A Season in the Big House: An Unscripted, Insider Look at the Marvel of Michigan Football

—

For Caryn Rachel, the newest Wolverine

Contents

Introduction

1. This One’s for All 111,000 of You

2. September 3: Michigan 33, Northern Illinois 17

3. September 10: Notre Dame 17, Michigan 10

4. September 17: Michigan 55, Eastern Michigan 0

5. October 1: Michigan 34, Michigan State 31

6. October 8: Minnesota 23, Michigan 20

7. October 15: Michigan 27, Penn State 25

8. October 22: Michigan 23, Iowa 20

9. October 29: Michigan 33, Northwestern 17

10. November 12: Michigan 41, Indiana 14

11. November 19: Ohio State 25, Michigan 21

12. December 28: Alamo Bowl Nebraska 32, Michigan 28

Afterword

Lloyd Carr Reflects

Appendix: 2005 Statistics

Photo Gallery

Introduction

The most shocking moment I experienced in writing this book came when someone compared the University of Michigan football program to the New York Yankees.

This staggered me. Not only staggered, but sickened.

I was a well-brought-up child of Detroit, taught by my father that the Yankees were to be regarded as objects of hatred. They were arrogant and soulless in their perfection. They blighted every summer of my life from the time I became aware of baseball until I graduated from college. In those 16 years they won the pennant every season but two. My Tigers bobbed up and down between second-rate play and occasional contention. On those rare instances that they seemed about to challenge the Yanks, they were swatted away like the pesky insects they were.

A college friend said that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for General Motors. (Of course, given the recent history of GM, that comparison isn’t especially apt anymore.)

The lesson learned from those years, however, was that precious moments of intense joy are paid for many times over by years of anguish.

Anguish is not generally a word used in the same sentence as Yankees fan. But you do become closely acquainted with it in Ann Arbor.

I know this because I was also taught by my father to cheer for the Wolverines. I could never quite figure out why he was so attached to them. He didn’t go to Michigan, and neither did I. We were both graduates of Wayne State University and proud fans of the Tartars.

Well, at least we used to be. The school grew weary of having its nickname confused with the gunk on your teeth and the stuff you put on fish, so several years ago it changed its name to Warriors. So I am now a proud Warrior—yes!

Still, Wayne is a commuter campus, and although it is a major university with excellent professional schools and research facilities, it plays Division II football. I have attended exactly two Wayne State football games in my life. One was to meet a girl in 1960, and the other was to cover a contest at Eastern Illinois in 1967. They lost both times, and the girl wasn’t that great, either.

Faced with this vast emptiness in my collegiate loyalties, I followed Dad’s example and turned to Michigan. I was nine years old at the time, and that Michigan team happened to go to the Rose Bowl and beat California.

This indicated to me that I had chosen wisely. Not that I was all that wrapped up in it. Neither the infamous Snow Bowl game of that 1950 season at Ohio State nor the ensuing Rose Bowl was televised. Still, I do have a vague recollection of listening to the game in Pasadena on the radio and being immensely cheered at the outcome.

I could not have known it, but Michigan was about to enter the longest fallow period in its history. It would be another 14 years before it returned to the Rose Bowl, and losing seasons would become commonplace.

Michigan State, at the exact same time, was turning into a national power. Two years after I chose Michigan as the team of my heart, the Spartans won the national championship. In the very next season, their first in the Big Ten, they won the conference title and went to the Rose Bowl.

Many of my peers quickly became big Michigan State fans. But I had made my choice, and even at that tender age it seemed shallow to cast it aside so quickly. I felt I was a better person than that. The born-again MSU converts were like the kids who showed up at our softball games wearing Yankees caps. They never actually got beaten up, but they were despised as front-running geeks.

Still, it was hard. In 1955, for example, Michigan won its first six games and was ranked number one in the country. It was a magnificent crew, led by All-American ends Ron Kramer and Tom Maentz. Their pictures appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. I went to my first game in The Big House that fall and watched them dismantle Army, 26–2.

Then they went down to Champaign and were simply corked by a nondescript Illinois team, 25–6. I was keeping score of this mess at home, and at one point in the fourth quarter simply hurled my notebook across the room in a rage and switched off the radio. It was a course of action I would come to repeat all too often.

Incidentally, Em Lindbeck, the Illinois quarterback who directed this disaster, became a baseball player. His only two games in the majors were with the Tigers. He batted once and failed to get a hit. It figures.

Michigan also lost its final game that year to Ohio State. This was during the very core of the era in which Woody Hayes had decided the forward pass was an unmanly fad that was not properly part of football. He simply rammed the ball down Michigan’s throat and dared them to stop him. They could not.

This is also the year I learned not to like Ohio State very much. If any fair correlation to the Yankees can be drawn, it is with that school. George Steinbrenner is a graduate of Ohio State and an avid Buckeyes fan. Michigan supporters are absolutely convinced that he signed Drew Henson to a whopping baseball contract for the sole purpose of leaving the team without an experienced quarterback.

There is, however, a slight basis for the comparison to the Yankees. They had a losing season in 1925, when Babe Ruth went down with a bellyache that was later revealed to be venereal disease. They didn’t have another one until 1965—39 years in a row without a losing record. The Wolverines last had a losing season in 1967. Going into 2006, that makes 38 years in a row.

Very impressive. But now we get to the anguish part.

While the Yankees won 19 championships during their streak, Michigan has won only one. In their final game of the season during that time, either against OSU or in a bowl game, their mark is 14–23–1.

So you see, those who speak of the Yankees are simply clueless. It’s more like being an Atlanta Braves fan. You win every year except when it comes to the games that matter.

Bo Schembechler pointed out, however, that not one of those end-of-the-season losses cost Michigan a national championship. Even though he went into the last game with a perfect record five straight times between 1970 and 1974, and then lost or tied it, the title would have gone elsewhere even if Michigan had won. Never were they ranked higher than third before any of these sad finales. In fact, the latest that a Schembechler team held the number-one spot was November 6, 1977, when they lost at Purdue, 16–14, on a missed field goal at the gun.

I can still hear Bob Ufer’s mournful cry into the mike. No good, he muttered. No good. No good.

Since Schembechler’s retirement, even accounting for the 1997 championship year, Michigan has been ranked first for a grand total of only four weeks.

It isn’t as if they always fall short. It’s more a case of—you know—things happening. Bad things.

So while some may call Michigan fans arrogant asses, we know in our hearts, as George Will once wrote about following the Chicago Cubs, that man is not born to pleasure.

My intention in writing this book was to get at the mystique of being a Michigan fan. There are so damn many of us, and we are so disposed to hope for the best and expect the worst.

Predictions for the 2005 season were typically bubbly, and it appeared that it could be a year worth remembering.

That prediction turned out to be correct, but for all the wrong reasons. No one anticipated a season that resembled a tightrope walker with the DTs. At times it seemed it would all plunge to ruin, and at others it appeared that the safety of the far side was only a shaky step away.

Neither turned out to be true. Absolutely stirring victories were outweighed by absolutely crushing losses. It sometimes seemed as if we were witnessing the end of an era of Michigan dominance and the start of a slow descent into the ordinary. Either that or it was the most god-awful streak of bad luck ever to hit a football team.

Maybe both. It was hard to tell.

Ambiguity has entered the equation, and it will take another season or two to learn whether it has taken up permanent residence in Ann Arbor.

1. This One’s for All 111,000 of You

Every season begins like a bright promise, clean as a freshly laundered uniform, free of the grime of failure. It’s true in any sport, even in places where teams have been beaten down for decades, deprived of the slightest whiff of success.

Whether it’s the Chicago Cubs or the Arizona Cardinals or the Temple Owls, at the beginning, their fans can hope, if only blindly and for a little while. Before the first ball is snapped or the first pitch is thrown, it is still a world of limitless possibilities. Maybe this will be the year when reality gets stood on its head, the losers rise up, and the last shall be first.

When August winds down in Ann Arbor, however, there is a different sort of anticipation. No less keen, but pitched to another key.

Success is regarded as merely the starting point for University of Michigan football. That is the given. The only question is a matter of degree.

What will it be? A share of the Big Ten title? Another trip to Pasadena? A shot at number one?

What will it be? 10–2? 11–1? 12–0?

Because 9–3 is not so good, and 8–4 is abject failure, unacceptable. Something less than that—be serious. It can’t happen.

A record that would send fans into gleeful dances and a December bowl game at other places is met here with scowls of contempt. The destination is always January. That certainty not only brings in the prime-time recruits, it fills more stadium seats than any other team in college football. Everybody wants to be a part of the spectacle at The Big House.

They troop in, 111,000 strong, every autumn Saturday when the gates open, because they know this is a place where failure isn’t allowed. Nowhere else are expectations constantly pegged so high.

Once upon a time it used to be that way at Notre Dame, and maybe, to some extent, with the Yankees. But even the Yankees can falter. The Wolverines never do.

Michigan has been to a bowl game every season since 1975—which was the first year the Big Ten lifted its restriction on postseason participation. They haven’t missed once, and 13 times in those 30 seasons it was the Rose Bowl.

Their last losing season was 1967. That was two years bb—Before Bo. That’s the longest such streak in any sport. Even in the worst year, the injury-plagued, 6–6 1984 season, Brigham Young had to beat Michigan in the Holiday Bowl before it could claim the national title.

Nebraska fell from this list in 2004. It was the first time the Huskers had lost more than they won since 1961—four national championships ago. In Lincoln, some would say five and tick off the 1997 season, too, when they finished first in the coaches’ poll. This is a point that does not even merit discussion in Ann Arbor, which was number one in the AP balloting that year. There was barely disguised glee at Michigan when Nebraska toppled, because some felt it was payback for such hubris, coming seven years overdue.

What rankles, however, is that through all those seasons of success there has been only one national title. That is the other part of the equation. It’s always something, some unexpected calamity that shatters hopes and turns championship aspirations into mere excellence once again. It shapes autumn in Ann Arbor—a worm-infested apple that falls to the ground and sours the entire season.

On the other hand, it keeps ’em coming back. Baseball executives like to say the perfect season is one in which your team is in the pennant race all the way but finishes second. That type of finish fills the stadium, and no one gets jaded, which pretty much fits the annual scenario at Michigan.

You are part of the largest crowd to watch a football game anywhere in the United States today, the public-address announcer always reminds the throng as he announces the official attendance total in the fourth quarter.

The last game played before anything less than a six-figure sellout in Ann Arbor took place on October 25, 1975. A paltry 93,857 showed up to watch the ritual dismemberment of always sad Indiana, 55–7.

Michael Ben has the date committed to memory. He was born exactly two weeks later, on the very day Michigan began its 30-year streak of six-figure sellouts. When Michael was four years old, his nursery-school teacher asked him to draw a picture of a family activity, says his mother, Barbara. "He turned in a picture of all of us at Michigan Stadium, waving our arms and cheering.

The thing was, he had never even been to a Michigan game yet. When the teacher showed us the drawing, we figured we’d better take him.

In his freshman year at Michigan, Mike showed up for the home opener with a maize-and-blue block M painted on his chest in zinc oxide. (All the stores seemed to be out of paint.) It was September 4, a hot late-summer afternoon. As he glumly watched Michigan lose to Notre Dame, the sun beat down on the student section. At day’s end he found that it had baked the pigment into his skin.

"For the rest of the year, I was known in the dorm as Michigan Mike, the guy with the M on his chest, he says. I thought of it as a mark of dedication. I don’t know how other people thought of it."

He and his brother, Josh, have a little ritual. When either of them makes his first visit to The Big House each season, he calls the other’s cell phone and says: This is the greatest sight these eyes have ever seen.

It’s a line from the movie Rudy. Of course, Rudy was about Notre Dame football. No matter. The sentiment is the same.

A little more than two months before the 2005 opening game, Michael moved back to Michigan after eight years of exile at law school and work on the East Coast. He does not paint his chest anymore. But under the skin his heart is pumping maize and blue.

And the rate speeds up in late August.

Fan Day 2005: August 27

It was a rainy Saturday morning. We debated whether it was even worth making the drive to Ann Arbor to attend. Who would be crazy enough to show up on a crummy day like that?

Usually this is an important day for the big spenders in the Victors Club. These are the fans who support Michigan football to the tune of a $15,000 donation. (For a mere $85,000 more one can join the Champions Club and go directly to heaven.) In return the Victors get the right to buy season tickets between the 30-yard