BLAST FROM PAST: CU’S MIRACLE AT MICHIGAN
Neuheisel kept Westbrook from missing trip to Ann Arbor
See, after all these years, all those replays, all those smiles, and we had the whole blasted thing wrong. To hear the lore, to hear Rick Neuheisel tell it, The Miracle at Michigan was not, in fact, one miracle, singular — but two.
For the first, roll the tape back to Thursday morning. Back to two days before Kordell Stewart’s heave, before Rashaan Salaam’s block, before Michael Westbrook’s catch for the ages, before the CU Buffs stopped hearts and time with a 27-26 last-second victory at Michigan on Sept. 24, 1994, 25 years ago.
Neuheisel, the Buffaloes’ 33-year-old quarterbacks coach, is in the CU football offices, waiting for coach Bill Mccartney’s Thursday morning prayer meeting to wrap up. Head trainer Dave Burton walks in.
“Michael Westbrook,” Burton says, “didn’t make treatment this morning.” Blank stares. Panic.
“I’d been around long enough to know that if Michael Westbrook is missing treatment,” Neuheisel says now, “it meant Michael Westbrook is not going on this trip.”
Neuheisel told Burton to not say anything to Mccartney, to try to stall until he returned.
“I got in my car, I knew where (Westbrook’s) apartment was,” Neuheisel recalls.
The young assistant pounded on the door. He remembers Westbrook answering it in shorts.
“And I told him, ‘Get your (expletive) in the car. We’re going to the treatment room,’ ” Neuheisel recalls. “He went up there, basically, without his clothes on. But I got him up to the treatment room.”
Mission accomplished, and just in time. Well, mostly.
To Neuheisel’s chagrin, the coaches’ meeting was already underway, and he slid in just after the gun.
“Mac looks at me with that look you get when you’re a little bit tardy,” Neuheisel recalls. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mac. I was here. I just had an upset stomach.’
“I nodded at Dave Burton, so that he knew I had accomplished my task. And no one knew that Michael Westbrook had been late to treatment. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have made that trip. Imagine what would’ve happened had he not been there. Right?”
In an alternate timeline, Michigan’s Chuck Winters and Ty Law converge on Stewart’s
72-yard heave at the 1-yard line as time expires, batting it away, and Michigan hangs on for a 26-21 victory at the Big House. Up is down, new Coke thrives and vinyl never makes a comeback.
Our reality?
Same song, different coda.
•••
“Stewart, with time,” ABC’S Keith Jackson said, describing the action. “Lets it go …
“He’s got three people down there …
“The ball’s up in the air …
Some 25 years ago Tuesday, at least four players converged on Stewart’s last-second rainbow with six seconds left — two Buffs and two Wolverines — as the ball caromed away from the group like a wet bar of soap and into the waiting arms of Westbrook behind them, who stretched and cradled it cleanly. “Caught! Touchdown!” Jackson
cried. “Caught by Westbrook for a touchdown! Incredible!
“There is no time remaining … there are no flags on the field.”
And there’s no debate: It’s still one of the best answers to one of the wildest prayers in college football history.
Although there is, um, one catch before the catch.
Westbrook disputes that Neuheisel’s tale, the first miracle, ever happened.
“I don’t even remember that,” Westbrook, the 47-year-old Detroit native, says with a laugh. “But Rick, he would remember that.
“We had some times back then. (My behavior) wasn’t as bad as my freshman year, but they were comparable.
“Let him have fun with his 25year story. Because I seriously doubt that. I had 70 people in (Michigan) Stadium that I had gotten tickets for. I literally had 70 tickets for that game, and I’m going to miss that one? I was lazy my freshman year. My senior year, I was making it happen.”
All these years later, the Miracle — a play called “Rocket Left” — still makes everybody’s top 10 list. The Sporting News last week slotted it as the second-greatest Hail Mary in college football history. Nfl.com four years ago declared it the No. 7 greatest college football play, period.
“We did (Rocket Left) every week, every Thursday,” recalled former CU safety Donnell Leomiti, who recorded 12 tackles and a key fourth-quarter fumble recovery against the Wolverines. “So we knew (Stewart) could throw it that far. But in the hype of the game, you’re like, ‘Is he going to get it there?’ It’s one of those things
where you practice it, but you don’t think it’s going to happen.”
As they practiced it, Westbook, the tallest of the receivers at 6foot-3, was supposed to do the tipping to a man either behind him or slightly ahead. But after the Buffs had run the same play late in the second quarter, up 14-9, and it was intercepted by Winters, the Wolverines safety, just before halftime Neuheisel said they decided to shuffle the targets around if fate afforded them a chance to try Rocket Left again. Fate obliged.
With CU down five and at its own 36 with six seconds left, Rae Carruth lined up outside, closest to the left boundary, Blake Anderson lined up inside and Westbrook slotted in between them. Stewart dropped back and got a free lane to throw thanks to a Rashann Salaam block, and let fly to history.
“We had no choice,” recalls former Buffs assistant coach Brian Cabral, who was in charge of CU’S linebackers at the time. “(Westbrook) was one of the best athletes in Colorado history. I put my money on him coming down with it, if I knew the ball was going to be there.”
••• Bizarrely, it was. In a Chicago Tribune report the morning after, Winters claimed he “had the ball in his hands” during the collective attempt to high-point the pass upon its descent, that he had tipped it and a CU player — presumably, Anderson — had knocked it away from him.
In the most popular Youtube video of the play, which has been viewed nearly 700,000 times, it appears, at best, inconclusive. The ball bounces off Winters’ hands, off Anderson’s hand, off Winters’ helmet or shoulder, off Ty Law’s shoulder or off the outstretched hand of the third CU wideout who had converged on the play, Carruth.
“It was one of those things that you never forget, and all the things leading up to it and all the things that played a part on it,” says Neuheisel, who would later coach the Buffs and is now an analyst with CBS Sports.
“There’s 1,000 different pieces in that puzzle that make it unique to me. Like Michael Westbrook almost not being on the trip.” Yeah, about that “almost” … “Missing a game? I wasn’t about to miss a game,” Westbrook says, redrawing his line in the sand. “I knew this was my year. Let Rick have his fun.” Neuheisel chuckles.
The lore lives on.
“I love Michael,” the old coach replies. “But it happened. Michael was very sleepy, so he might not remember. It happened.”
Sean Keeler: skeeler@denverpost.com