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE
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DEDICATION
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PROLOGUE
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1.
LEADERS AND BEST
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2.
MAN IN A HURRY
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3.
CHANGING OVERNIGHT
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4.
SPREADING THE SPREAD
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5.
A STRANGE SEASON
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6.
A STRANGE SEARCH
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7.
HONEYMOON FROM HELL
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8.
THE EVE OF A NEW ERA
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9.
WOKEN UP BY THE ECHOES
11.
WHILE THEY WERE MAKING OTHER PLANS
20.
COCKROACHES
21.
BIG TEN, BIG RINGS, BIG GAMES
25.
OF SLAUGHTERS AND SUMMIT MEETINGS
29.
HUMBLED
33.
MAKING IT
43.
DENARD'S DAY
48.
SHOOT-OUT
51.
OUT OF GAS AT THE GATOR BOWL
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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ALSO BY JOHN U. BACON
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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COPYRIGHT
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PROLOGUE
“When I was still in grade school,” coach Rich Rodriguez told me, “I knew I wanted two things: to spend my life in sports, and to do it on the biggest stage possible.”
It was late July 2010, just a few days before the Michigan Wolverines' summer camp started. Rodriguez sat at the big desk in his office in Schembechler Hall, a warm, comfortable space, with his stocking foot resting near pictures of his wife, Rita, and his children, Raquel, fourteen, and Rhett, twelve. He had set up more photos of them on the dark wooden shelves behind him, including one of Rhett jumping up to touch the famed
GO BLUE
banner before Rodriguez's first game at the University of Michigan two years earlier.
It is a picture of pure exuberance. Ten years old at the time, before he hit his growth spurt, Rhett had to give it his all just to reach the bottom of the bannerâand he touched it, barely. Now, two years later, he had grown five inches and matured from a deadly serious fourth grader who forced himself to quit wearing Nike (because Michigan had become an Adidas school and he was playing it by the book) to a preternaturally calm young man with a dry wit who seemed to be going on thirty, not thirteen. Living in the epicenter of Michigan football had a way of making you grow weary, or grow upâfast.
Rodriguez had filled the shelf above that photo with Michigan's iconic winged helmets from different eras, starting with a barless version all the way up to the current five-bar model. The two in the middle sported the numbers 47 and 87, representing the retired numbers of Bennie Oosterbaan and Ron Kramer, two of the greatest athletes in Michigan history. On the next shelf over, Rodriguez had stacked the canon of Michigan football literature, including tomes covering the history of Michigan Stadium and the first book on Bo Schembechler,
Man in Motion
, written in 1973.
Throughout Rodriguez's second-floor office, in the locker room, the weight room, and the museum below, he was surrounded by the trappings of Michigan football loreâgigantic photos and displays of the banner, the winged helmet, the 109,901-seat stadium, and the players and coaches who had made the program the biggest stage in college football.
Rodriguez had not merely pursued his childhood dreams. He had actually achieved them.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Michigan football had been a model of stability and success since the Wolverines played their first game in 1879. The six coaches who preceded Rodriguez, dating back to 1938, averaged twelve years on the jobâone good reason the Wolverines had won more games, and owned a higher winning percentage, than any other team in the country. They had built the biggest stadium, the largest alumni base, the most heated rivalries, and the richest tradition in the nation. More people have seen the Wolverines play footballâin person and on TVâthan any other team in the history of the game.
It made sense, then, when Lloyd Carr stepped down in 2007, that the Wolverines would want the hottest coach in the country. And after a stumbling search, they found him.
In late November 2007, Rich Rodriguez, the inventor of the spread option offense that most college teams now use, had led West Virginia University to the cusp of the national title game, until lowly Pittsburgh upset his alma mater 13â9. A week later, when Rodriguez asked the school president for higher salaries for his assistants, he was surprised not only to be turned down but also to be told, “We have done all we can. Take it or leave it.”
Although Rodriguez had turned down the University of Alabama the year before, when Michigan offered him the top post, he accepted, becoming only the fourth outsider in over a century to lead the Wolverines. Both parties thought their problems were over. After all, plug a big-name coach into a big-name program, and what could go wrong?
As it turned out, just about everything.
Before Rodriguez had even left Morgantown, West Virginia sued him for full payment of his $4 million buyout. He and the University of Michigan ultimately paid it, but only after six months of one-sided silence, which West Virginia exploited to tarnish Rodriguez's name.
He still assumed, however, that his troubles were behind himâwhich helps explain why he didn't see the troubles ahead.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
During the three years this book covers, Michigan changed athletic directors once, head coaches twice, defensive coordinators three times, and quarterbacks at least four times, depending on who's counting. All play central roles in this story, of course; their actions affect the plot in ways both expected and surprising. But one character affected events perhaps more than any otherâand not by his actions, but by his absence.
When Bo Schembechler passed away on November 17, 2006, the Wolverines were 11â0 and ranked second in the nation. They proceeded to lose their next four games, including the infamous upset at the hands of Appalachian State, which one popular website refers to simply as “the Horror.” There is no need to explain to any Michigan fan what that means, or to underscore that the team's aura of invincibility had vanished with that loss.
A few months after Schembechler's passing, his former quarterback, Jim Harbaugh, who had become Stanford's head coach, publicly lambasted his alma mater and the football program's academic advisers for allegedly talking him out of majoring in history. Michigan's time-honored practice of keeping conflicts in-house no longer seemed to apply, either.
Lloyd Carr's retirement had been rumored for years; it finally occurred the Monday after his fourth straight loss to Ohio State in 2007, at age sixty-three. Yet it seemed to catch athletic director Bill Martin by surprise. Instead of having several strong candidates lined up, or one already sewed up for a seamless transition, Martin was at a loss; no one seemed to know who or what he was looking for.
Martin's bumbling month-long search for a leader only deepened the fault lines that first appeared after Schembechler's death. The Michigan football family quickly cleaved into camps that wanted to see Louisiana State's Les Miles, Michigan defensive coordinator Ron English, or another candidate succeed Carr. By the time Martin finally hired Rodriguez, unbeknownst to the incoming coach, the “Michigan Men” had become bitterly divided, agreeing on just one thing: “None of this would have happened if Bo were still here.”
When Schembechler died, Michigan lost more than a coach, and the university lost more than a leader. The Michigan family lost its father. For the first time in almost four decades, it was not clear who the head of the household would be. Almost five years later, it's still not.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Probably all of the off-field ordealsâfrom the mudslinging coming out of Morgantown to the factionalism growing in Ann Arborâwould have simmered down if Rodriguez's first Michigan team had posted a winning season. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Wolverines' twelfth national title. With the whole football world watching, Rodriguez's team struggled, stumbled, and finally fumbled its way to an anemic 3â9 record, breaking the program's forty-one-year streak without a losing season and its thirty-three-year run of bowl games. The lowlight was a 13â10 home loss to a weak University of Toledo team, which snapped Michigan's perfect 24â0 mark against Mid-American Conference teams, a record that reached back to the nineteenth century.
Rodriguez's debut sharpened the divisions some, but hope was still alive on the eve of his second seasonâuntil the
Detroit Free Press
published a front-page story six days before the 2009 opener, claiming, among other things, that Rodriguez forced his players to spend fifteen or twenty-one hours a week on football in the off-season, more than twice the NCAA limit. It prompted investigations by the university and the NCAA itself, the first that Michigan's football program had ever suffered, which entailed interviewing dozens of players and coaches in the middle of the season.