Three and Out (51 page)

When Rodriguez walked to the bus, a man with a Notre Dame hat approached him. “I'm not sure if you're shaking hands with Notre Dame fans, but great job. I'm impressed.”

*   *   *

As the buses rolled down the road, cell phones started buzzing with text messages coming in from parents, girlfriends, fans, and even the famous.

The national story would be Denard Robinson, who broke just about every single-game record for a Michigan quarterback on the books. With 455 yards rushing in two games, Robinson led not only all quarterbacks nationwide but all tailbacks, too, and he had yet to suffer a single run for a loss.

PR man Dave Ablauf's phone vibrated like a tuning fork the entire way home, with everyone wanting a piece of Denard, the leading Heisman candidate. Even Dhani Jones and Braylon Edwards, frequent critics of the Rodriguez regime, appeared to want back on the bandwagon. But the best response might have been the tweet from LeBron James—a Buckeye fan, no less—who wrote, “I give credit where credit is due. That Denard Robinson is a monster out there right now.”

The Wolverines were undefeated, and headed home for what looked like two easy games before starting Big Ten play.

But Rodriguez didn't give a second thought to any of it. He sat in the front seat with his laptop, breaking down the tape.

 

39   FIGHTING BACK THE GHOSTS

“Offensive player?” Rodriguez said, doing his best to sound mildly grumpy throughout the Sunday staff meeting. “Guess we can figure out who that is.” It was the first tipoff in forty-five minutes that he had actually seen Denard play the day before.

On defense, Kovacs and Mouton took top honors, but when special teams came up, Rodriguez jumped at the chance to try to take the sheen off the Era of Good Feeling. “Special teams?” he asked rhetorically. “I don't think we have anyone. It was atrocious.”

But the good news kept coming anyway. Seven players had crunches, three had picks, and the defense achieved its weekly goal of six three-and-outs. Nonetheless, after they broke down the special teams film, the offensive coaches ran through every play—all eighty-seven, back and forth and back and forth—without cracking a smile.

But when Denard finished his 3-yard run for the winning touchdown—the last offensive play of the game—Tony Dews couldn't restrain himself, jamming both fists into the air. “Man, that
still
feels good,” he said, standing up and pointing at the screen. “
Suck it
, Notre Dame!”

Rodriguez himself displayed a a grin worthy of the
Mona Lisa
. No one else said a word—no one dared—until Rodriguez retired to his office. Outside of Dews's brief outburst, if you watched the two-hour meeting, you would have assumed their team had been humiliated.

But when they all walked down the hall to the bathroom, their faces broke into big smiles and they started high-fiving each other and patting each other on the back.

“Oh, man, that was great!”

“We needed that one!”

“That felt good!”

“We've only just begun!”

That five-minute celebration was the last they talked about the Notre Dame game all day, all week, all season. They returned to the den, put their game faces back on, and started breaking down tape of the University of Massachusetts, their third opponent.

Their focus was interrupted only once, when Denard Robinson timidly cracked the door open to see if it was okay to come in.

“Come on in, Denard!”

“Hey, man, you guys see it?” he asked.

“See what?” they asked, assuming he was talking about his now famous 87-yard run, which had been playing on ESPN every thirty minutes.

“You guys all see my knockdown? I got a knockdown! I want my Payday!”

They laughed. “We'll check the tape again. Promise.”

“You a little sore today?” Rod Smith asked.

“Yeah,” he said, chuckling. “I'm sore as hell right now. Ribs. Neck.” He picked up some tapes of UMass.

“Getting hounded by the press yet?” Rodriguez asked.

“I'm getting texts from people I never met. I just ignore 'em.”

“Good. Don't talk to anyone who doesn't go through Dave [Ablauf].”

A couple hours later, Ablauf sat down with Rodriguez for Sunday pizza.

“I'm getting pounded,” Ablauf said, referring to the flood of media requests for Denard. “We need to come up with a strategy—
now
—to deal with all of it.

“That's easy,” Rodriguez said, munching on a slice. “No change in his routine. No hype for the Heisman.”

“I agree,” Ablauf said. “Of course, they're going to howl.”

“You can blame it on me,” Rodriguez said. “What're they gonna do, write a bad story about me? Been there, done that. They can kiss my ass. And they can kiss Denard's too—if they can catch it.”

While the media showered praise on Robinson, it seemed to regard Michigan's success as a lucky fluke. Few seemed to remember that Michigan was the only big-name program smart enough to recruit Denard as a quarterback and honest enough to keep their word. People had also forgotten how unprepared Robinson—and his supporting cast—had been just one year earlier. Michigan's success wasn't based on just Robinson, or luck. The quarterback and his teammates had been recruited, they had been coached, and they had responded.

Obviously, since Rodriguez had arrived in Ann Arbor, a lot of things had not gone as he had hoped or expected, especially on defense. But if his bosses had reviewed Rodriguez's progression at Glenville State and West Virginia, and analyzed his first twenty-six games in Ann Arbor, they would recognize a familiar pattern: After struggling to learn his system, the offense takes off, then the defense follows.

As
Sports Illustrated
's Austin Murphy had written, “If past is prologue, the Wolverines will grind their offensive gears in Rich Rod's first season. After that, stand back.”

That appeared in the 2008 college football preview. Everything seemed a year behind schedule, for a variety of reasons, but by mid-September 2010, it looked more like the cycle had merely been delayed, not broken.

*   *   *

“Any time you get a win, it's good,” Rodriguez told his team on Monday, September 13. “And any time you get a win over Notre Dame, it's even better. But when you see the tape, you'll see that we can play a lot better.

“Now, all of a sudden the cockroaches are hiding because the lights are on. And now the media wants to have
all
these interviews—with Denard, with me, with all of you.

“Well, where the hell were they two weeks ago?

“Remember, all this attention, all this praise—it's just like poison: It's not gonna kill ya unless you swallow it.

“We're not going to coach any different, we're not going to play any different, no matter who we're playing, no matter who's watching.”

The next six games represented a perfect progression upward: UMass, Bowling Green, Indiana on the road, Michigan State at home, Iowa at home, and Penn State on the road. Each week they would probably have to play better to win, but that seemed a lot easier than the two-game gauntlet they had just survived.

Everyone expected UMass to be easier, but no one expected Rodriguez to let up. When they were winning, he was at his toughest. At the end of a good practice, Rodriguez told his team: “Do not get behind on your schoolwork. How you start your semester has everything to do with how you finish. We have eleven more weeks of unshakable focus ahead of us. Keep the lights on!”

Quarterback coach Rod Smith was more direct when he addressed his four charges: “Don't you
dare
take these guys for granted. They're good!”

The players were done for the day, but not the coaches. On this warm, sunny day, twenty-nine walk-on wannabes showed up to run, pass, catch, and kick in front of the coaches for forty-five minutes.

The group looked like an intramural flag football team—and not a great one, at that. But Rodriguez noticed a tight end with a Division I build who made a great diving catch. On his next route, he strained for another high pass, tipped it, and then gathered it on the way down, with the defender hanging all over him.

“There you go!” Rodriguez said. “Good job catching my eye! Come over here!” Rodriguez wanted some basic information: Mike Kwiatkowski. Macomb, Michigan. A 3.4 GPA, majoring in neuroscience. Bingo.

After Kwiatkowski made another strong catch, I asked Rodriguez, “Did he just make the team with that one?”

“No,” he said, then turned to me. “He made it on the last one.”

Throughout the tryout, Rodriguez roamed among the half dozen stations, with his two children close by. They often attended practice—“If I don't see 'em then, I might not see 'em all day,” Rodriguez explained—but this was their only chance to walk on the field. They took full advantage, following their father wherever he went, taking turns being sheltered by his big left arm.

Rodriguez's Wolverines were 2–0, ranked twentieth in the nation, with winnable games on the horizon. The Irish had been vanquished, his patented spread offense was humming along nicely with a Heisman candidate at quarterback, the weather was perfect, he was about to give a walk-on the same chance he'd been given, and his kids were under his wing.

When they're happy, cats purr. Dogs wag their tails. Coach Rodriguez spins his whistle string on the first two fingers of his right hand, winds it all the way up, then spins it all the way back, unaware he's even doing it.

Rich Rodriguez was happy.

Back at his desk, he was writing notes on each player he'd just watched. He decided to keep two kickers and the tight end.

Was this the best part of coaching?

“If it's not my favorite day, it's one of 'em,” he said, writing away, then looked up. “I love it. I love it.”

*   *   *

If you want to get the pulse of the average Michigan football fan, you need to close your laptop, leave the campus cafés, and walk down State Street toward Ferry Field. If you stop halfway down the slope, between Hill and Packard, you'll see such Ann Arbor institutions as Pizza Bob's, Mr. Spots, Big Ten Burrito (though the conference made it change its name to BTB Burrito, everyone still calls it by its original name), and two barbershops: Coach & Four and the State Street Barbershop.

They have a history. Jerry Erickson came down from a little town in the Upper Peninsula called Stambaugh, near the Wisconsin border, and opened Coach & Four in 1972. He hired fellow Stambaugh native Bill Stolberg, whom everyone still calls “Red” even though his hair turned white long ago. Four years later, Stolberg took over the State Street Barbershop, and it's been that way ever since.

Both barbershops cut hair—sixteen bucks, no appointment needed—and serve as mini-museums to Michigan Men, with signed game jerseys and photos covering every flat surface, from legends like Anthony Carter, Jamie Morris, and Jim Harbaugh. Erickson's place features a stuffed bear on the wall wearing a Michigan hockey jersey from 1973, and a photo of Bo Schembechler, who wrote, “To Jerry, the worst barber in Ann Arbor.” That didn't stop him from walking up the street for decades. He got his last haircut just two days before he passed away. “I think,” Erickson said, “he was saying good-bye.”

Both barbershops serve as gossip centers for all things Michigan athletics. The proprietors are cousins, to boot, but that doesn't mean they agree very often.

On Friday afternoon, Erickson was busy shooting the bull with his customers, selling tickets, and watching his barbers cut hair. “Oh, everyone's real happy, everyone's real excited,” he said about the team. “They're fun to watch. Keep it up for a few more, and I think the ol' boy is safe.”

Red Stolberg was holding court down the street. “The consensus is,” he said, while cutting a local businessman's hair, “someone should have sat Rich Rod down when he came to Michigan, and told him what Michigan is all about, the tradition, and the Big Ten. And he should be more visible on campus. You never see him, except for some big pep rally once a year. He needs to come up here! Lloyd was always walking up and down State Street saying hello to people.

“Hard to like someone you don't know.

“Sixty percent of my customers say, if he doesn't come through this year, he's got to go. Other folks are saying it's his third year, and you need to give him more time.”

*   *   *

Of course, to Rodriguez, the idea that the danger had passed was, well, dangerous.

On Friday night, September 17, in the team meeting at the Campus Inn, Rodriguez reviewed the keys to success. The previous two seasons, he offered five points each for offense, defense, and the team, but this year he'd reduced that to just one key for each, which he then beat into their heads so often that they could yell them back. It mirrored the coaches' decision to simplify both the offensive and defensive schemes in the hopes of sacrificing complexity for execution and aggressiveness. It was the start of his third season in Ann Arbor, and he was still evolving as a coach.

“On offense?”

“Attack, whack, don't hold back!”

“That's right. And BSA?”

“Ball security always.”

“Good. Defense?”

“Strain, contain, and CAUSE SOME PAIN.”

“Yeah, you got it! And our team keys?”

“Stay hungry. Don't swallow the poison!”

“I don't think you have swallowed the poison, from what I've seen. You've been humble. Practice has been good.” Then he showed a tape that had popped up that day on the UMass website. During their walk-through that day, someone asked one of their players about the Big House. “Well, it's not that big,” he said. “It should be called the Little House on the Prairie.”

It was just like Dierdorf had warned: They weren't scared anymore.