Three and Out (7 page)

As Canham had feared, Weidenbach became the full-time athletic director. He was rapidly followed by Joe Roberson, Tom Goss, and finally Bill Martin before the 1990s closed. Yes, the same department that had needed only three directors for sixty-seven years had to hire five in the next twelve.

All of them had done something impressive before accepting the post—usually in business or on the Hill, which is what athletic directors call the central administration—but three of them didn't seek the job, two were hired as interim directors, and, after Schembechler, not one of them had any experience working in athletics.

As odd as hiring five straight athletic directors with no direct experience seems, especially for one of the foremost athletic departments in the country, it wasn't an accident. It was the
point.

At Duderstadt's retirement banquet in 1996, he said that being Michigan's president for eight years was not always easy, but there were some nice perks. He even got the chance to meet the man thousands of people consider God.

“No,” he said, “not Bo Schembechler, but the Dalai Lama.”

It got a laugh, but it also revealed one of the truths of Duderstadt's reign. He was acutely aware of the coach's power, and he resented it.

Michigan presidents since James B. Angell have believed athletic directors and football coaches have had too much autonomy, and they have often dreaded dealing with them.

The solution? Hire a handpicked outsider more familiar with their world than the coaches were. And, after a century-long struggle stretching all the way back to the battles between Yost and Angell, they finally had the power to fulfill their wish.

“It's become more of a business situation than it used to be, but the biggest thing is still to help your coach succeed,” said Bump Elliott, who had been an All-American on Crisler's Mad Magicians before becoming Michigan's head coach and finally Iowa's AD. “If your [football] coach doesn't win, it doesn't matter how good a businessman you are.”

“They say it's more important nowadays to have a business background than an athletic one,” Canham said. “I disagree. You have to have an athletic background first, or you don't know what's going on. You cannot run a hospital without medical people. You cannot run an athletic department without sports people. You just don't know what to look for.”

Duderstadt obviously disagreed, but the former administrators' very weakness and inexperience resulted in more scandals in the 1990s alone—with twenty-eight separate headline grabbers on the Detroit papers' front pages—than Michigan had suffered in the previous eight decades combined. The biggest problem proved to be the basketball program, when it was discovered Chris Webber and other Michigan basketball players had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a corrupt booster.

The NCAA gave the Wolverines four years' probation and took away 113 wins, plus every NCAA, NIT, and Big Ten banner Michigan had won during that ugly era.

“That's my point,” Canham said. “The administrators under [the outsider ADs] have never been in the trenches and don't know what to look for.”

It was also the presidents who approved conference basketball tournaments, conference football title games, the BCS bowl system, and the twelfth regular-season football game—while limiting the number of walk-ons each team could have.

“It's all being driven by money,” Weidenbach told me. “I can think of no other reason. It's hard enough to be a student athlete already. Bo was against it, I was against it—but nobody asked us.”

James B. Angell would have been proud of President Duderstadt's intentions—but likely appalled by the results.

When Michigan athletics entered its second century in the Big Ten, the fate of its vaunted tradition and autonomy were both in jeopardy.

*   *   *

In 2000, then president Lee Bollinger fired Tom Goss, who served as the fall guy for Bollinger's ill-considered “maize halo.” Bollinger talked his good friend, local real estate tycoon Bill Martin, into taking the job for just six months or so until they could find a permanent replacement.

Bollinger had good reason to tap Martin for the temporary post. When Martin was still a Michigan MBA student in the 1960s, he had parlayed an emergency student loan into the largest private real estate empire in the county—so big that the university today has to spend over $5 million every year just to lease his property. (Michigan's biggest landlord, however, is Domino's Farms.)

When Martin was in business school, he realized that “I was not driven by wealth or fame. I was driven to be independent and not have to answer to anyone.”

Even on the weekends, he went his own way. He was famous for saying, “Why would I want to sit inside a packed stadium on a perfectly good day for sailing?” In Ann Arbor, the statement was virtually blasphemous.

But Martin sailed to win—and often did. He was appointed president of the U.S. Sailing Association, then USOC sailing director and USOC board member, serving on its budget committee.

When Martin accepted Bollinger's offer, the athletic facilities hadn't been updated in a decade, the department was $3 million in debt, and the basketball program was about to get hammered by the NCAA investigation. Bollinger gave him no job description, simply telling him, “Go down there and see what you can do.”

When it came time to find a permanent replacement, Martin declined to throw his hat into the ring. His company was very successful, but very private, with just a handful of employees—not exactly the environment the Michigan athletic director finds himself working in. But when the coaches presented Bollinger with a petition to keep Martin, he accepted Bollinger's request on one condition: that his salary be one dollar a year. Bollinger wisely did not make a counteroffer.

At the end of Martin's first year,
The Ann Arbor News
named him “Citizen of the Year.” During his term as chairman of the Big Ten athletic directors, he was part of the negotiating team for the league's contract with ESPN—in which ESPN paid about a third more dollars for a third less programming, and gave the Big Ten its library of old games—and aided the effort to launch the league's own network. After a rocky start, the Big Ten Network has succeeded wildly, providing a measure of financial stability to every member, which helped lure Nebraska.

But Martin's bailiwicks were bricks and budgets. Under Martin's tenure, Michigan would create or renovate no fewer than twelve major buildings. Football received $226 million for the stadium renovation (plus a new $26 million practice building and a $3 million locker room), basketball would get a new $23 million practice facility, and the hockey arena added a $2 million club level.

But the sports formerly called “nonrevenue” also made out quite well under Martin. For baseball, wrestling, women's gymnastics, and softball, Martin built brand-new state-of-the-art facilities, for a total of $32 million, not to mention facilities that benefit all sports, such as the Junge Champions Center, the ticket office, the administration building, and the academic center, totaling $21 million.

The facilities are not only first-rate functionally, they are architecturally consistent, classic, and appealing—in contrast to the pell-mell buildings on the Hill.

The decadelong building boom cost a total of $333 million. Yet, when Martin stepped down, the Michigan athletic department enjoyed a $20 million annual surplus, he had doubled its “piggy bank” of unrestricted operating reserves to $35 million, and its endowment had almost tripled to $56 million.

As a result, the department has no trouble footing the bill for the five hundred athletes' scholarships it pays for each year. In 2010–11, that came to roughly $15 million each year, for which the department wrote an actual check to the folks up on the Hill. Despite the considerable cost, Michigan never nudges the coaches to recruit more in-state kids to save money. “We pay retail,” Martin told me. “So I suppose that makes the athletic director the biggest dad at U-M.”

When it came to bricks and budgets, no one—not even Fielding H. Yost or Don Canham—outperformed Bill Martin.

In 2006, Martin attended the regents' meeting in Dearborn that approved his plan to add luxury boxes to the Big House, the pièce de résistance of his building program. On the way back, Martin and five employees stopped for a celebratory beer at an Ann Arbor pub. They felt relieved, happy, even satisfied. In just six years, Martin had fulfilled his ambitious agenda—out of the red, off probation, with great facilities covering Ferry Field and beyond. The rest was just filling in the blanks.

After they toasted Martin's success, PR man Bruce Madej said, “You know what you should do?”

“What's that?”

“Walk straight into [President] Mary Sue [Coleman's] office and retire tomorrow.”

Martin laughed.

“He thought I was kidding,” Madej says today.

“If he had decided to ride off into the sunset after the luxury boxes were approved,” says Percy Bates, the longtime faculty representative on Michigan's athletic board, “he would have gone down as one of the greats.”

*   *   *

When Gary Moeller was let go in 1995, athletic director Joe Roberson tapped Lloyd Carr to be the interim coach. After struggling through two 8–4 seasons, Carr's 1997 squad captured Michigan's first national title in fifty years. It was probably the best thing to happen to him, and maybe the worst. After the Michigan faithful had gotten a taste of life at the very top, it seemed like nothing else was good enough.

From 1997 through 2004, Carr's teams played one hundred games, winning a remarkable seventy-eight of them, averaging almost ten wins a season while grabbing five Big Ten titles. But, incredibly, criticism of Carr actually seemed to grow. The complaint went like this: His teams were boring, his offense was outdated, and his defense couldn't stop mobile quarterbacks in general and the spread offense in particular—the last point punctuated by a loss to Northwestern in 2000 when the once lowly Wildcats beat the Wolverines for the third time in six years, that time by the unheard-of score of 54–51.

Michigan fans are uncommonly loyal and knowledgeable, and gracious toward opponents—even in defeat. They do not believe in a win-at-all-costs approach, and take great pride in the sterling reputation of the program.

But they can also be very fickle. If Episcopalians are “God's frozen people,” then a segment of Michigan backers could be called the Episcopalians of college football—less fans than opera critics, sitting quietly in their seats, waiting for someone to screw up so they can show their friends how much smarter they are than the coaching staff. More than a few Michigan fans are simply not happy unless they're not happy. That's probably true of the fans of most elite programs, but it doesn't make it any more appealing.

To test this theory, in 2003 my Sunday morning radio cohost and I posed a challenge to our listeners. The day before, the Wolverines had smoked fifteenth-ranked Notre Dame 38–0—the series's first shutout since 1902—in a nearly flawless performance. So, we asked our listeners, what can you find to criticize? We thought we were making a joke. But to our amusement, and our amazement, the callers had no problem filling two hours with a stream of original complaints.

While such talk wouldn't have mattered much to Schembechler, who possessed an almost superhuman immunity to criticism, it affected Carr. This is a man who would walk out to his secretary's desk between lunch and practice each day, ask for the mail, then shut his door and go through each and every letter, including the angry ones. (He was generous enough to compose handwritten replies to the nice ones.)

Each week he went through the game program and circled everything he didn't like—right down to an ad for Velveeta cheese featuring former Ohio State quarterback turned ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit—and told the sports information people to make sure it was pulled by the next week. Inside the department, such stories earned him the nickname “Paranoid Lloyd.”

While Carr's psychology was not ideally designed for the overhyped era in which he coached, it was also part of his charm. If he voraciously consumed all the gossip coming in, he was utterly disciplined about not letting it out. In press conferences, he could be closed off, curt, and even condescending—often appropriately, given the inanity of the questions—but I cannot recall a single gaffe in his thirteen years at the helm.

When Carr spoke to a large class I was teaching, he told the students if he was not a college football coach, he would have been a high school teacher, and a very happy one. The shelves in his office groaned under the weight of books by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, and Jon Krakauer. He also kept, just outside his office door, an unabridged dictionary on an oak table.

I once teased him about it. “I haven't seen too many coaches look up words in a dictionary.”

“Don't be impressed,” he said. “It's only because I don't know them.”

When I first reported this several years ago, I was surprised how quickly it became part of Carr lore—exactly the kind of image, of course, Michigan wanted for its football program: a wordsmith who won games.

At Schembechler's public memorial service at Michigan Stadium, they assembled an all-star team of eulogists, most of them national figures. But Carr gave the most polished and touching talk of the day. He was simply an outstanding spokesman for the team and the school.

To the day Schembechler died, he was the godfather of the Michigan football family. If a former player or coach got out of line, he could be confident Schembechler would be calling within twenty-four hours. The conversation would be brief, one-sided, and highly effective.

“That was the good thing about Bo,” said Jamie Morris, who broke Michigan's career rushing record in the 1980s. “He would get you in his office, and say, ‘You need to shut up,' and that was it. Wasn't much to talk about after that!”