Three and Out (69 page)

The skills I needed to produce this book—researching, writing, and thinking critically—I learned from world-class professors at the University of Michigan. But the most important principle they taught me was pursuing the truth without fear, wherever it leads.

The official seal of the University of Michigan, which the president, the athletic director, and other officials stand behind when they represent the university, features three Latin words,
Artes, Scientia, Veritas:
Arts, Science, Truth. If that seal merely represents some clever corporate branding, then no one should be offended when the university does not strive for the truth but attempts to squelch it—which seems to be commonplace in big-time college athletics these days. But if the founders of the university actually meant what they wrote, and their successors still profess to believe it, their conduct should reflect the university's first values.

For those who say this book will hurt Michigan, I can only respond: not the Michigan I know.

Michigan football fans are very demanding—they expect a first-class program on and off the field—but they also want the truth, they can handle it, and they will appreciate your best efforts to find it.

The University of Michigan remains a very rare place.

*   *   *

As I wrote in these pages, in 1905 college football had arrived at a moment of truth. That season alone, eighteen college students had died playing the game. Not surprising, many critics and most college presidents were calling for an end to this spectacle forever.

President Theodore Roosevelt saved the game, which quickly became one of our nation's most popular pastimes.

One hundred and seven years later, by just about any measure—attendance, TV ratings, revenues—college football has never been more popular. And it might be headed for its greatest crisis since 1905.

College football's many critics have produced proposals to address everything from protecting players from concussions to paying them, capping coaches' salaries, boiling down the Bowl Championship Series division to just four major conferences, creating a national playoff system, and even separating the teams from their universities to form a school-sponsored “minor league.” Other proposals have called for ending the NCAA's antitrust protection, forming a federal enforcement agency for athletics, or killing this unwieldy beast once and for all, as many university presidents have urged.

This rumbling is telling us that college football is a volcano about to erupt. Can this uniquely American marriage between academics and athletics long endure?

The answer might well be found in the Big Ten, the world's oldest academically based athletic conference, home to the biggest research universities, stadiums, alumni bodies, and conference television network. However the Big Ten goes, the rest of the country will likely follow.

The Big Ten has probably never seen more turbulence than it has the past two seasons, particularly among its leading programs. If Michigan had to go through hell to get to heaven, it might be nothing compared to what Ohio State and especially Penn State will be facing in 2012.

If there's one lesson from
Three and Out,
it's that even under the best of circumstances, transitions are much trickier than we usually think. They're tough for any organization, and particularly for established college football programs, where tradition is sacrosanct and coaches become icons. The coach who follows you is going to do things differently, like it or not, and if he succeeds, your critics will say he's better than you were, and if he falters, they will say you set him up for failure. It is truly a no-win situation—and that's under normal circumstances.

Handling this well is not the rule, but the rare exception—with Michigan standing as proof.

*   *   *

During the 2011 season, Rodriguez had been rumored to be a candidate at Ole Miss, North Carolina State, Tulane (which he declined), and Arizona, among others. The Wildcats' athletic director, Greg Byrne, first interviewed Urban Meyer. He lost him to the Buckeyes, but not before Meyer told him if he hired Rodriguez, he'd be getting “one of the top five football minds in the game.” Byrne apparently believed Meyer, hiring Rodriguez shortly after the 2011 regular season.

If Michigan had already demonstrated what it had learned by how it handled Brady Hoke's first year, Rodriguez showed how much he had learned once he arrived in Tucson. He clearly had prepared for his first press conference, saying all the right things and closing with the Wildcats' signature slogan, “Bear Down!”—which is how he now ends every speech at alumni events and virtually every conversation with fans on the streets of Tucson.

Rodriguez immediately went to work getting the band back together, including Cal Magee, Rod Smith, and Tony Dews. He could not convince Mike Barwis—who now has four young children—to move to Tucson, but he was able to hire Barwis's longtime assistants, Parker Whiteman and Chris Allen. While many were surprised to see Rodriguez rehire defensive backs coach Tony Gibson, it was telling how hard Rodriguez worked to convince West Virginia defensive coordinator Jeff Casteel—the missing piece in Ann Arbor—to join him in Tucson. During six weeks of stubborn negotiating, Rodriguez would not take no for an answer, and finally got his man.

It is not yet clear how well Rodriguez will do in Arizona—there are still more questions than answers—but it's worth remembering he has been fired just once, and that was not at Glenville State or Tulane, Clemson or West Virginia, but at Michigan, the nation's winningest program. While Arizona can't offer the kind of resources Michigan has, Rodriguez has a few things going for him this time, including Jeff Casteel and a unified football family. He is also not following a Hall of Fame legend who still has an office down the street, but a good friend and fellow outsider in Mike Stoops, who finished his last season at 4–8, and was fired for it.

The transition to come at Arizona will not be easy, but it's hard to imagine it won't go better than Rodriguez's last one.

*   *   *

If there was one great privilege I had that I hope every reader can share, it was getting to know the young men in Michigan's program not as gladiators but as human beings—some of the best I've met—which erased much of the cynicism I too often feel for college football. They were, quite simply, the real thing.

Shortly before we completed this edition, Western Kentucky hired Nick Sheridan to serve as the Hilltoppers' quarterback coach. His dream of becoming a college football coach has come true.

After leaving Ann Arbor, Tate Forcier announced he would be transferring to the University of Miami in the fall of 2011, but never attended. He was rumored to be considering Hawaii, among other schools, but enrolled instead at San Jose State University. Although he was slated to be their starting quarterback in 2012, after sitting out a season per NCAA rules, he left the SJSU football program in February 2012. In May, Forcier signed with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League.

Denard Robinson did not repeat as the Big Ten's Most Valuable Player, settling for the All–Big Ten second team, but he will return to Michigan as the starting quarterback for his senior season. He is scheduled to graduate on time, just as he had promised his parents.

Devin Gardner was frequently unhappy with his lack of playing time in 2011—which generated rumors of a potential transfer—but is expected to return in 2012, as well.

Senior Ryan Van Bergen earned All–Big Ten Honorable Mention, and Mike Martin was named to the All–Big Ten second team, but David Molk was the big winner in 2011, taking home the Big Ten's inaugural Rimington-Pace Offensive Lineman of the Year award, a spot on the first team All-America roster, and the Rimington Trophy as the nation's best center.

Eleven Wolverines earned Fall 2011 Academic All–Big Ten recognition, including J. B. Fitzgerald, Jordan Kovacs, Patrick Omameh, and Craig Roh.

Defensive coordinator Greg Mattison took over a unit that had ranked 107th in scoring defense and pushed it a full one hundred places to seventh, a stunning achievement. He was one of five finalists for the Broyles Award, which goes to the nation's top assistant coach.

The Big Ten rightly awarded Brady Hoke the inaugural Schembechler-Hayes Coach of the Year trophy, and the Maxwell Football Club followed up by naming him national Coach of the Year.

In February 2012, the former West Virginia coaches and staffers who had been fired by Dave Brandon a year earlier received their Gator Bowl rings from the University of Michigan.

In the spring of 2012,
Sports Illustrated
hired Michael Rosenberg as a senior writer.

A day after his twenty-seventh birthday in September, Brock Mealer—the man who left his wheelchair behind to walk out, touch the banner, and rededicate the renovated Michigan Stadium in 2010—asked Haley Frank to marry him. She said yes. They will be wed in December of 2012. He is working with Barwis and company to make sure he can walk down the aisle without canes.

*   *   *

The Big Ten is still considered one of the nation's top leagues, despite its frequent belly flops in bowl games. In 2011, the Big Ten placed a record ten teams in bowl games—then watched them drop, one by one. And not just in the storied Rose Bowl, but in games like the
Taxslayer.com
Gator Bowl, the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, and the Insight Bowl.

With only two bowl games left, Big Ten teams had managed to win just twice: the Little Caesars Pizza Bowl in Detroit, over Western Michigan, and the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, over a UCLA team that had a losing record and no coach. In non–food based bowls, the Big Ten had no luck at all.

Then Michigan State came to the rescue. The Spartans had beaten Michigan, won their division, and seemed poised to win the Big Ten's first conference championship game until one of their players was called for “roughing the punter.” This is on par with giving the class nerd noogies—and about as serious—but it cost them the game.

Their prize for all this? An invitation to a less prestigious bowl game than Michigan received. The Spartans were ticked off—and rightly so—but against Georgia, they blocked a field goal attempt in the third overtime to win.

Michigan's road to redemption was even crazier—and far longer. When Bo Schembechler famously told his first Michigan team that “Those who stay will be champions,” they had to put up with his unequaled intensity for just a few months before being rewarded with an upset over Ohio State.

Michigan's current senior class, however, had to put up with much more—including detractors inside and outside the program—for three years.

At the team bust in 2010, Zac Ciullo took the podium to defend his teammates. “We received the harshest criticism of any Michigan team. [But] all the fire and turmoil has only made us stronger.”

Ciullo's teammates proved him right after Michigan fired Rich Rodriguez. That same day, David Molk addressed his teammates. “If we don't stay together, we'll never make it. I don't want to see anyone leaving.”

They did not leave. They stuck together—every game. They won all but two of them, earning a bid to the Sugar Bowl against Virginia Tech.

A few hours before his final college game, Ryan Van Bergen told his Facebook friends that he and his teammates had been called “losers, disappointments, embarrassments. Tonight that changes.”

The Wolverines had plenty of problems in that game, but a lack of passion was not among them. They played their best when it mattered most. And in overtime, after Virginia Tech's kicker missed for the first time in five attempts, they pulled off the victory.

Some have questioned whether Michigan deserved to win that game. But for anybody who was in that meeting room, when these seniors started leading their team a week before they even had a coach, there can be no doubt this class deserved to go out champions.

After all, they stayed.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project started out as a simple three-month stint intended to generate a few magazine articles, and ended as a three-year marathon to produce a book. It's impossible to expand the scope of any journalistic enterprise that dramatically without some serious help.

My first thanks is to my former student, Greg Farrall, who got this ball rolling, and to Mike Wilcox, Mike Brown, and especially Bennett Speyer, who provided expert help at a few crucial junctures.

The relationship between any journalist and his subject is fraught with competing interests. That's all the more true when the journalist is following more than a hundred subjects, wherever they go, for three years.

Rich Rodriguez invited me into the Michigan football program, but the assistants, staffers, and players didn't have to accept me. They could have shut down access to their daily lives and thoughts, especially when things were not going their way. But they remained accommodating throughout. For all this, I remain deeply grateful.

So, to assistant coaches Adam Braithwaite, Tony Gibson, Jay Hopson, Fred Jackson, Greg Robinson, Scott Shafer, and Bruce Tall, and to graduate assistants and interns Alex Herron, Dan Hott, Josh Ison, Eric Smith, Bryan Wright, and Cory Zirbel—thank you. Rod Smith was particularly helpful in the countless quarterback meetings I attended, while Calvin Magee, Greg Frey, and Tony Dews let me eavesdrop on their Friday-night conversations in Magee's hotel room.

The office staffers already worked a minimum of twelve hours a day during the season, and I added to their workload without adding to their paychecks. Thanks to Scott Draper, Brad Labadie, Mike Parrish, Chris Singletary, and Dusty Rutledge; and to Jennifer Maszatics, Mary Passink, Kelly Vaughn, and Michelle Guidry-Pan for cheerfully putting up with my endless presence.

During football weekends, videographers Phil Bromley and Kevin Undeen work from dawn to dusk—and that's before the real work starts, often requiring all-nighters. Yet they found the time to burn me a DVD of each week's game and give me their sage observations.