The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (9 page)

All the while, head coach Brady Hoke barreled around the place as if his blue
M
shorts were on fire, his sharp, insistent whistle piercing the air. Contact was frequent and often unrestrained: at one point, a smashmouth linebacker–running back tackling drill ran the width of one field; then first-team offense lined up against first-team D, half a dozen coaches within spitting distance of the line of scrimmage, coaching up the pitch even higher. When practice finally ended, linemen peeled off helmets, pads, shoes and socks and plunged into jumbo-sized tubs full of ice for a welcome, if brief, relief.

Unlike Alabama, when the Wolverines finally hit the field in Texas, the fifty-three-year-old Hoke had them in football mode—jerseys, shorts and helmets—running through plays. Deafening crowd noise pumped into the empty stadium. Coaches flashed signals from the sidelines. Hoke charged around like a kid at Christmas—playing quarterback one play, defensive tackle the next, sprinting fifty yards downfield on kickoff coverage. Giving off a vibe that seemed to say, Alabama, Sha-la-bama, we’re ready to tee it up right now.

Few knew, but Hoke was suffering from a bad case of the flu.

“Sometimes,” he would later say, “you just have to fake it.”

In a profession oozing with false promises and dime-store sincerity, Hoke came across as anything but a phony. Instead, he seemed like a genuine guy who wore his emotions on his sleeve, who
cared
and who related to his players. He loved to tell recruits how his two big goals in college at Ball State were to play football and to drink every beer in Muncie, Indiana. In between those pastimes Hoke studied criminal justice and worked as an intern with the federal probation and parole office. After President Reagan was shot in 1981, he dreamed of becoming a Secret Service agent.

Instead, through a friend, he gravitated toward coaching. Working with parolees and wanting to protect presidents, he discovered, wasn’t all that different from trying to help kids. Coaches at Ball State had straightened him out. He could do the same. Teaching high school athletes the importance of honoring your name, family and school.

In 1983, when Hoke was an assistant coach at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, he and his wife, Laura, snuck into an empty Michigan Stadium. They walked out of the tunnel onto the field.
This
is where I want to coach, Brady told her. And so he set out to accomplish his goal, spending eight years as an assistant under Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr,
before resurrecting the football programs at his alma mater and San Diego State.

In January 2011, Michigan’s athletic director, Dave Brandon, found himself in the market for a new head football coach. The previous three seasons under Rich Rodriguez had dissolved into a frustrating snarl of missed opportunities that included an embarrassing NCAA investigation into excessive off-season workouts (later found to be minimal) and the worst defensive season in the 131-year history of the program. An athletic department known for its efficiency, stability and integrity was headed the wrong way in far too many areas. Worse, the game atmosphere had become as predictable as the fight song. The largest living alumni base in the world—at 450,000—was restless. Decades of fan loyalty had been put to the test.

Adding to the pressure was the fact U-M was truly a Big House divided on the man to replace Rodriguez. One alumni group pressed Brandon to reach into the past and hire former Wolverines quarterback Jim Harbaugh, then the head coach at Stanford; another group pulled for LSU’s head coach, Les Miles, a former Michigan assistant. Hoke was seen as a long shot at best.

Prior to taking the Michigan athletic director job in March 2010, Brandon had served as chairman and CEO of Domino’s Pizza for eleven years. He had been well schooled in the ingredients of marketing success, including a stint with the consumer giant Procter & Gamble. But he was a Michigan man through and through. A star at Michigan’s South Lyon High School, he’d earned a scholarship at quarterback to U-M in 1970 but ended up playing sparingly as a tight end and defensive end under legendary head coach Bo Schembechler. His reward for sticking it out: three Big Ten championship rings—of which Brandon was immensely proud—and an enduring father-son relationship with Schembechler, a towering figure in Michigan legend and lore, a coach who believed, above all, in “The Team … The Team … The Team.”

“One of the things I was looking for [in a head coach] was, who can be the unifier?” Brandon said. “Who is going to see the program is bigger than any one person? Who can put their arms around this whole
community
and say, ‘Let’s win football games’?

“So I had this form I put together. Listed the twelve things I wanted to
rate each [potential head] coach on. Basic stuff. Track record in recruiting, track record in turning around a program; I was looking for someone with a passion and propensity for playing defense. Fund-raising, NCAA record, that sort of thing.”

In Brandon’s scoring system, candidates were ranked in each category on a scale of 1 to 10. When he sat down with Hoke, the coach was hot off the rebuilding of struggling San Diego State. Still, Hoke carried an under-.500 record as a head coach.

Brandon had never met the SDSU coach, so he allotted a couple of hours for the interview. Hoke went on about Michigan’s unique culture, its storied football tradition (the most wins in college football history), iconic winged helmet and eleven national championships. He said he wanted to build a team that honored the past—tough, hard-nosed, competitive kids who loved the school and got chills running out of the tunnel.

By the time Hoke shook Brandon’s hand and said good-bye, five hours had passed.

At that point Brandon pulled out his form, went to work and tallied up Hoke’s score.

“I looked at the number, and I said, ‘This can’t be right, I added it wrong.’ So I added it again,” he said. “Then I took out a calculator and added it one more time because I thought I had miscalculated. The number was
so much larger
than anybody else I had met and, frankly, anyone else I thought I was going to meet. I just looked at it and said, ‘Wow.’ ”

Still, Brandon knew he could ill afford to make a mistake. For an athletic director today there is no more important hire than that of a head football coach. Mess up and bowl and television revenue begin to dry up, donations drop, the entertainment and merchandising dollars find other outlets.

“You’re dead,” Brandon said.

At 9:00 a.m. on January 11, 2011, Michigan held a press conference to announce its new head football coach.

“I must have got four hundred e-mails telling me what an idiot I was,” said Brandon.

Then Brady Hoke, he of the teddy-bear body and gravel-dusted voice, stepped up to the microphone. He said he would have walked from San Diego to Ann Arbor for the job. He spoke of “the game” and the days until they could beat “Ohio.” Such was his distaste he couldn’t bring himself to say the word “State.” The “Go Blue!” nation could hardly believe its ears.

Then, during the Q&A, someone asked whether Michigan was still an elite job.

Elite?

Hoke’s answer—as unrehearsed as it was unapologetic—was destined to earn a place in school history. In one single, unforgettable phrase, he declared how much the state, the school, the pride and the program meant to him, to anyone born to—or in love with—the maize and blue.

“This is Michigan fergodsakes.”

“That press conference happened,” said Brandon, “and I got four hundred e-mails from people saying, ‘Thank God. We got a Michigan guy back.’ ”

It was going on seven o’clock inside Cowboys Stadium when the “This is Michigan fergodsakes” guy rallied his team in the middle of the field. Brandon looked on from a few feet away.

“Nobody gives us a chance,” he said. “I’ve been watching TV all day, and nobody gives us a chance.”

In less than twenty-four hours the steel-and-glass palace would be filled with more than ninety thousand fans, at least half decked out in maize and blue.

“Well,” he said, “I think we do.”

“When I came into this job, I knew how the business of athletics worked,” said Brandon, who spent eight years as a U-M regent. “What you don’t understand about the job is the
intensity
. One of the reasons it’s so intense is because it’s so competitive, it’s so important to me. You don’t take this job for the money. You don’t take this job because it’s easy. You take this job because you believe in the purpose of what we have to do.”

It was Friday before the 2012 spring game, and Brandon, long and lean with close-cropped hair, looked relaxed sitting around a small circular table in his office on the second floor in Weidenbach Hall. An American flag fluttered in the breeze outside a large glass window overlooking the corner of Hoover and State. The place appeared to have been organized by a regiment of marines. Family photographs, a signed “Tribute to Bo” football and other personal mementos were neatly arranged around the room.

At heart, Brandon was a numbers guy. At the moment, in his mind, some of his most important were 109,901, 130, 29, 880, 15, 228, 5.8 and 22. The 109,901? Stadium capacity. Brandon had the biggest stadium in the
country, complete with eighty-one luxury suites and thirty-nine hundred club seats. Michigan had led the nation in attendance for thirty-four of the last thirty-five years and needed to continue to fill the Big House to stay on top.