Three and Out (5 page)

But football was the sport he loved, and his upbringing was uniquely suited to provide the young Rodriguez with the incentive, the competition, and the coaching necessary to reach the top in his field.

He was lucky to play tight end and safety for head coach Roy “Punk” Michaels, for example, who won three state championships without ever suffering a losing season.

Using methods similar to Schembechler's, Coach Michaels whittled down the roster from 140 to 50. In one loss, Rodriguez got turned around trying to make tackles so often, he was on his knees all night. Before the next practice, he looked in his locker to discover that someone had cut the knee pads off his practice pants. When he asked Michaels about it, the coach replied, “Maybe this way you'll get off your knees.”

There was no point arguing with a coach in coal country. Rodriguez had scabs on his knees for weeks. But when he had finally learned to stay off his knees a month later, he found a new pair of practice pants hanging in his locker, complete with new knee pads.

“But by then, I'd grown proud of the pants I had,” Rodriguez said. “I told him, ‘Thanks, but I'll keep the old ones.'”

Rodriguez also showed signs of being a budding tactician. “When everyone else was just doing what they were told,” Weir recalled, “Rich was having conversations with the coaches about strategy. In those days, quarterbacks timed their passes—one, two, three seconds, and throw—but Rich was already thinking about a different approach.”

That came to light during their annual alumni game. Rodriguez started talking to Weir on the sidelines about tempo and timing, a conversation so unusual that Weir still remembers it.

“He thought you could speed things up with a no-huddle offense—which was almost never used in those days—and catch them off guard. And instead of just making the quarterback throw the ball to a certain spot after three seconds, he thought the quarterback could read the defense
before
the snap and run away from a defender if they're in man-to-man, or find his receivers sitting down in soft areas if the defense was in a zone.

“You got to understand: This guy was talking about the beginnings of the spread offense, in
high school.
Are you kidding me?

“I tell you, that kid was way, way ahead of his time.”

*   *   *

Davidson, Marshall, and West Point offered Rodriguez basketball scholarships, but Rodriguez wanted to play football for West Virginia, even if the Mountaineers weren't that interested in him.

The Rodriguez boys could probably have qualified as minorities, but they never considered it. Rodriguez had been elected junior class president and narrowly missed out on being the valedictorian, so he was able to cobble together enough academic scholarship money to last one year. When that ran out, he had to either earn a full scholarship or drop out and go to one of the cheaper state schools like Fairmont State, which cost only $325 a semester at the time.

Rodriguez decided to bet on himself.

On his first trip to Morgantown, his father dropped him off on the wrong side of the stadium. Rodriguez still remembers how long that walk felt, circling the stadium, trying to figure out where he was supposed to go.

When he finally found the rest of the wide-eyed walk-ons gathered in the locker room, an assistant coach started yelling names off his clipboard, telling each player where he'd been assigned. After he'd finished, the assistant barked at Rodriguez.

“What're you doing here? Move!”

Rodriguez screwed up his courage and said, “You never called my name. Where do you want me to go?”

“Aren't you Gonzales?” he asked.

“No, sir, I'm Rodriguez. Rich Rodriguez.”

“Ah, you're all the same anyway. I can't tell you apart.”

Once Rodriguez concluded they had no idea who he was, his plan was simple: “I was going to get in as many fights as I could the first week, just so they would know my name. I played desperate—because I was.”

“Rich was a very solid player,” head coach Don Nehlen said. “He certainly was not very flashy. He was like his coach—slow! He was a 4.8 or 4.9 guy. But he was smart, and he could read a play.”

At the end of his freshman year, Nehlen gave Rodriguez a full ride for his sophomore season. He'd made it.

His first big bet on himself had paid off—and with it, a mind-set began to take hold. Whenever Rodriguez faced a crossroads, he would bypass the safe route, take a chance on doing it his way, and usually make it pay, often quite handsomely.

Once again, Rodriguez's timing was impeccable. He joined the Mountaineers right as Nehlen started turning a program of perennial losers into a perennial bowl team, finishing all four of Rodriguez's seasons in the top twenty. Rodriguez got to learn from another master, one who had learned from Bo Schembechler when he assisted him in Ann Arbor.

“When I got to West Virginia,” Nehlen said, “about all I did was turn the ‘M' upside down. Whatever Bo did, we tried to do here.”

After Rodriguez graduated in 1985, he spent a year on Nehlen's staff as a graduate assistant, then took a job as an assistant coach at a small school called Salem College. There he served under the unforgettable head coach Corky Griffith. Whenever Griffith's assistants presented him with a problem, he'd invariably say, “I'll solve your problem, Jack!” And he'd come back the next day with a solution you could never have imagined.

When they were having trouble recruiting, Corky put an ad in
USA Today.
“WANTED: Football players at Salem College. No experience necessary. See the country.”

When Rodriguez told Corky they needed thigh pads, he returned the next day with boxes of
Reader's Digests
. “They're the Christmas issues!” he boasted. “Twice as thick as the normal ones!”

When Rodriguez told him they had no grass on their field, and no money for seed or turf, Corky said, “I'll be back tomorrow, Jack! Solve your problem!” And he returned the next day with a few guys in hazmat suits, who started spraying something on the field. The backs of their suits read
HUMAN WASTE FACILITY.
Corky had brought them down to shoot shit all over the field—for free. It smelled like shit, but the grass grew.

After Rodriguez's second season at Salem, 1988, Corky Griffith called him into his office and said, “It's all yours, Jack!”

“What is?”

“The team, Jack! I went out and bought a bar and a pontoon boat, and that's what I'm going to do.”

So, at the ripe age of twenty-four, Rich Rodriguez became the youngest head coach in the country. He also got a raise, from $16,000 to $20,000 a year.

On Rodriguez's first team, he started fourteen true freshmen, including one player who “couldn't play dead in a Western.” (That player, however, would go on to play a role in
Porky's II: The Next Day.
)

The team finished 2–8, but Rodriguez felt optimistic about the season ahead, until his phone rang one morning. The man claimed to be a reporter from the Associated Press. “How do you feel about your program being canceled?”

Rodriguez knew a prank when he heard one. But a few minutes later, the school's athletic director walked in to tell Rodriguez, “We're going to have a press conference to make an announcement that will be detrimental to your program.”

There is detrimental, and there is detrimental. In this case, “detrimental” meant they were killing the football program, effective immediately. A Japanese university had just bought the school and had no interest in funding a football team—though, in fairness, no one outside the United States would ever understand why any college would fund a football team, or any other team.

Rodriguez had already proposed to Rita Setliff, a former West Virginia University cheerleader from Jane Lew, a town of about four hundred people just down Route 79 from Grant Town, where her family could get only channels 5 and 12. Since her dad would not let her watch
Three's Company
because it was too risqué, that left one channel, so she focused instead on basketball and tennis, and played both well enough to win the Lewis County High School Female Athlete of the Year award—to go with her homecoming queen crown.

“I liked her immediately,” Rich said of their first meeting in the school cafeteria. “She was good-looking, had a great personality, sharp as can be—and she liked sports, too.”

When Salem killed football, however, he realized he had a new car to pay for, a new house, and a fiancée who was betting on him.

“‘Honey, I've got some good news, and I've got some bad news,'” he recalled telling her. “‘The bad news is, the school just cut football, I don't have a job, and I've got no idea how I'm gonna pay for the car or the house.

“‘But the good news is, I'm still gonna marry you!'

“And, God bless her, she still said yes.”

For their honeymoon, all they could afford was Cedar Point for one night, but they remember it fondly.

Faced with the kinds of problems that make most new husbands head for the hills, the mines, or the cubicles, Rodriguez didn't hesitate. He returned to Morgantown, where Coach Nehlen welcomed him back as a volunteer assistant coach. Rodriguez paid his bills teaching driver's education on the side. But he was still in football. To Rodriguez, that's what mattered.

The next year, 1990, the Glenville State Pioneers came calling for a head coach. The pay was meager, the Pioneers hadn't won a single game the previous year, and it wasn't even an NCAA school. But it was a paid position, and a head coaching one at that. Rodriguez didn't sit around waiting for a better offer. He grabbed it.

To say Glenville, West Virginia, is in the middle of nowhere is not fair. It's actually fifteen miles off the interstate, which goes through the middle of nowhere. When Rodriguez moved there, it took forty-five minutes to get to the nearest McDonald's.

The Pioneers had 105 players, and only nine scholarships to divvy up among them. Rodriguez would take his broken-down tackling sleds to his dad to weld them back together, and Nehlen let Rodriguez ransack West Virginia's bins of used stuff. “Practice pants, jerseys, shoes, you name it,” Nehlen recalled. “Rich grabbed everything he could.”

One day one of the assistant coaches told Rodriguez, “We've got 105 guys out for the team and only 95 helmets.”

“I figured the competition for those last ten helmets would be intense,” Rodriguez said. “And it was!”

The program off the field matched the team on the field. “We were so bad that first year,” Rodriguez admitted, “the crowd would literally give us a standing ovation if we got a first down. I'm not kidding. And they didn't have to do it very often.”

The Pioneers finished that first season 1–7–1.

But the locals still loved him. “He lived in Glenville, right in the faculty apartments,” his star receiver Chris George said. “He played in the local softball league, he played on the local nine-hole golf course. Rita played there. They
lived
there. He knew everyone, and everyone knew him.”

“That's what made him so loved around this state,” longtime sidekick Dusty Rutledge noted. “He was one of them.”

But all that love was no substitute for winning. In need of leftover players, Rodriguez went back to the same place he got his leftover equipment: Morgantown. Nehlen told him he had about fifty walk-ons, and if Rodriguez could offer them at least room and board, he could probably get a few of them. Rodriguez scooped up a bunch, including quarterback Jed Drenning and receiver Chris George.

“Remember the Land of the Misfits?” Rodriguez asked. “Well, that was Glenville: the Land of the Misfits. A bunch of Rudolphs and Herbie the Dentists, and none bigger than me!

“But I've got to say, the kids we got were
hungry.
We might have all been misfits. We might have all been a little lost, trying to find something better. But we all wanted it, and wanted it
badly.
And we were willing to sacrifice to get it.”

It will come as a surprise to Michigan fans who felt Rodriguez did not embrace Michigan tradition that right before Rodriguez's second season in Glenville “he puts that sign up in our weight room,” George recalled, “
THOSE WHO STAY WILL BE CHAMPIONS.
And he didn't just put it up, he explained what it meant. He said, ‘This is going to be hard. We're going to have people leave. We're going to have guys who can't handle it. But if you stick with me, you'll be rewarded. Trust me.' And we did.”

The Pioneers still had a long way to go. “My first year,” George said, “teams were laughing at us when we got on the field.”

They had reason to. The Pioneers headed into their fifth game of Rodriguez's second year at 1–2–1, and they weren't likely to win against West Virginia State. “They were good,” George said. “They beat [Drenning] to a pulp. He needed help just getting to the training room the next day.”

In fact, he'd been sacked thirty-two times over his last two games, a season's worth even for a bad team. Worse, the Pioneers were about to face Wingate, which had whipped them 63–0 the year before. To say things looked grim is to understate the case considerably.

*   *   *

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes it's actually true. In 1945, Fritz Crisler had a bunch of seventeen-year-olds who were no match for the undefeated, top-ranked Army squad, with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old guys who had already swept Italy, Germany, and Japan. They were not scared of a bunch of teenagers. Crisler knew it was time to gamble.

Pioneer Stadium would never be confused with Yankee Stadium—your average suburban high school soccer field is nicer—but Rodriguez's desperation was every bit as great as Crisler's. And what he decided to do on that field that day would change the game more than anything since Crisler created his platoon system forty-six years earlier.