With tears in his eyes, Lloyd Carr announced that he will retire as head coach of the Michigan Wolverines after 13 seasons.
“I wanted to be able to walk out of here knowing that to the very last minute, I did my job to the best of my ability,” Carr told reporters. “I cried more tears than I knew I had, and i’ve never laughed so hard in my life because there are so many memories.”
Carr, 62, spent 28 seasons as a member of the Michigan coaching staff. He was appointed interim head coach in May 1995 following the resignation of Gary Moeller and was given the job in November 1995 after leading the Wolverines to an 8-2 record.
His career record at Michigan, the Final Bowl Game pending, is 121-40 (81-23 in the Big Ten). His teams won or shared five Big Ten titles and won a National Championship in 1997. He posted a career 5-4 record against Notre Dame, 10-3 record against Michigan State, 6-7 against Ohio State and 5-7 in bowl games.
Lloyd’s career can better be viewed as a tale of two halves.
The beginning of his career at Michigan was brilliant. From 1995 to 2000, the Wolverines went 5-1 against John Cooper’s Ohio St. and won four straight Bowl Games from 1998-2001. The stretch included the magical 12-0 season in 1997 that culminated in a National Title.
The remainder of the Carr era, however, remained full of frustration and failure. The Wolverines have lost 6 out of the last 7 against Ohio State and 5 out of the last 6 Bowl Games. If the Wolverines lose the bowl game, the current Senior Class will graduate having won neither a Bowl Game nor an Ohio State game.
The results were respectable on paper, three 10-win seasons. However, the team never inspired confidence, routinely playing down to the level of their opposition. Without numerous comebacks against inferior opposition, their record over that period could have been far worse.
Their conditioning program turned lithe and agile recruits into bulky blundering behemoths. Great if you are playing a team that will line up and play “properly” like Penn State, but disastrous against teams with any sort of spread offense.
Many times they appeared hopelessly out-coached and forced to rely upon their superior talent to grind out a victory. This year, notably against Division I-AA Appalachian State, that was not even enough to bail them out.
Carr did have an excellent relationship with his players, though at times that was to a fault. It’s a difficult task to tell an injured Senior QB he needs to sit down in a rivalry game, but it should not have taken three quarters in this year’s Ohio State game to realize that Henne could not throw a tight spiral and could not throw with any accuracy beyond ten yards with his separated shoulder. He killed Michigan’s offense (91 total yards) and the coaching staff just watched and let it happen.
Lloyd deserves the credit for opening up Michigan football and bringing it into the 1990’s. But, he also deserves the blame for being instrumental in keeping it there.
Carr had some wonderful moments as head coach at Michigan. However, like with Joe Torre, at some point a program has to stop evaluating a coach based on his past and evaluate him based on what he can provide in the future.
Like a fine cheese, Carr tasted great in his prime but toward the end his legacy began to sour. He was never in danger of being fired, as hard as that may be for the ESPN talking heads to believe. With Bo in a better place, he was the standard bearer of the Michigan Way. No one at the university had the gravitas to fire him.
Michigan faces the greatest period of uncertainty the program has experienced in decades. It was Bo Schembechler who cemented Michigan’s legacy as a national powerhouse, and it has been his scions who have been custodians of that legacy for the last forty years. The program and the man are synonymous.
The Wolverines have not gone off campus to get a football coach since the Johnson administration. The new appointment should be handled with great care and caution, because the future of Michigan football’s tradition and legacy hangs in the balance. The inbred program could use some new blood, but with new genes come the risk of mutation as well.
His last years have come up lacking and have tainted an otherwise stellar career. In the short term, it will be difficult for many fans to forgive the futile efforts and the failure of the past few seasons. But in the long term, Lloyd Carr should be remembered fondly for what he was, a devoted servant of the University of Michigan.
