Article published December 30, 2007
Not just another Michigan game for Carr
By ZACH SILKA
BLADE SPORTS WRITER
ORLANDO, Fla. - Retiring Michigan coach Lloyd Carr has maintained throughout his team's preparation for No. 9 Florida in the Capital One Bowl that this game is not about him.
He has made it clear on several occasions since the Wolverines arrived in central Florida on Christmas night that he is treating his last game on the Michigan sidelines just like any other game.
Unavoidably, though, it is not.
Even his players have said they've noticed a difference in Carr this week in practice, a looser, more easygoing Carr than the stern, dour figure they've come to expect.
"He's not as uptight as he'd usually be," senior linebacker and co-captain Shawn Crable said. "He's allowing us to talk a lot more. We have a lot more intensity [in practice]. He's really staying in the background.
"He's not really focusing on the X's and O's and the execution of things. He really just wants us to play hard and enjoy being there and have fun."Carr has taken the standpoint of becoming just another one of the seniors on the team and even admits this game isn't quite like the 12 other bowl games he's coached at Michigan.
"It is a little different," he said. "I always ask our team after a game, 'Did we win, did I contribute, and who's next?' I won't have to ask that third question. It will be the end for these seniors and this team. It will be a new team next year. It won't be this team. This will be the last time that we will be together, so we're trying to make every day count and enjoy it and get prepared."
Although he's had his gruff moments with the media during his tenure, Carr has always exhibited a deep concern for every one of his players.
Name anyone on the Wolverines' roster, and Carr can tell you at least a handful of personal details unique to that one player.
"He's a player's coach," Michigan quarterback Chad Henne said. "You can approach him in any way possible. He's always in his office. You can always swing by and talk to him, and he's just always there for his players."
Because of his open-door policy, Carr often has a line of players waiting to speak with him. So a while back, he put a dictionary outside his office and required players to look up the definition of a word they'd never heard of and recite it to him before their conversation.
"I went into a team meeting one day and said, 'From now on, if you come to my office, there's a dictionary out there,'•" Carr said. "We had it on a big stand. So I said, 'You look through that dictionary and find a word. I want a word that you don't know.'
"We all get into habits of reading over a word, not really understanding it or just the context. So that's kind of how it started."
That relationship with his players is one aspect of his 13 years as the head coach at Michigan that Carr takes pride in. Another is the fact he's run as clean a ship as you can run in Division I-A football in the 21st century.
Carr attributes the lack of any scandals during his coaching career to the years he spent as an assistant coach under Bo Schembechler and Gary Moeller at Michigan.
"In those 10 years before I became a head coach, I came to understand there was a standard there, in terms of historically how that program had been run," Carr said. "I am proud that we tried to do things with integrity."
One detail of the coaching profession that grew into a monster of its own during Carr's time at Michigan began as his greatest moment with the Wolverines - winning a national championship and the growing fan obsession with the BCS.
After defeating Washington State in the 1997 Rose Bowl to finish the season undefeated, the Wolverines were named co-national champions with Nebraska to become the first team at Michigan to do so since 1948.
"It changed everything certainly for me and for our program, along with the expectations because of the BCS," Carr said. "Once you do that, it's the only goal you have. When Bo Schembechler was here, everything was predicated on winning the Big Ten championship.
"Once that '97 team won it, I spent every day since then trying to do it again."
But Carr could never quite reach the mountaintop again. And after starting the year with embarrassing losses to Appalachian State and Oregon and finishing the regular season with his sixth loss to Ohio State in the last seven years, Carr decided it was time to step down.
There will be one final battle on Tuesday, however, and Carr said retirement isn't on his mind yet.
"I've tried to concentrate on this game," he said. "I know that there are going to be a lot of changes in my life. I just don't know what those are going to be."
Contact Zach Silka at: zsilka@theblade.com.
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