Three and Out (58 page)

“What else can fucking happen? What
hasn't
happened the past three fucking years? DAMN IT!”

His anger largely spent, the room went silent, which made an appeal from the locker room audible. Usually, when the coaches could hear someone speaking out in the locker room, it was Mike Barwis, Mark Mondrous, or, the previous year, Brandon Graham. But this time it was Denard Robinson, who had never addressed the team before. “This one's on me. My fault! But we ain't losing again! Got that? Eleven and one! We are not. Losing. Again! All year! Ever!”

Back in the coaches' room, Dave Brandon entered quietly. “Do you want to take a minute?” he asked, referring to the press conferences ahead.

“No, I'm okay,” Rodriguez said, collecting himself before going out to greet the recruits and parents. He gave them all hugs and smiles. This was not phony. Rodriguez had an amazing ability to compartmentalize his emotions and get back to the bad ones later.

Sergeant Gary Hicks, who had protected Rodriguez at every home and away game since Rodriguez came to town, escorted him to the press conference. After Rodriguez walked to the podium, Hicks said, “That man is so cordial, at all times. I never see any of the stuff the press is always talking about. I don't know where they get it, but it's not the man I know.”

When Rodriguez took his postgame shower a few minutes later, it sounded like he might suffer from a rare strain of Tourette's. “Fuckin' defense! Fuckin' long snapper! Fuckin' LIFE!”

When he emerged, Dave Brandon was sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. He made his sympathy clear. Then he pointed at a three-inch by half-inch gash on the coach's left shin, now bleeding impressively. “How'd you get that?”

Not by kicking the corner of the cooler, as I had assumed, but by a Spartan's cleat in the second quarter. Only now had his adrenaline abated enough for him to appreciate what he had done.

“Do you mind if I watch film with you tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Rodriguez said. “You can share my agony.”

After he dressed, Rodriguez stopped by the trainers' room, where one of the interns sprayed his cut, then covered it with a five-by-five-inch bandage.

He knew he would not be sleeping much that night.

*   *   *

On paper, Rodriguez's Wolverines were 5–1, not bad at all.

Though they faced fourteenth-ranked Iowa next, their near miss in Iowa City the year before gave them reason for hope. After that, they would face Penn State, Illinois, and Purdue—all struggling. It looked as though they could still win three of the next four, and maybe sweep, leaving them 8–2 or 9–1, in great position for a good January bowl game, a contract extension, and protection from those who wanted to see him fail.

But the season wasn't played on paper. Even the student managers—who, like butlers, are often ignored but see everything—knew where the team stood.

“At 5-and-1,” one told me, when I met them after the season, “right after State, we all felt like it's coming again. All the pressure. All the fear.”

The ghosts of 2009, coming back to haunt them.

“Oh, yeah,” another said. “Right away.”

“We knew, at that instant,” a third said. “You had Michigan State coming to your stadium. If you beat this team, you're all set. It's done! All the bullshit—it's over!”

“But all the pressure was on Michigan.”

“And Michigan never loses three in a row to State.”

“So when we lost, you just knew, that was it. It's over.”

Whatever disease they had caught in 2009 that ruined their 4–0 season had not been eradicated; it was only in remission. Now it was back after a single loss in week six of the 2010 season, and more virulent than ever.

No sport fosters myopia like college football, where every weekend is a playoff game. That's part of its charm, of course—but the younger the team, the higher the peaks and the lower the valleys.

Just one loss put the young Wolverines in great danger of crashing.

 

45   FIGHTING FOR HIS TEAM

Ultimately, Rodriguez's critics didn't matter. Not directly, at least.

The
only
thing that mattered was his ability to keep his team.

If they kept working hard, improving, and believing in themselves, each other, and their coaches, they would get better, and the future would be bright. They could endure the press, the critics, and the small but powerful segment of football alums and big-time donors who wanted Brandon to clean house. They could even lose some heartbreakers, so long as they learned from them and came back the next week determined to make it right.

But all that was asking a lot. This group of players had been getting beaten up since they arrived in Ann Arbor, whether their first game was the Horror against Appalachian State, Rodriguez's debut heartbreaker to Utah, or the 2009 opener against Western Michigan—which had been eclipsed by the
Free Press
front-page sensation six days earlier.

Many of the former players—including some of their former teammates—told the current players and the press they just weren't “Michigan” anymore, as if they were orphans. They had been carrying a heavier burden than probably any other group of Michigan players in its long and glorious history—so heavy, in fact, that after just one loss at midseason, the student managers could already feel the foundation cracking.

If Rodriguez lost his players—if they buckled under the weight, splintered, started blaming one another or the coaches, or just plain quit—nothing could save the team. Or him.

And no matter how mentally tough they were—and if they had shown nothing else over the past thirty games, they had surely shown that—keeping the team together depended on winning some games. Not just to get the outsiders off their backs but also to reward the players for their commitment and faith, to keep them working, and to keep them believing.

It would not be easy. Not this week.

Inevitably, there had to be some distractions to make the already difficult task harder. This time, they were largely self-inflicted. At his Monday press conference, held in the Commons, Rodriguez's responses ran some one thousand three hundred words in the transcript, and none of them seemed very newsworthy.

Almost none.

In the middle, Rodriguez repeated his usual comment that he was receiving great support from the university and the fans. “Everybody wants the same thing here,” he said, “and nobody's happy with a loss.”

If he'd stopped there, his words would have been justly forgotten. But he didn't. “We lost to Michigan State. What? You wanna hang me off the building now? I mean, there might be a few people who want to do that, but that's the same people that probably wanted to do that after the first five games, too, they just weren't saying it publicly.”

At that moment, you could hear his supporters around the nation slapping their foreheads. It was, at best, artlessly worded. At worst, it suggested he hadn't taken the loss as hard as the fans did when nothing could be further from the truth—witness the kicked-over cooler in the coaches' room.

It was, however, an accurate reflection of his frustration—he was far harder on himself than the fans could ever be—and his lack of discipline in front of a microphone.

And, as usual, the man who would pay the most would be Rich Rodriguez—followed by his players, who would have to defend their coach.

Just a few hours removed from his gaffe in the Commons, Rodriguez addressed his team in the cantilevered team room behind the blond-wood podium. In front of the press, he was apt to blurt out statements that had nothing to do with what he was really thinking, but in front of his team, he was invariably strong, confident, and on message. The contrast was at times so great as to defy credulity.

“I only ask two things of you,” Rodriguez said in his powerful voice. He often gripped the podium—not for strength but as an outlet for his excess of energy, built up through daily workouts on the StairMaster and the speedbag. “One,” he said, raising his finger with the back of his hand toward his players, “that you be coachable, which I think you are. And two, that you play ball,
hard
, every time you take the field.

“We're not there yet. You cannot be tentative and be a football player. At some point, it's not about schemes or plays or anything you can draw up on a board. You just gotta go
hit him.
Or he's gonna hit you.

“GO KNOCK THE SHIT OUT OF HIM!

“We don't have soft players. But it's got to be
every
play.
Every fucking play!

“It's a violent game! You don't need to do anything stupid and cheap. You just need to get after your man like you mean it.

“I hear everyone talking about how tough the Hawkeyes are. I don't hear anyone talking about how tough
we
are. Everyone's talking about how great they are. The best front four in the history of football. Their offense is gonna wear our little defense out.

“And I'll play right into it: ‘Yeah, they're incredible, I don't know what we're going to do, maybe we'll show up.' All that bullshit. But I'm expecting us to win the game. Just so you know.”

A day later, on the ESPN talk show
Around the Horn
, Rodriguez got roundly ripped by all the panelists for his “You wanna hang me from a building?” comment. They had a point, of course, but if they could see him in front of his team, they wouldn't recognize him as the same man.

*   *   *

If Rodriguez was worried about losing his team—and he was too smart not to be—he had reason to sit up and take notice when he got word that a few of his players had missed class on Wednesday and a couple more were late for their workout that day. Minor missteps, perhaps, but he took them as major signs.

That was what he was fighting when he collected his players after practice that day in the team's new indoor practice facility. They hunkered down on one knee, looking half-bored and worn-out—tired not simply of the physical toll every team feels at midseason but of the entire experience: the doubts, the defending, the demands of facing a do-or-die game just about every damn weekend.

“Listen to me,” he said simply and sincerely. Every coach has to be a good actor, but there was no acting in this message. He had the tone of a father who finally had to level with his sons about something serious.

“For too long, I've let you guys off the hook. I've been soft on you guys. And that's not fair to you.

“I'm personally offended when we get outtoughed, and that's what I saw on the film this weekend. I take it personally. Last week we got outworked, and we got outtoughed. And that wasn't the first week.”

That got their eyes up, but some still slumped their shoulders.

“They can be bigger than us, they can be faster than us, but they will not outtough us. EVER.

“If I go into a fight with someone, he may be bigger, I might lose, but damn it, he'll be bloody. I guarantee you that.”

Bowed heads rose. They knew what he was talking about and why he was saying it. He had cut through the usual cloud of coachspeak and connected with them with some simple truths, the same ones he had to face himself that week.

“Freshmen, I've defended you in the press. But I don't have to defend you here. Between the white lines I can't make excuses for you.”

As he continued, his voice grew louder, his pace faster.

“Last year, we went into Iowa for a night game on national TV. Everyone was saying how great they were, how tough they were—and we went toe-to-toe with them. We didn't back off an inch. We did not play scared. We got up for that challenge and gave them our most physical game. They won by a couple points, but they
did not outtough us
.”

Their shoulders rose. Their backs straightened.

“It's good to have Ortmann and Moose here at practice today. They went into Iowa and played the best games of their careers.

“Nothing is going to be easy. You have to put your work in. And that is what you have to do in life. If you lose your job, you have to get back up. Someone may get sick, and you need to help them and keep fighting.

“You can't just lie down. Get up. GET THE FUCK UP!” He tore his jacket off and threw it on the turf. Rodriguez was a naturally good speaker and motivator, and he did a remarkable job after each loss getting them to slough it off before the next kickoff, when they invariably seemed ready to go again—but they seemed particularly mesmerized by this speech. Even the strength coaches, circling the group, were nodding vigorously.

“We're going to go hard on Saturday, so we need to go hard all week! In class, at workouts, at practice. GROW UP. GROW UP NOW.

“WE WILL NOT BE OUTTOUGHED!”

He snatched his jacket off the ground and stomped back to the building.

The players were dead silent, staring straight ahead, most of them bobbing their heads, pursing their lips.

Walking away, Barwis said, “Best fucking speech I've ever heard.”

Denard turned to one of the student managers and said, “Go get me some balls.” A minute later, all four quarterbacks were taking snaps under center, soon joined by other players staying after practice to work on their own, the most they had done all season.

Whether the NCAA would consider their extra work voluntary or not, no one, for the first time in over a year, stopped to consider.

*   *   *

“Everyone's sad we lost to State,” Erickson said, “but avoid a couple picks and we win the game. Fans are still pretty happy. Hey, we're 5–1. Once in a while you still get some guys who want to run Rich Rod out of town, but not many.”

Not surprisingly, the man cutting hair a few doors down saw things differently—a fair representation of the other side of the debate.