The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1184078
DECEMBER 2019 THE WOLVERINE 35 for me to come back, but I sought out a few more people just to make sure. At the same time, I was trying to make my decision, Marlin Jackson and Dave Baas also had the opportunity to leave. All three of us were heading into our final year, so we got together and talked about what each of us was thinking and if we all wanted to come back together and make this final sea- son the best one yet. Jackson was a freshman All-American who balled out his sophomore year, but they switched him to safety his junior sea- son. He had on okay year, but he got banged up so he didn't have the year he wanted either. I said for me it was too big of a difference being picked 10 or 48. Plus, I didn't like the way we lost to USC, Iowa, and Oregon that season. The other thing for me was the quarterback situa- tion. I knew [John] Navarre was leaving, but I trusted Matt Guti- errez. We all thought about it and decided we wanted our M rings and thought we could reach a national championship game. I said I was coming back. Marlin said he needed to come back, and then Bass looked at us and said, "Those who stay." The linemen are always the corny ones, but I said I would let him have that one because he was right. The Michigan man- tra is: "those who stay will be champions." And we wanted to be champions. All three of us were coming back. But we weren't just coming back and hoping it would get better. If we were going to sac- rifice potentially millions of dol- lars in the NFL, then we were going to do it right. We're coming back with a whole different mind-set. We knew we were going to be the three who would get the team going and be leaders of the team. We had other se- niors that would help, too, but every- one had to fall in line. We didn't want any excuses or bulls---. We're going to go after it. If you had to stop partying so much, then do it. I didn't drink un- til I turned 21, so I was drinking by this time, but all of that was secondary now. We were focused and determined that spring ball through summer and training camp would be the best we've ever had. We were policing ourselves now because we wanted everything right. We told the coaches that if any- thing happened to let us deal with it in-house, and the coaches gave us the right to do so. We used to run on the golf course right next to the stadium in Ann Arbor, and I didn't like running distances, and the golf course run certainly quali- fied. My sophomore year I got into it with Mike Gittleson because I always finished close to last when we ran the golf course. He always asked me how I finished last if I'm one of the fastest guys on the team, and I said it was because I was fast but didn't have or want the endurance to run almost four miles. I asked him, "When I am ever going to run 3.7 miles on the football field?" Teams like Miami were running 100 repeats, 40 shuttles, gassers with the parachutes behind them. That stuff was getting them explosive, and we're running 3.7 miles, and we're Michigan Men because we finished. My senior year, though, I always fin- ished in the top 10 in the golf course run. I improved my bench up from doing 25 reps of 225 pounds to 33, and everything just started to change for us. We told Adam Stenavich, Matt Lentz, and Tyler Eckert the plan and said, "Let's crush it." We told the scout team to give us a good look every week. Sometimes in practice with the scout team, you told them to chill out a little bit, that we're tired, so relax. This year we weren't doing that. It was 100 percent every play so we were ready. We did bag drills where the coaches would lay out these long blue bags that you ran over and side to side while avoiding the bags. They laid out seven bags, and Gittle- son yelled out numbers that were divisible by seven. If he yelled out 77, that meant we needed to run 11 times back and forth or 77 times. Guys were dying, getting sloppy, knocking bags over. But this year we addressed it and said we had to be ready to attack those bags. It got to the point where he was yelling 154, which would have been 22 times, and we weren't blinking. We all started to see that work pay off, too, even in the summer. Some of my high school friends went to MAC schools, and some went to Michigan State, which was basically like a MAC school then. We did 7-on-7 stuff in the sum- mer and we all met up at 13 Mile Road and Lahser to get work in. I was on such a different level at this point when we did one-on-ones. I looked at them like kids. I was a first- team All-Big Ten guy who just benched 225 pounds 33 times and I went against two first-round corners in practice in Marlin and Leon [Hall], so this was nothing. I was no longer the Martin Luther King Jr. or Bishop Gallagher High kid trying to find my- self. I was through the roof, and that neighborhood stuff was over. ❑ This excerpt of Braylon Edwards: Doing It My Way: My Outspoken Life as a Michigan Wolverine, NFL Receiver, and Beyond, by Braylon Edwards and Tom VanHaaren, is presented with permission from Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit www. triumphbooks.com/braylonedwards. Braylon Edwards came back for his senior season in 2004 despite being projected as high as the No. 10 pick in the NFL Draft, and the decision paid off when he was named the nation's top wideout by winning the Fred Biletnikoff Award, a unanimous All-American and the Big Ten's Most Valuable Player. PHOTO BY PER KJELDSEN