Three and Out Read Free Page A

decisively in the presidents’ favor after Schembechler retired as athletic director in 1990, Michigan’s presidents had hired four straight athletic directors who did not have a single day of experience coaching or administering college athletics. Before Rodriguez’s third season, Michigan hired a fifth.
    They all brought serious strengths to the post, but none of them seemed to know what coaches went through and how best to help them.
    The questions about Rodriguez started the day he arrived in Ann Arbor and multiplied each year he coached the Wolverines.
    Could Rodriguez adapt to the unique culture that is Michigan football? Would he embrace the tradition, or fight it? Could his high-flying offense succeed in the stodgy Big Ten, and could he build a defense to match?
    But questions about Michigan arose, too. Would the Wolverines, who cherish their past like no one else, seize the future in the form of the spread offense? Could they accept an outsider for the first time in four decades—and the first West Virginia accent in a century—and give him the support he needed to get the Wolverines back to BCS games, where everyone felt they belonged? How would the Michigan family respond if Rodriguez failed to win enough, fast enough?
    Many Michigan Men would come to Rodriguez’s aid and help him any way they could—sometimes at considerable personal cost. Others immediately rejected him as a “bad cultural fit.” Still others came to that conclusion only after the losses piled up.
    *   *   *
    Rodriguez had not made it all the way from tiny Grant Town, West Virginia, to the biggest stage in the nation by playing it safe. As we sat in his office that July day in 2010, he told me that, for the third straight season, he would be starting a new quarterback in the opener—sophomore Denard Robinson, this time—with former freshman phenom Forcier demoted to third string.
    Rodriguez knew he had to win, and he had to do it the right way—just one more reason the outcome of the NCAA investigation seemed so important. He also had to become, in the well-worn phrase of the day, a “Michigan Man”—a leader so exemplary that alums and fans were proud to see him serving as the voice of the program and, truly, the face of the university itself.
    Sports fans invest great hopes and dreams in their teams. College football fans invest even more, I think, because of the stronger connection they feel with the school and the players. But I’ve never seen any fans ask more of their team than Michigan football fans ask of theirs.
    There are only two groups who are more devoted to the Wolverines—the coaches and the players themselves. They have the most to gain and the most to lose. They know the stakes. And they accept them—even embrace them. It’s why all of them, from Rich Rodriguez to Tate Forcier to Denard Robinson, came to Ann Arbor. Not to be average, or even good, but “the leaders and best.”
    Anything less would not do.
    This book attempts to explain how the coach and his team fell short—and what happened when they did.

 
    1   LEADERS AND BEST
    This is a story that could happen only in America.
    When you travel abroad you quickly realize it is impossible to explain why a university would own the largest stadium in the country. It is, literally, a foreign concept, one as original as the U.S. Constitution.
    Indeed, it was Thomas Jefferson who drafted the Northwest Ordinance, providing for the funding of public schools and universities in the states that now constitute most of the Big Ten. “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The idea is so central to Michigan’s mission—even its very existence—it is engraved on the façade of its central building, Angell Hall.
    If Ken Burns is