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  To my mom, who always told me, “Your character is what you do when you think no one’s watching.” And to my dad, who said, “When you’re on the floor, you can’t fall out of bed.” This book proved them right many times over.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  1. LEADERS AND BEST

  2. MAN IN A HURRY

  3. CHANGING OVERNIGHT

  4. SPREADING THE SPREAD

  5. A STRANGE SEASON

  6. A STRANGE SEARCH

  7. HONEYMOON FROM HELL

  8. THE EVE OF A NEW ERA

  9. WOKEN UP BY THE ECHOES

  10. CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES

  11. WHILE THEY WERE MAKING OTHER PLANS

  12. FACING LITTLE BROTHER

  13. PLAYING FOR PRIDE

  14. SHARPENING THE SWORD

  15. BIG STORM COMING

  16. BAD NEWS ON THE DOORSTEP

  17. MEET THE PRESS

  18. STARTING OVER

  19. AS GOOD AS IT GETS

  20. COCKROACHES

  21. BIG TEN, BIG RINGS, BIG GAMES

  22. COACHING ON THE SIDE

  23. IN SEARCH OF PAUL BUNYAN

  24. BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG STAGE

  25. OF SLAUGHTERS AND SUMMIT MEETINGS

  26. THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE

  27. THE LAST BEST CHANCE

  28. TRYING TO KEEP TRYING

  29. HUMBLED

  30. MEET THE NEW BOSS

  31. JIMMYS AND JOES

  32. RALLIES AND REPORTS

  33. MAKING IT

  34. STRAW POLLS AND BIG BETS

  35. RECONSIDERING EVERYTHING

  36. BREAKFAST CLUB

  37. GRAND REOPENING

  38. ELEVEN AS ONE

  39. FIGHTING BACK THE GHOSTS

  40. LIFE’S NOT SO BAD

  41. THEY LEFT US TOO MUCH TIME

  42. BIG WEEK? WE KNOW!

  43. DENARD’S DAY

  44. LITTLE BROTHER, BIG GAME

  45. FIGHTING FOR HIS TEAM

  46. INTO THE LIONS’ DEN

  47. A PYRRHIC VICTORY

  48. SHOOT-OUT

  49. PLAYING FOR PRIDE—AGAIN

  50. THE FINAL BUST

  51. OUT OF GAS AT THE GATOR BOWL

  52. A MICHIGAN MAN

  EPILOGUE

  AFTERWORD TO THE 2012 EDITION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY JOHN U. BACON

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  “When I was still in grade school,” coach Rich Rodriguez told me, “I knew I wanted two things: to spend my life in sports, and to do it on the biggest stage possible.”

  It was late July 2010, just a few days before the Michigan Wolverines’ summer camp started. Rodriguez sat at the big desk in his office in Schembechler Hall, a warm, comfortable space, with his stocking foot resting near pictures of his wife, Rita, and his children, Raquel, fourteen, and Rhett, twelve. He had set up more photos of them on the dark wooden shelves behind him, including one of Rhett jumping up to touch the famed GO BLUE banner before Rodriguez’s first game at the University of Michigan two years earlier.

  It is a picture of pure exuberance. Ten years old at the time, before he hit his growth spurt, Rhett had to give it his all just to reach the bottom of the banner—and he touched it, barely. Now, two years later, he had grown five inches and matured from a deadly serious fourth grader who forced himself to quit wearing Nike (because Michigan had become an Adidas school and he was playing it by the book) to a preternaturally calm young man with a dry wit who seemed to be going on thirty, not thirteen. Living in the epicenter of Michigan football had a way of making you grow weary, or grow up—fast.

  Rodriguez had filled the shelf above that photo with Michigan’s iconic winged helmets from different eras, starting with a barless version all the way up to the current five-bar model. The two in the middle sported the numbers 47 and 87, representing the retired numbers of Bennie Oosterbaan and Ron Kramer, two of the greatest athletes in Michigan history. On the next shelf over, Rodriguez had stacked the canon of Michigan football literature, including tomes covering the history of Michigan Stadium and the first book on Bo Schembechler, Man in Motion, written in 1973.

  Throughout Rodriguez’s second-floor office, in the locker room, the weight room, and the museum below, he was surrounded by the trappings of Michigan football lore—gigantic photos and displays of the banner, the winged helmet, the 109,901-seat stadium, and the players and coaches who had made the program the biggest stage in college football.

  Rodriguez had not merely pursued his childhood dreams. He had actually achieved them.

  * * *

  Michigan football had been a model of stability and success since the Wolverines played their first game in 1879. The six coaches who preceded Rodriguez, dating back to 1938, averaged twelve years on the job—one good reason the Wolverines had won more games, and owned a higher winning percentage, than any other team in the country. They had built the biggest stadium, the largest alumni base, the most heated rivalries, and the richest tradition in the nation. More people have seen the Wolverines play football—in person and on TV—than any other team in the history of the game.

  It made sense, then, when Lloyd Carr stepped down in 2007, that the Wolverines would want the hottest coach in the country. And after a stumbling search, they found him.

  In late November 2007, Rich Rodriguez, the inventor of the spread option offense that most college teams now use, had led West Virginia University to the cusp of the national title game, until lowly Pittsburgh upset his alma mater 13–9. A week later, when Rodriguez asked the school president for higher salaries for his assistants, he was surprised not only to be turned down but also to be told, “We have done all we can. Take it or leave it.”

  Although Rodriguez had turned down the University of Alabama the year before, when Michigan offered him the top post, he accepted, becoming only the fourth outsider in over a century to lead the Wolverines. Both parties thought their problems were over. After all, plug a big-name coach into a big-name program, and what could go wrong?

  As it turned out, just about everything.

  Before Rodriguez had even left Morgantown, West Virginia sued him for full payment of his $4 million buyout. He and the University of Michigan ultimately paid it, but only after six months of one-sided silence, which West Virginia exploited to tarnish Rodriguez’s name.

  He still assumed, however, that his troubles were behind him—which helps explain why he didn’t see the troubles ahead.

  * * *

  During the three years this book covers, Michigan changed athletic directors once, head coaches twice, defensive coordinators three times, and quarterbacks at least four times, depending on who’s counting. All play central roles in this story, of course; their actions affect the plot in ways both expected and surprising. But one character affected events perhaps more than any other—and not by his actions, but by his absence.

  When Bo Schembechler passed away on November 17, 2006, the Wolverines were 11–0 and ranked second in the nation. They proceeded to lose their next four games, including the infamous upset at the hands of Appalachian State, which one popular website refers to simply as “the Horror.” There is no need to explain to any Michigan fan what that means, or to underscore that the team’s aura of invincibility had vanished
with that loss.

  A few months after Schembechler’s passing, his former quarterback, Jim Harbaugh, who had become Stanford’s head coach, publicly lambasted his alma mater and the football program’s academic advisers for allegedly talking him out of majoring in history. Michigan’s time-honored practice of keeping conflicts in-house no longer seemed to apply, either.

  Lloyd Carr’s retirement had been rumored for years; it finally occurred the Monday after his fourth straight loss to Ohio State in 2007, at age sixty-three. Yet it seemed to catch athletic director Bill Martin by surprise. Instead of having several strong candidates lined up, or one already sewed up for a seamless transition, Martin was at a loss; no one seemed to know who or what he was looking for.

  Martin’s bumbling month-long search for a leader only deepened the fault lines that first appeared after Schembechler’s death. The Michigan football family quickly cleaved into camps that wanted to see Louisiana State’s Les Miles, Michigan defensive coordinator Ron English, or another candidate succeed Carr. By the time Martin finally hired Rodriguez, unbeknownst to the incoming coach, the “Michigan Men” had become bitterly divided, agreeing on just one thing: “None of this would have happened if Bo were still here.”

  When Schembechler died, Michigan lost more than a coach, and the university lost more than a leader. The Michigan family lost its father. For the first time in almost four decades, it was not clear who the head of the household would be. Almost five years later, it’s still not.

  * * *

  Probably all of the off-field ordeals—from the mudslinging coming out of Morgantown to the factionalism growing in Ann Arbor—would have simmered down if Rodriguez’s first Michigan team had posted a winning season. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Wolverines’ twelfth national title. With the whole football world watching, Rodriguez’s team struggled, stumbled, and finally fumbled its way to an anemic 3–9 record, breaking the program’s forty-one-year streak without a losing season and its thirty-three-year run of bowl games. The lowlight was a 13–10 home loss to a weak University of Toledo team, which snapped Michigan’s perfect 24–0 mark against Mid-American Conference teams, a record that reached back to the nineteenth century.

  Rodriguez’s debut sharpened the divisions some, but hope was still alive on the eve of his second season—until the Detroit Free Press published a front-page story six days before the 2009 opener, claiming, among other things, that Rodriguez forced his players to spend fifteen or twenty-one hours a week on football in the off-season, more than twice the NCAA limit. It prompted investigations by the university and the NCAA itself, the first that Michigan’s football program had ever suffered, which entailed interviewing dozens of players and coaches in the middle of the season.

  Despite the distractions and the seemingly nonstop negative nationwide publicity, the 2009 Wolverines, led by freshman quarterback Tate Forcier, started the season with four straight victories—including a thrilling last-minute win over Notre Dame—but then fell apart, going 1–7 the rest of the way, once again falling out of the bowl picture.

  Wolverine Nation winced. How much of its pain derived from Rodriguez’s 8–16 record at Michigan and how much from the taint of the NCAA’s ongoing investigation was impossible to say. But when you added it all up, by the time we had that conversation in Rodriguez’s office in July 2010, just about every sports outlet in the country had Rodriguez sitting squarely on the hottest seat in college football.

  * * *

  The opportunity to write this book popped up largely through dumb luck, and it’s been luck—of all kinds—that has reshaped it every year since.

  After graduating from Michigan, I taught history and coached hockey at Culver Academies in northern Indiana. One of my star students, Greg Farrall, went on to become an All–Big Ten defensive end at Indiana, before pursuing a career in finance. One of his colleagues, Mike Wilcox, just happened to be Rich Rodriguez’s financial adviser. In 2008, when Farrall sent Wilcox my most recent book, Bo’s Lasting Lessons, Wilcox asked if I’d be interested in following Rodriguez’s first Michigan team at close range.

  The idea was to publish a series of stories to a magazine, in the hope of turning them into a book coauthored with Rodriguez, similar to the one I wrote with Bo Schembechler in 2007. After that first season ended at 3–9, however, I came to two obvious conclusions: this story wasn’t over, and I had to write it myself. A bit to my surprise, Rodriguez didn’t think twice.

  The deal we arrived at was simple: I would be granted unfettered access to the team’s meals and meetings, practices and games—from the sidelines to the locker room—an almost unheard-of opportunity for any journalist. In exchange, Rodriguez would get to read the manuscript for factual accuracy, period, though I was under no obligation to agree to his suggested changes. I was free to report whatever I observed and experienced. It is fair to say that no one involved in this project had any idea what we were getting ourselves into, but to everyone’s credit, no one ever tried to renege on the agreement.

  Rodriguez never flinched, I believe, because he firmly believed he had nothing to hide and was willing to bet that a fair portrayal of him and his program, warts and all, would be a considerable improvement over the rumors and recriminations coming out of West Virginia after he left. Rodriguez thought it was a chance worth taking.

  Of course, at that time it might not have seemed like that big a gamble. When I first met Rodriguez in August 2008, he said, “I’ve told my wife, Rita, that Charles Manson is also from West Virginia, and right now he’s more popular than I am.”

  As someone who has spent nearly two decades researching and writing about Michigan football, I found the offer especially enticing. I was born at University of Michigan Hospital, grew up in Ann Arbor, and earned two degrees from the school. After a couple of years away, I returned to Ann Arbor and started my writing career at the local paper, covering high school football games for fifty bucks a pop. I moved on to the Detroit News, where my position as a sports feature writer allowed me to produce longer pieces on, among other things, Michigan’s 1996 NCAA-champion hockey team, its storied football stadium, and its resident living legend, Bo Schembechler.

  Most reporters will tell you Michigan has done as good a job running a big-time college athletic department as has any school in the nation, but it surely has not been perfect. I was the first reporter to expose Fielding Yost’s racist past and initiated the investigation into the Michigan basketball program, which culminated in serious NCAA sanctions. I wrote a feature piece for The New York Times in 1999 explaining how the very department that once stood for unequaled stability, achievement, and integrity was about to hire its fifth director in a decade, under the cloud of a $3.9 million deficit and investigations into its basketball program by the NCAA, the IRS, and even the FBI. “Michigan’s problems run deep,” I wrote, “and the consequences will spread nationwide.”

  I left the Detroit News in 1999 to freelance for magazines and write books, but I never thought I’d be writing one like this.

  * * *

  The book you have in your hands is not the book I expected to write.

  I started out thinking I was writing Rocky—the small-town outsider who gets his shot on the big stage. By the middle of 2009, though, the story had morphed into something more akin to The Shawshank Redemption, and there was reason to wonder whether Rodriguez would ever be able to escape his detractors. But when Rich Rodriguez’s tenure as Michigan’s head football coach came to an end on Wednesday, January 5, 2011, I realized I was witness to the final moments of college football’s Titanic. The unsinkable ship had just gone down.

  Now the most pressing question is this: How did the game’s hottest coach combine forces with the game’s strongest program to produce three of the worst seasons in school history?

  Many other questions, however, arose unexpectedly.

  I thought I knew college football, and particularly Michigan football, as well as anyone. But after three years of seeing
everything up close, I can tell you this unequivocally: I had no idea.

  Looking at Michigan’s past three seasons, it’s not hard to divine dozens of management lessons—starting with the perils of arrogance on just about all fronts—but none of them would resolve college football’s central conflict: It’s a billion-dollar business whose revenues can fund entire athletic departments and whose leaders personify our biggest universities, but it’s all built on the backs of stressed-out coaches and amateur athletes.

  The contemporary college athletic department now resembles a modern racehorse: bigger, faster, and more powerful than ever but still supported by the same spindly legs that break with increasing frequency. Michigan’s $226 million renovation of its stadium—already the largest in the country, and almost twice as big as many NFL stadiums—the spiraling salaries (Rodriguez made $2.5 million a year at Michigan, the market rate), and the seemingly insatiable desire for new facilities for the university’s twenty-eight other varsity programs all depend on selling football tickets, seat licenses, luxury suites, and TV rights.

  And all that still depends on the arm of a nineteen-year-old quarterback and the foot of a twenty-year-old kicker.

  From the inside, I soon discovered how complicated the game had become, requiring coaches to work 120-hour weeks recruiting, practicing, and watching endless hours of film—only to see that twenty-year-old kid miss the kick. When that happened, Rodriguez would get hundreds of nasty e-mails and very little sleep, and have to hear stories of one of his daughter’s teachers making jokes about her father being fired in front of her classmates.

  Big-time college coaches ask their players to work almost as hard—not just on the field but in the weight room and in the classroom, too. I followed quarterback Denard Robinson for one day, which started at seven a.m. with treatment for his swollen knee, followed by weight lifting, classes, an interview with ESPN Radio, more treatment, meetings, practice, a third round of treatment, dinner, and film. When he walked out of Schembechler Hall after ten p.m., two middle-aged men who had been waiting all night for him in the parking lot asked him to sign a dozen glossy photos.