Three and Out (8 page)

But if you were a Michigan Man in good standing—whether an All-American or a walk-on—and you needed something, even $150,000 for a bone marrow transplant, Schembechler would mobilize the Michigan family immediately, and you could be assured help was coming, and fast.

When Canham said, “It didn't change until Bo left, and then it changed almost overnight,” he was talking about the athletic department, but he could have been talking about the Michigan family.

Within months of Bo's passing, Harbaugh accused Michigan football of slipshod academics, Mike Hart replied that Harbaugh was not a Michigan man, and suddenly none of the old rules seemed to apply, with everyone airing his laundry in public, and the media taking shots it wouldn't have dared to do just a year earlier.

The institutional discipline that had ruled the program since its inception was eroding—and fast—with serious consequences in the years to come.

Near the end of Schembechler's life, he had lunch with Morris and his beloved quarterback, John Wangler. “When I leave this earth,” Schembechler told them, “we are going to see the true Michigan Men come out.”

“I didn't know what he was saying then,” Morris said.

“I do now.”

 

4   SPREADING THE SPREAD

Most fans assume once a football coach has had some success, the bigger programs will start beating a path to his door.

Not always.

At Glenville State, Rodriguez posted a 43–28–2 record over seven seasons, with four consecutive conference title teams that never lost more than one league game each season—all while introducing the game's most important innovation of the decade.

Didn't matter.

Year after year, Rodriguez not only didn't get any calls from Division I schools looking for a coordinator or an assistant coach, even the bigger schools in his own conference—teams he was beating regularly—never called when they had an opening. Rodriguez was initially puzzled, then frustrated, and finally curious. But, he said, the minute he quit worrying about his next job and focused on the one he had, things started stirring.

In his fourth year at Glenville, Rodriguez added the position of athletic director, which boosted his salary from $35,000 to $50,000. If he stayed one more year he stood to receive a $50,000 annuity: “Big money to me,” he said. But in 1997, Tulane head coach Tommy Bowden called out of the blue. Rodriguez didn't know Tommy as well as he knew his dad, Bobby, and he knew even less about Tulane. But he was willing to listen.

After a brief bit of small talk, Bowden asked point-blank, “So, would you like to come down?”

“What's the job?”

“Offensive coordinator.”

“Wow, that's something,” Rodriguez said. “But you know I run this spread offense, right?”

“Run whatever you want.”

It was the break he'd been waiting for, but Rodriguez still had his doubts. Rita had just given birth to Raquel, they had never lived out of the state, and the money at Glenville was getting better. Rodriguez also wasn't sure if the spread option offense would work in Division I.

Rita wasn't having it. “If you don't take this, you might not get another chance.”

“As usual,” Rodriguez noted, “Rita was right.”

But in his first spring game at Tulane, his offense couldn't even get a first down. “It was like our first year at Glenville all over again.” Rodriguez's fancy new offense was so pathetic that Tulane's defensive coach let one of his student trainers call the defense—and her plays were producing sacks, too.

“Don't worry about it,” Bowden told Rodriguez. “It'll come together. This is what I hired you to do.”

When Bowden's crew took over, the mayor of New Orleans, a Tulane grad, told them Tulane football succeeds only when the city's with them. When Tulane opened the 1997 season in the Superdome against Cincinnati, only fifteen thousand fans bothered to show up to see the debut of the spread offense. The city was clearly not with them.

The Bearcats had little trouble jumping ahead 10–0, while Tulane couldn't seem to move the ball at all.

“We are in some serious trouble here,” Rodriguez thought. “But all of a sudden—and I remember it like it was yesterday—[quarterback] Shaun King calls a play-action pass, and he hits the fullback on a wheel route, and it goes for a 40-yard touchdown.”

Tulane won 31–17, and the Green Wave started to roll. Rodriguez kept tinkering with his new machine, adding wrinkles, including a slot check for every running play. If the slot receiver—who sets up between the tight end and the wide receivers—was not covered, the quarterback was instructed to forget the run and just throw it to him. That's why slots don't have to be tall, just fast, which allowed Rodriguez to recruit players most teams overlooked.

Rodriguez also wanted King to utilize the zone read more often. Originally, whenever the defensive end started chasing the ball carrier, Rodriguez wanted his quarterback to pull the ball and run into the space just vacated, like Drenning did that memorable day in Glenville. But King knew he could get crushed, and he wanted no part of it. He made a deal with Rodriguez: If no receivers were open,
then
he'd run it.

Rodriguez wisely adapted, the Green Wave kept winning, and the crowds started coming. Tulane finished the 1997 season at 7–4, the kind of mark that would create complaints at Michigan but generated something closer to euphoria at Tulane. It was the program's best season since 1980, producing twenty-five school and conference records.

After starting the 1998 season with three straight victories, Shaun King broke his left wrist. They devised a special cast for his nonthrowing hand, taught the center to hike the shotgun snap to his right, and kept tearing up the record book. King threw thirty-eight touchdowns against only six interceptions, breaking Danny Wuerffel's record 178 quarterback rating with a 183.

“I can't remember Shaun missing a single open touchdown pass all year,” Rodriguez said.

In a 49–35 win over Navy, King became the first quarterback in NCAA history to pass for 300 yards and run for 100 in the same game.

With Shaun King showing just what the spread offense could do, the Green Wave rolled into its last regular season game against Louisiana Tech with a 10–0 record and a seventh-place national ranking—but there were already rumors that Tommy Bowden might be headed to Clemson.

The Superdome was packed—a far cry from the paltry fifteen thousand who showed up to see their first game the year before. The fans got what they wanted. Tulane scored on its first possession. And the next. And the next. And kept it up for ten straight possessions. Well, except two: at the end of the first half, and at the end of the game, when Shaun King took a knee.

“That place was rockin'!” Rodriguez recalled. “Everybody was happy.”

When the team ran off the Superdome field, the crowd started chanting, “Stay, Tommy, Stay!”

But a few days later Bowden announced he had accepted the job at Clemson. The papers and radio shows all figured Rodriguez was the heir apparent.

Tulane interviewed Gary Crowton, the head coach at Louisiana Tech; Chris Scelfo, a Louisiana native and assistant at Georgia; and Rodriguez. After Rodriguez's interview with athletic director Sandy Barbour went smoothly, “she tells me the next step is to meet with the president at his house that Saturday night.

“I go through my little speech with him, too. We chat, and after two hours or so, we shake hands and I walk back to my office. Sandy comes over and says, ‘The president was really impressed. Everything looks good. We'd like to have a press conference Monday at eleven. I'll call you tomorrow at three to go over the details.'”

But by three o'clock that Sunday, Rodriguez still hadn't heard from anyone. Rita said, “Rich, something's up.”

Monday morning, still in the dark, Rodriguez got to the office by six, as usual—but this time he was wearing his green Tulane jacket and tie. He had started on his paperwork when the line coach, Ron West, poked his head in to say, “Looks like we got a new coach.”

“What do you mean?” Rodriguez replied, not sure if he was referring to him or someone else.

West held up the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, which announced Tulane's new coach: Louisiana native Chris Scelfo. As Rodriguez read this, Sandy Barbour stopped by, still wearing her sweat suit from the night before.

“We decided to go in a different direction,” she said.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Rodriguez said, pointing to the paper. “Tell me, did I blow something in the interview?”

“No, no,” she said. “Your interview went great. But we just decided to go in a different direction.”

When she left, Rodriguez slumped back in his seat and loosened his tie. He decided he should meet with the team. “Guys, I don't want to have to tell you this, but I'm not gonna be the head coach.”

Rodriguez didn't want to go to the press conference, either, but figured if he didn't, everyone would assume he was off pouting somewhere. So he found a spot on the third floor of the athletic department atrium, looking down at the press conference below. “Man, that was embarrassing. I felt like a junior high school kid all over again, like you wore the wrong shirt and everyone's looking at you. ‘What kind of loser is that guy in the balcony?'

“I just wanted to go—anywhere.”

Bowden couldn't believe it and offered Rodriguez the coordinator job at Clemson. Bowden sent Clemson's private plane, with the Tigers' trademark orange paw painted on the tail, and a bouquet of orange roses waiting for Rita on her seat. They had them.

But Tulane's new head coach, Chris Scelfo, asked all the assistants to stay on to coach Tulane in the Liberty Bowl against Brigham Young. Reluctantly, Rodriguez agreed. The Green Wave drowned the Cougars 41–27 to finish a perfect 12–0 season, then carried Rodriguez off the field, chanting his name. “For all the ups and downs of this crazy profession,” he said, “a day like that goes a long way.”

*   *   *

No matter how outlandish the results—maybe
because
of the outlandish results—critics always said the same thing: “Sure, the spread option worked down there, but it will never work up here.”

When Bowden and Rodriguez took the spread to Clemson, the critics looked pretty smart—at first.

Clemson opened the 1999 season at home against Marshall, led by future New York Jets quarterback Chad Pennington. But the Thundering Herd had become a Division I, Mid-American Conference team just two years earlier, so no one thought they had much of a chance. The Tigers' fancy new offense, however, could muster only 10 points, and they lost a shocker 13–10.

The natives were not happy, and Rodriguez was about to hear why. Only after the game did he remember that all the coaches had gotten dressed at the field house across the street. No big deal, right? He put his coaching clothes back on, grabbed his bag, and started walking across the parking lot toward the field house, through three hundred yards of tailgaters, and that's when the thought popped into his head: “Rodriguez, this might not have been the best idea you've ever had.”

But then he thought, “Well, I'm new here, and I'm only an assistant coach anyway. Maybe they won't know who I am.” But when he looked down and saw he was wearing his bright orange
CLEMSON FOOTBALL
polo shirt and a bright orange
CLEMSON FOOTBALL
hat and carrying a bag that said
CLEMSON FOOTBALL
—well, that's when he realized the odds of his getting across the parking lot unnoticed were pretty slim.

At about the exact moment all these thoughts occurred to him, ten yards into his walk, he started hearing it.

“Hey, nice offense, Mr. Genius!”

“What kind of high school plays you gonna run next week, brainiac?”

“Go back to Tulane!”

“You hear the first one, you tune it out,” Rodriguez recalled with a grin. “But once they started in on me, word spread pretty fast, and all of a sudden every damn tailgater in the state turned around to let me have it.

“That was my first experience in Death Valley—and that's when I learned they were serious about that Death part.”

The Tigers and Rodriguez redeemed themselves the following week by beating league rival Virginia 33–14. They finished the season at 6–6—up from 3–8 the year before—but they still took those losses hard.

Rodriguez and Bowden ran together every day. They had two paths: If they won that Saturday, they'd run all week decked out in their Clemson gear on the sidewalks through town, waving at all the fans honking their horns. But if they lost, they'd take their “alternate route,” wearing gray sweats and baseball caps, through the woods and lakes, risking only angry squirrels.

Fortunately for Bowden and Rodriguez, they needed to resort to the alternate route less and less during Rodriguez's time at Clemson.

In 2000, Bowden's second year there, the Tigers won their first eight games, they were ranked fourth in the nation, and they had an outside shot at a national title game. Things were getting serious when they traveled to play the 5–2 Ramblin' Wreck of Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

The Tigers fell behind 31–28 in the fourth quarter. On third down, with 1 yard to go around Tech's 40-yard line, Rodriguez figured Georgia Tech had to be expecting a run up the middle, maybe even a quarterback sneak.

“So, smart me, I called a reverse—and we lose 6 yards! We're out of field goal range, we had to punt, and there goes the game, the undefeated season, and the shot at a national title. Kerplooie!”

When a dejected Rodriguez got home that night, Rita knew not to say anything to him about the game for a while. But after Clemson beat South Carolina a few weeks later, she finally asked him, “Honey, when you were playing Georgia Tech, why'd you call that reverse?”