Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football

by Bacon, John U.

  The Jim Tressel era ended on Monday, May 30, 2011, when he “resigned.” But he would get to keep his national title and quickly landed a job at the University of Akron, where he had started his coaching career back in 1975 as a graduate assistant. He returned as their vice president for strategic engagement. It’s hard to know what that corporate title entails, but we do know it doesn’t include cleaning up the mess he left behind.

  If the NCAA ran local law enforcement, whenever they pulled over a drunk driver, they would impound the car and let the driver hop in another one and drive off.

  All this set up OSU’s thirty-eight-year-old interim coach, Luke Fickell, and the Buckeyes for a historically horrible 2011 season. Ohio State struggled through a 6-7 campaign, including close losses to Michigan State, Penn State, and Michigan, Ohio State’s first since 2003, and a final humiliation at the hands of the 6-6 Florida Gators in the TaxSlayer.com Gator Bowl. The 2011 Buckeyes suffered the school’s first losing season in twenty-three years, and only its second since 1966.

  • • •

  Near the end of the 2011 season, Ohio State had to make the most important hire most athletic departments have to make.

  Ohio State’s next head coach would be under immense pressure to win. To many Buckeye fans, Tressel’s worst transgression was not getting the team put on probation, but getting blown out twice in national title games.

  But could the Buckeyes’ next coach also help the program’s “image problem”?

  Unlike NFL franchises, which simply hire the most talented coach available, schools like Michigan, Penn State, and Ohio State need to find a head coach who can not only win games, but also win over the lettermen, the loyal alums, and the fans. He needs to represent the entire school and even come to embody it.

  Why Ohio State wanted Urban Meyer is obvious: after the prodigal son reached the apex of his profession, the Buckeye backers longed for him to return to his native land. But why would Meyer, a multimillionaire who had already won two national titles, want to leave a cushy job at ESPN to return to possibly the biggest pressure cooker in coaching?

  During Meyer’s happy hiatus, he made his first visit to his family doctor in years. The generalist determined in five minutes what the specialists couldn’t diagnose after years of tests: Meyer’s problem was not a heart condition, but merely esophageal spasms and acid reflux, which was resolved with a dose of Nexium, literally overnight. “The next morning,” Meyer said, “I felt like a new man. And it got better.”

  But the catch was a familiar one to college coaches: both conditions were aggravated by stress, which the job provides by the bucket.

  So why would he jeopardize his renewed health, his revitalized family life, and his rediscovered sanity to return to the sidelines—especially when it would include moving from Florida to Ohio, a trip most retirees make in the other direction?

  No doubt additional money and fame have their appeal, but Meyer already had ample doses of both. More likely, having removed his biggest obstacle to coaching, he wanted to get back at it. For competitive personalities, there is naturally no substitute for actual competition. That it was the Ohio State Buckeyes coming after him tipped the scales.

  No one understood the importance of “getting it” more than Meyer. He was born in Toledo and raised in Ashtabula, where he wore number 45 in honor of Ohio State’s two-time Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin. He wasn’t recruited by Ohio State, so he played at Cincinnati, then assisted Earle Bruce at Ohio State and Colorado State before becoming the head coach at Bowling Green, Utah, and Florida, while graduating 80 percent of his players. But Ohio State had been the team of his childhood dreams. Getting the opportunity to push them back up to their rightful station at the top echelon of the game was, for Meyer, more honor than duty.

  When I spoke with Meyer between his first spring practice and summer training camp in Columbus, it didn’t take long to understand why a man who had already won three division titles in six years in the SEC—a conference that was about to extend its streak of consecutive national titles to seven, including the two Meyer had won at Florida—wanted to return to the beleaguered Big Ten, which had won exactly two national titles in the previous forty-four years.

  “Growing up in Ashtabula, Archie Griffin, Cornelius Green, Woody—man, that’s all I knew,” he told me. “I mean, that’s all I knew. I’m not even kidding. I learned math by adding threes and sevens.

  “But when you talk about Woody Hayes, and Bo Schembechler, and Earle Bruce, it’s the same: you do it the right way, and you do it really hard. And there’s always an academic component in there. That’s what’s special about those coaches: academic integrity, the big, old stadiums, the traditions that all these great schools have here. Growing up, the Big Ten was always the standard.

  “To be a part of it again means a lot to a guy like me.”

  Meyer believed he would be a wiser coach, too, thanks to the year he had just spent analyzing games in ESPN TV’s booth.

  “I learned what all great programs have in common,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re running the spread, the wishbone, or a pro set, or if they run a three-four defense, or what league they’re in. No, it’s the alignment of the staff. If everyone’s on the same page—if the CEO says this is how it’s done, and nine coaches believe it—you have a shot. If you’re not—if even one position group is off—you don’t, and you’re done.

  “That means, when I ask [an assistant] for a quick answer, give me a quick answer. Don’t give me another question. And when I say something, I want it done.

  “I need that responsiveness.” Without being prompted, he added, “I don’t have that yet.”

  To get that, before 2012 spring practice even started, Meyer and his new assistants were running through practices—without players. “We practiced practice,” he said, taking his already manic levels of preparation to new levels.

  The tug-of-war between success and sanity had commenced.

  • • •

  One obstacle could not be avoided: Ohio State’s probation, which meant they would not be playing in the 2012 Big Ten championship or a bowl, no matter how many games they won.

  “It’s the elephant in the room,” Meyer acknowledged. “Completely uncharted waters for myself, and for this program. How do you stay focused without a championship game or a bowl game to play for? But if we have a good year, we can still win the Leaders Division. So that’s number one on our bucket list.

  “Number two,” he said, then grinned, “well, you can probably guess,” and it wasn’t hard: beat “That Team Up North,” a phrase borrowed from Woody Hayes, who refused even to utter the “M-word.” (“Show me a good loser,” he said, “and I’ll show you a busboy.”)

  As if Meyer didn’t have enough on his plate, he wanted to accomplish something else, too: wipe clean the stain on Ohio State’s reputation—through more diplomas and fewer arrests. He had returned to Ohio State to produce that familiar oxymoron, a professionally run program of amateur excellence.

  “The stakes are extremely high,” he concluded. “It’s Ohio State. Do you build up to next year? No, we simply try to win every game we play, every year. It’s Ohio State. There will never be a time at Ohio State that we’re worried about next year. We always want to win now. So, from where I sit, the stakes couldn’t be higher. And you can print that.”

  MICHIGAN

  In 1989, on the twentieth anniversary of Bo Schembechler’s first Michigan football team, he invited every Wolverine he’d ever coached back to Ann Arbor, for a long night of stories. The former players sat with their teammates, and each one stood up to give a brief introduction.

  While Bo’s first teams introduced themselves, Dave Brandon sat at the table with his 1973 teammates, wondering what he was going to say.

  Brandon had grown up in South Lyon, just fifteen minutes north of Ann Arbor, where he became an all-state quarterback, good enough to attract the attention of Bo Schembechler.

  Brando
n had the good timing to join Bo’s 1971–73 squads, which won 31 games, lost 2, and tied 1, with all three setbacks occurring in the last game of the season at the Rose Bowl or against Ohio State. But the excellence of those teams meant Brandon had to battle all-conference players at almost every position just to get on the field. Bo first tried Brandon at quarterback, behind Dennis Franklin, Larry Cipa, and Tom Slade, all of whom started at some point in their careers. Bo then moved Brandon to scout-team defensive end, where former all-American Reggie McKenzie used him daily as a tackling dummy, then to backup kicker, where he finished his career. Despite hundreds of practices, Brandon got in only one game.

  Soon after Brandon graduated, Schembechler helped him get a job at Procter & Gamble’s headquarters in Cincinnati—and that’s when Brandon took off. He rose to chairman, president, and CEO of Valassis Communications, a former Fortune 500 company that sends advertising postcards to some 100 million homes every week.

  So, after thinking through his career, when it was his turn to stand up at the football reunion, Brandon knew exactly what to say. His old coach Bo Schembechler liked his response so much, he could remember it verbatim years later: “Brandon gets up—and I’ve quoted this statement a hundred times—and he tells his old teammates, ‘I didn’t get in many games. I wasn’t an all-American like a lot of you guys, or even an all–Big Ten player. Hell, some weeks I wasn’t even on the All-Scout Team! But in the long run, I became an all-American in business.’

  “They all cheered,” Bo said. “People, believe me when I tell you, that is what we were trying to teach when I was head coach.”

  Brandon moved on from Valassis to work with Mitt Romney at Bain Capital. In 1998, the energetic Brandon won a statewide election to become one of the University of Michigan’s eight regents. The next year Bain took over Domino’s Pizza, which had been on the market for several years, and named Brandon its CEO.

  So Brandon went to work simultaneously getting Domino’s ready for an initial public offering (IPO) and courting the University of Iowa’s president, Mary Sue Coleman, for interviews in Ann Arbor. Although almost everyone on campus seemed to believe the popular former business-school dean and interim president, Joe White, was a shoe-in—some journalists actually reported that he’d been named the next president—in 2002, the regents named Coleman Michigan’s thirteenth president. Two years later, in 2004, Domino’s IPO set the valuation record in the “Quick Service Restaurant” category.

  After Brandon lost his 2006 reelection bid for regent, he lobbied Coleman and the regents to become Michigan’s next athletic director. Michigan interviewed three current Division I athletic directors, all of whom had played or coached at Michigan, and Brandon, who had never coached or worked in college athletics before. That was also true of Michigan’s previous four athletic directors, and might have worked in Brandon’s favor.

  “I’m more than just a pizza man,” he said at the time. “Although I have not lived a career in athletics specifically as others have, I believe I bring a unique set of qualifications, interests, and experiences to the job.”

  The Associated Press added, “Brandon said his business background will help him manage an athletic department with a budget of more than $90 million, media and licensing agreements, and fundraising efforts under way in a sputtering economy. ‘I view it as a selling organization for the entire university.’ ”

  Universities have in recent years eschewed former coaches and university administrators in favor of corporate professionals to run their athletic departments—a list that includes Oregon, Rutgers, and Notre Dame. Fewer people wondered why Coleman would tap Brandon than why Brandon would want to take an 82 percent pay cut—not counting bonuses, stock options, and the like, which comprise the bulk of a CEO’s compensation—for a job that promised more headaches, more scrutiny, and less privacy than running a Fortune 500 company.

  “I can’t think of many jobs in the world that I would pick up and leave that great company and great brand for,” he explained, “but this is one. . . . I love the University of Michigan. I loved it when I was here as a student-athlete, [and] I’ve been connected to it ever since in one-way or another.”

  He started working well before his official start date of March 8, 2010, effectively assuming office after the announcement was made on January 5, 2010, and he’s been on a mission ever since. If you send him an e-mail at 2:00 a.m., he often responds by 3:00 a.m. After he inherited the ongoing NCAA investigation of Michigan’s football program’s practice limits, he put on a veritable clinic of damage control through public policies and press conferences, causing his standing to soar among Michigan fans.

  In former football coach Lloyd Carr’s final years, Brandon had heard the masses grumbling about Michigan’s slide into mediocrity. Then he heard that low roar rise to full-throated shouting when Carr’s successor, Rich Rodriguez, finished his three seasons at Michigan with a 6-18 record in the Big Ten. Brandon was determined to do something about it.

  If Michigan fans wanted more wins, he concluded, Michigan needed the best facilities and the best coaches. To get those things, he concluded, they needed to make more money to pay for them.

  One of his first acts in office was to install gigantic, pro-style, four-sided scoreboards for the hockey, basketball, and football facilities—two four-thousand-square-foot versions for Michigan Stadium, the “Big House”—for an estimated $20 million. More recently, in late 2012, Brandon announced a master plan to renovate ten facilities and build seven new ones, including a field hockey renovation project for $10 million, new lacrosse facilities for $12 million, a pool expansion for $20 million, a new rowing/strength and conditioning center for $25 million, a new multipurpose gym for $30 million, and a new track facility for $90 million—plus “The Walk of Champions,” which will create “one complete, contiguous athletic experience that will be as impressive in its scale as it is in its vision.”

  The department estimated the entire master plan would cost $250 million in 2012, but when he discussed it with the Regents in mid-2013, Brandon concluded the figure would be closer to $340 million.

  Brandon’s not afraid to make sweeping changes in personnel, either. As he’d promised he would in speeches to alumni groups, he soon let over 85 of the department’s 275 employees go, paying a couple million for buyouts, then increased the staff to 308. In those same speeches, he often mentioned his first hire would be a chief marketing officer, which reflected one of his principal missions, and changed the director of human resource’s title to chief talent officer and had her report directly to him.

  If Brandon isn’t afraid to spend money, he has redoubled efforts to raise it, too, first by tripling the department’s development staff, from nine to twenty-eight full-time fund-raisers to help cover the department’s operating budget, which has grown from $100 million during the 2010–11 fiscal year to $137.5 million just three years later. (These figures do not include the capital expenditures above.)

  Brandon also raised revenues by creating or increasing “seat licenses” for football, basketball, and hockey and closed off virtually all Michigan facilities to the public. The athletic department now charges for corporate events in the skyboxes ($9,000), for wedding receptions on the 50-yard line ($8,000, or $6,000 for one hour), and for school tours, which Michigan had provided free for decades.

  Brandon’s style might not please everyone he deals with, but he delivers what he promises. Under Brandon, the department increased its operating surplus to $15.3 million in fiscal year 2012, 72 percent higher than the previous fiscal year. In 2012, the Michigan football team alone generated $61.6 million in profits, second only to the University of Texas, which has the considerable advantage of its exclusive twenty-year, $300 million TV deal with ESPN.

  Brandon has delivered more than dollars, too. After hiring Brady Hoke in 2011, the Michigan football team beat Notre Dame on the last play of the Big House’s first night game, defeated Ohio State for the first time since 2003, and won a thrillin
g overtime game over eleventh-ranked Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl, Michigan’s first BCS bowl victory since a young man named Tom Brady beat Alabama in the January 1, 2000, Orange Bowl.

  In the 2011–12 school year, Brandon’s first official full year on the job, the hockey team earned a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament; the men’s basketball team won a share of its first Big Ten title since 1986; and the following fall, Michigan’s other twenty-nine sports combined to run a close second behind Stanford, and ahead of such perennial all-sport powers as Texas and UCLA, in the Directors’ Cup, which Michigan has never won.

  If the Michigan athletic department had issued a 2012 annual report to its shareholders, it would have been the shiniest publication in college sports, packed with enough good news to make the competition envious. By those measures, its creator could be considered an all-American athletic director.

  The Wolverines are not alone in spending millions, of course, engaged as they are in an arms race with the Buckeyes and the Southeastern Conference that shows no signs of slowing down. In Brandon’s speeches to alumni clubs, service groups, and the press, he has been unabashed in laying out a simple equation: if you want titles, this is what it takes.

  • • •

  But it can come with some unexpected prices.

  On Friday morning, April 20, 2012, while I watched workers set up the stage for the groundbreaking ceremony for Penn State’s $104 million hockey arena the day before their football team’s spring game, I took my weekly call from Ann Arbor’s local sports-talk station, WTKA.

  This being six days after Michigan’s spring scrimmage, I assumed the morning hosts would ask me how Michigan’s second-year coaches, who favored a pro-set offense, were meshing with soon-to-be senior Denard Robinson, the consummate spread-offense quarterback. So I was a little surprised when Ira Weintraub and Sam Webb asked me about the Michigan-Alabama game, scheduled more than four months away, on September 1 in Dallas.