Three and Out (47 page)

That left Dorsey, by far the most vital to Rodriguez.

Knowing he was squarely behind the eight ball academically entering his senior year, Dorsey enrolled in two high schools to make up ground as fast as he could run, one being an alternative high school called LifeSkills. He also took a few online courses, for which he received all As. But Michigan told Rodriguez that Dorsey would not be admitted. Rodriguez gave Dorsey the bad news.

Because Dorsey didn't submit his application, admissions never had to make an official ruling one way or the other. Dorsey subsequently enrolled at Grand Rapids Community College.

Whether Dorsey should have been admitted, whether he could have cut it academically, and how much he might have helped the team will never be known. It is certainly possible, if he had been admitted, that Rodriguez's tough-love approach would have produced respectable results off the field, and Dorsey's speed spectacular results on the field. Considering Rodriguez's detractors' prediction that eight wins would have earned Rodriguez his fourth year, it's a tantalizing what-if.

But in the end, we know only this: Rodriguez and his staff spent time, effort, and lots of political capital with the very people who would determine his fate and got almost nothing in return—except another public bruising.

 

35   RECONSIDERING EVERYTHING

The buildup to the 2010 season opener against Connecticut might have been the greatest of any game since Rodriguez arrived thirty months earlier—which was saying something, given the endless talk of do-or-die games and sports talk show hosts declaring, “I have it on good authority he'll be gone by December/February/August”—take your pick.

It didn't help that the Wolverines were coming off two consecutive losing seasons for the first time since 1963, the year Rich Rodriguez was born. If they suffered a third, it would mark the first time that had happened since … well, since Michigan started playing football in 1879. It would also surely mark the departure of head coach Rich Rodriguez, his assistants, and his strength staff.

Throw in an ongoing NCAA investigation, the incessant derogatory drumbeat of the
Detroit Free Press
, and the rededicating of the Big House after a $226 million renovation, and you had the most pressurized position in all of college football.

But those rumors were nothing new, hounding Rodriguez almost from day one. What
was
new, however, was his response to it all.

Well before the 2010 season started, Rodriguez had made up his mind about a few things that had been floating around Schembechler Hall for longer than he liked. He intended to put an end to as much of it as he could, in the hopes of allowing him and his staff to focus on football.

*   *   *

“WELCOME!” Rodriguez said to his coaches on Monday, July 26, 2010. It was the first day of their staff retreat, held in the Schembechler Hall Commons. They would spend five days going over every one of the 162 pages in the binders they had just received. On the covers, Rodriguez had printed
2010 HIDEAWAY
above a famed mantra from Schembechler himself,
THE TEAM. THE TEAM. THE TEAM
, and one from Rodriguez,
ALL IN FOR MICHIGAN
, against a backdrop of the newly renovated stadium. It marked a nice summation of where they stood, juxtaposing past and present—with plenty of pressure.

“The purpose of the hideaway,” Rodriguez explained to the people seated at the square of tables, “is to go over every single aspect of the program to make sure we don't miss a thing about what we want and who's in charge of what. It's about the same as last year. Of course, we have a little more to talk about this year because of all we've been through.

“On the first page is our schedule. It won't be easy.”

During the retreat, Rodriguez would cover everything from how they recruited, to how they conditioned, practiced, dressed, and traveled, and a couple dozen more tasks in between. But even if their players aced every class and carried themselves like Eagle Scouts, the coaches knew they would all be judged on the outcome of those twelve sixty-minute contests. But it was even less than that, because the average football game has only eleven minutes of actual action, thus boiling down the annual evaluation of every person in that room—and a hundred others not present—to a grand total of 2:12 of plays produced by kids not old enough to buy a beer.

If you want a definition of pressure, that's not a bad one.

“‘THE STATE OF THE UNION,'” Rodriguez said, reading from page four.

“‘The worst is behind us,'” he read. “‘We must demand excellence.'”

That would start with Rodriguez. If 95 percent of the message hadn't changed from the year before, the 5 percent essentially boiled down to two points: The buck stops with Coach Rodriguez, and no more Mr. Nice Guy.

“Here's what I've learned the last two years,” he said. “Like everyone else, I came here with great respect for Michigan. When people here did things differently than I'm used to, or not the way I would do it, I've been very trusting, figuring this is how they do it here. I said, ‘Let them do it that way. It's the way they've done it for years.'

“Well, guess what? That got my ass in trouble, and I'm still paying for it. So is Michigan.

“The head football coach is in charge of everything. If I ask you to do something, I'll trust you to do it. From now on, if I say we're going to wear pink wristbands, we're going to wear pink wristbands. I'm not going to ask. My decisions will not please everyone, but I'm the head coach, so that's the way it is. If something is iffy, I'll ask Dave Brandon.

“I don't want anyone here to feel that I'm micromanaging you. But if anything goes wrong, the first guy they're going to blame is me. Is that clear to everyone? Good.

“Another point: Never keep from me anything I'm going to be accountable for. Got it? Good.”

The people sitting at those tables knew exactly what Rodriguez was talking about: the
Free Press
front-page story of August 29, 2009, and the NCAA investigation that followed. Rodriguez had been taking slings and arrows since he left Morgantown, but that story penetrated his armor like no other, particularly the suggestion that he had no regard for his players' well-being.

“I have to sleep at night knowing that there's nothing we did or didn't do that day that is going to come back and bite us in the ass. And I'll be the first one they bite.”

What he didn't tell them is that he hadn't had a good night's sleep since he had left West Virginia, and it was getting worse. “I'm tossing and turning at four o'clock in the morning,” he told me. “And all I'm thinking is, ‘I'm
not
a bad guy. I'm not a liar, I'm not a cheater. I
care
about our guys. So why am I going through all this?'”

He had, by his own account, become less trusting of people in general and some local reporters and Michigan insiders in particular. He had also become world-weary, visibly aging. But he was not about to give up. If anything, he had become more determined to prove his critics wrong. His glare, his jaw, and his defiance had all grown stronger.

That brought Rodriguez to sideline passes and media access. “The last two years every man in the state of Michigan and his mother had a sideline pass,” he said. He didn't mention his name, but most present knew the one pass that bothered him most was Jim Stapleton's.

“No more. We're taking charge of this. Brandon's on top of it.”

Carr had been so protective of the program's privacy that the building was jokingly referred to as “Fort Schembechler.” Rodriguez was initially the opposite, opening up every practice not only to former players and coaches but also to the media. That had been his policy at West Virginia, but glasnost had worked a lot better in Morgantown than in Ann Arbor.

“I've been nice and accommodating from the day I got here,” he said, “and they screwed me.

“Well, we don't have to be nice anymore. We just have to be accommodating. They will not have the access they've had. I've trusted others' judgment about what reporters are fair, which ones we should help, and it got us in trouble. I'm not delegating that anymore.”

When they got to the tab addressing the coaching staff, the top item on the first page was “Loyalty.”

“We're good here,” is all Rodriguez had to say, and he meant it. If Rodriguez had become more suspicious of some people, he had become more appreciative of most, especially his assistants. “When I hired you, I hired you
and
your family. I know you. I know your families. And I think your families are outstanding.”

It was not hyperbole. Of the nine assistants, all but two were married, and none of them had ever been divorced. They had almost two dozen children among them, some adults now, and none of them were screwups. In modern America, the staff must have set some sort of record for stability.

Rodriguez, as he did every year, asked all of those present to tell something about themselves, their spouses, and their children.

“I'll start. You all know Rita, of course. She's always around. We've got two kids, Raquel, fourteen going on nineteen, and Rhett, who's twelve. Both my parents are still alive. My dad is a retired coal miner, and my mom's a retired teacher's aide.

“I have two brothers. One's a middle school principal, one's a lawyer, who only has to work twice a week. I think he's the only lawyer in the country I've not hired.”

That got a laugh and sent the subject circling around the tables. “I'm so proud of my brothers,” defensive line coach Bruce Tall said. “My oldest is an orthopedic surgeon who graduated from Dartmouth, the other two are law grads from Case Western, and the youngest is the smartest. He was in med school, but when my parents got ill, he took care of them, and now he's a schoolteacher.”

Cal Magee took it from there: The youngest of six siblings raised in a shotgun shack in the shadows of the New Orleans Superdome, he was the first in his family to earn a college degree and had been thinking about going to law school when the coaching bug bit him.

Rodriguez enjoyed these stories—one of the only chances they had for such things—and frequently asked questions during their introductions.

Next, Rodriguez asked video coordinator Phil Bromley to start a slide show of some 120 head shots, every player on the roster. When a face popped up, the next guy at the table had to give the player's name, position, hometown, high school, and anything else about him he could remember. Rodriguez expected every coach and staffer to know every player, from All-American to walk-on. Through the entire show, no one drew a blank except on the occasional freshman, and they usually had a quick comment or story about each player.

When it was Calvin Magee's turn, he didn't hesitate. “Maaaad Jack Kennedy!” he bellowed. No one was quite sure why they started calling him “Mad Jack”—except perhaps because it was completely counter to his sunny personality—but it had stuck, and spread.

“Walk-on quarterback from Michigan.”

“Where in Michigan?” Rod Smith asked, testing his friend. “Big state!”

“Ah, geez. Lake something.”

“Lotta lakes, too,” Smith said.

“Ah! Walled Lake!”

“Walled Lake
Central
,” Smith said, “but we'll allow it.”

“Thank you, Rod. Let's see. One run for six yards against Delaware State. Very high average. Hockey player—and a hell of a rapper. Go figure!”

That brought him to “Captains!” which had become another source of friction when Rodriguez ended the 129-year tradition of naming at least one full-time captain for the entire season. Instead, he had brought to Michigan a system of rotating captains for each game to ensure that every senior gets to be captain at least once and leadership comes from the entire class. When the old guard started giving Rodriguez a hard time about this, one big donor told him, “There's a difference between tradition and best practices. Respect tradition, but follow best practices.” But drawing that line had proved to be one of Rodriguez's greatest challenges at Michigan.

So, when one of the players suggested to him that they have two permanent captains selected by the team and two game captains, Rodriguez decided that sounded perfect.

If Rodriguez had come up with such a simple solution in the first months of his tenure, he probably would have avoided a few headaches.

“If they don't pick Steve Schilling and Mark Moundros,” he said, “they got the wrong guys.”

That Steve Schilling was a strong candidate for captain was hardly a surprise. He had been a five-star lineman out of Washington State and was about to enter his third season as a starter. Mark Moundros was a little more surprising.

Moundros had turned down a scholarship from Eastern Michigan to walk on at Michigan. He let his teammates know that playing for Michigan was a privilege, not a right, something he underscored during their summer workouts and seven-on-seven drills, which the seniors directed.

“We were disappointed with the past two years,” he said, “and we knew whatever we were doing wasn't working.”

Inevitably, that meant dealing with players who took the word “voluntary” at face value. The seniors couldn't do much about it—thanks to strict adherence to all NCAA rules, they couldn't take attendance or tell the coaches—but they didn't have to treat them equally, either.

That included the quarterbacks. Forcier had started all twelve games the previous season, making it his job to lose. But after the 2009 season ended, the former wunderkind had slacked off—in the classroom, in the weight room, in the film room, and in spring practice.

While Forcier was out having fun, Denard Robinson was dedicating himself to learning the spread offense.

That spring, when some of the student managers ran into Roy Roundtree at a party, they'd asked him, “Who's going to be the quarterback?”