The Man Behind the Mask
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As he leads No.2 Michigan into its showdown with No. 1 Ohio State, coach Lloyd Carr remains a private man who's loyal, literate and, would you believe, funny?
By Austin Murphy
Sports Illustrated
Issue date: November 20, 2006
Loyd Carr was talking about his mask. The Michigan football coach was in a corridor at Crisler Arena on a recent Monday, having just turned in a characteristically arid, monotone and sound-bite- free performance at his weekly press conference. Now, out in the hallway, unmoored from the lectern, he sprang to life, reenacting a moment from the previous week when he'd donned a hideous mask, sneaked up on one of his players and scared the bejesus out of him.
What did the mask look like? "Oh, it's horrendous," Carr assured a reporter. It was the face of a guy "who's beaten up and bloodied."
Carr had disguised himself as ... himself, circa 2005. Seriously, did any coach in the country take more abuse last season? Ravaged by injuries, bankrupt of creative ideas on both sides of the ball, the defending Big 10 co-champions went 7-5, the program's worst season in two decades. The many vocal critics in Wolverine Nation bayed for a new direction.
One of the reasons Michigan is No. 2 in the nation and 11-0 going into this week's cataclysmic meeting with No. 1 Ohio State is that Carr agreed with them. That was shocking. The winds of change do not often kick up around this program, in which tradition is revered, night games are out of the question, and the football complex is named for the still-living legend who keeps an office in it. Yet Carr, renowned as much for his loyalty to his staff as his dour countenance, nonetheless nudged both of his coordinators, Terry Malone on offense and Jim Herrmann on defense, out the door, inviting them to pursue opportunities in the NFL. (Malone now coaches tight ends for the New Orleans Saints; Herrmann is linebackers coach for the New York Jets.)
Maybe the folks in Ann Arbor should be more open to change. By shaking up his staff, Carr kick-started a dramatic turnaround. Taking advantage of creases opened up by the zone-blocking scheme introduced by new offensive coordinator Mike DeBord, bumped up after two years as the special teams coach, junior tailback Mike Hart has averaged 124.8 yards per game. That, in turn, has opened up the passing lanes for junior quarterback Chad Henne, who threw for his 17th and 18th touchdowns of the season in the Wolverines' workmanlike 34-3 dismantling of Indiana last Saturday.
If Michigan has a face this season -- other than Carr's mask -- it is the glowering mug of defensive captain and sackmeister LaMarr Woodley. The senior end, whose 11 sacks leads the team, is the soul of the baddest defense in the country.
That unit has been transformed under coordinator Ron English, a highly regarded 38-year-old who joined Carr's staff as the secondary coach in 2003. Rather than wait around to be promoted, English took a similar job with the Chicago Bears last February -- a gig he held for less than a week. That's how long it took Carr to woo him back, by offering the coordinatorship.
Where Herrmann installed opponent-specific packages each week, sometimes overwhelming his players, English simplified the scheme. In exchange the intense, excitable Coach E requires his guys to practice and play at a high tempo. Taking note of what lousy finishers they were last season -- three times the Wolverines lost by allowing opponents to rally in the fourth quarter -- he and the staff put a renewed emphasis on nutrition and off-season conditioning. The result: streamlined athletes working from a streamlined playbook.
It all came together on Sept. 16, when the maize-and-blue cyclone that is Michigan's front seven held Notre Dame to four yards rushing in a 47-21 rout in South Bend. The Wolverines had five takeaways, scored twice on defense and made Irish quarterback Brady Quinn miserable all day as Notre Dame endured its worst beating of the Charlie Weis era.
It would seem to be sweet vindication for Carr. For him to feel vindicated, however, he would have to care what people thought in the first place. The 61-year-old father of six donates many hours of his time to a number of charities. (Closest to his heart is Ann Arbor's Mott Children's Hospital. Working summers in the late '60s on a construction crew, he helped raise that building. Now, he's co-chairman of the campaign to raise money for a new hospital.) A voracious reader, he is deft at dropping quotations from such disparate figures as Thomas Jefferson, Rudyard Kipling and George Patton. He frequently shares with his players passages from books he admires. (In 1997, after being captivated by Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, he persuaded a member of the ill-fated Everest expedition described in the book to address the team. Afterward, Carr distributed maize-and-blue ice axes to his players.) It is another of his endearing qualities that he couldn't care less if the public ever discovers his endearing qualities. While he was perfectly cordial to this reporter in Ann Arbor last week, willing to shake hands and make small talk, Carr had informed SI that he would not sit for an interview; he did not want a story written about him. Said assistant sports information director David Ablauf, "He feels the emphasis should be on the team."
The football complex, by the way, is named Schembechler Hall, where 77-year-old Bo keeps an office and occasionally pokes his head into meeting rooms. The spirit of Bo lives on in the team's policy toward the press: No Division I-A program is less accommodating. Long ago beat writers nicknamed the complex Fort Schembechler. With few exceptions, Carr is only concerned about how those inside the fort feel about him. And they love the guy.
"He had this aura, or persona, kind of like a president," says junior safety Jamar Adams, recalling his first meeting with the coach. "You felt like you wanted him to be leading you."
"He's got a kind heart," adds Chris Graham, a junior linebacker.
"The guy you see on the sideline -- that's not what you're getting, day to day," says Ball State coach Brady Hoke, for seven years a Michigan assistant under Carr.
"People ask me all the time if Coach Carr ever smiles," says Woodley. Deep down, the Wolverines insist, their coach is very funny.
Examples, please.
"There's the M&M story," says Jeff Backus, a former Wolverines offensive lineman who played his last snap for the Wolverines in 2000. About six years ago an unknown Michigan player poured a large bowl of M&Ms into the soft-ice-cream dispenser at the team's cafeteria.
The result, alas, was not ice cream with M&Ms but a broken machine and an irate coach. Carr's demand that the culprit turn himself in was met with silence.
So the coach became a kind of Inspector Javert, obsessively pursuing the perpetrator. "For years afterward," says Backus, now a tackle for the Detroit Lions, "even after I left, he would stop meetings and start interrogating people. He'd swear he was going to find out who did it, and when he did, he was gonna bust their ass. It always cracked people up."
Carr didn't care about the ice cream. Well, maybe he cared a little. Maybe having a small swirl cone in the evening after two-a-days provided a tiny grace note for his day. The point is, he saw the comic potential of the situation, and mined it.
Then there is the Lone Ranger incident. During two-a-days before the 2004 season, Carr treated the squad to several clips from the old TV series, after which a man dressed as the Lone Ranger strode into the room. "He had it all going on," recalls former All-America wideout Braylon Edwards, "the cowboy hat, the black mask, the badge, the silver Smith & Wesson." After noting the great chemistry between the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Carr handed out silver bullets to the players, then left the stage. All the time he was in costume, says Edwards, now with the Cleveland Browns, "he never broke character. He played that role to a T."
So, the mysterious contents of Fort Schembechler include, apparently, a chest in which Carr stores his many costumes. Perhaps it resides near the dictionary outside his office. Before entering Carr's quarters, players are strongly encouraged to look up a new word and jot down its definition on one of the index cards provided for that purpose. Once inside, they discuss the word with Carr and, if possible, use it in a sentence. On a day he was tardy for a meeting, Hart looked up punctual, then sought to defuse the coach's anger by discussing the importance of punctuality.
That Carr should care so much about his players' vocabularies is not surprising. A former high school teacher of history and English -- "You're lucky you didn't have me," he told reporters, with just the hint of a smile, at the 2004 Rose Bowl -- he got his degree in education at Northern Michigan in 1968. That, as all true Michigan fans know, is the year Ohio State, led by the brash young Woody Hayes, crushed the Wolverines 50-14. That catastrophe led to the resignation of Bump Elliott, who was replaced by Schembechler, who brought Carr on as his secondary coach in 1980.
Carr ascended to the head coaching position 15 years later, after an inebriated Gary Moeller was arrested for assault, battery and disorderly conduct outside a restaurant. Two years later Lloyd did what Bo never could -- he guided Michigan to the national title, its first in 49 years.
Carr had played quarterback at Missouri and Northern Michigan, knew a ton about football and was much more hands-on than your average head coach. He was a terrific recruiter -- as authentic and genuine in the living rooms of schoolboys as he was churlish and cranky on the sideline. Surely, Wolverines fans speculated, there were more national titles just around the corner.
There have been very good seasons since 1997. Five times, including this year, Carr has won at least 10 games. Four times he has won or shared the Big 10 title. But this is one of the country's more thankless jobs. When Carr wins big, fans tend to say, "With the talent he's got, he should win big." When Michigan stumbles, as it did last year, websites begin demanding his head on a pike. Then there is the Ohio State issue. Though Carr won five of his first six games against the Wolverines' bitter rival, he is 1-4 since the Buckeyes hired Jim Tressel in 2001.
Many of the aggrieved fans addressed their concerns to athletic director Bill Martin, who says he "didn't think for a second" about dumping Carr. "You want to fire Lloyd," he says, "you gotta fire me."
One common gripe: By slavishly limiting themselves to hiring head coaches from within the Michigan family, the program was starving itself of new blood and fresh ideas. Those complaints faded this season as the Wolverines sailed up the BCS standings. Now Martin cannot help eavesdropping on the conversations attending the search for a head coach at Michigan State, where the beleaguered John L. Smith will coach his final game this Saturday.
"What I'm hearing," says Martin, "is people saying, 'We need the continuity and stability you see down the road at Michigan.'"
From East Lansing, Carr's career record of 113-34 must look very good indeed. With their solid ground game and suffocating defensive front, the Wolverines could well pull off the upset in the Horseshoe this Saturday. Even if Carr gets his 114th win at the expense of the Buckeyes, however, it is his fate to be misunderstood and underappreciated, the kind of coach of whom most Michigan fans will say, once he is gone: Who was that masked man? We never got a chance to thank him. |
