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

by Bacon, John U.

  It was already being hyped as a clash between two tradition-rich programs, both ranked in the preseason Top 10, and two tradition-rich conferences. But it was bigger than that, because the schools had struck a deal with the Dallas Cowboys’ celebrity owner, Jerry Jones, to play the game in his shiny, new, $1.15 billion, state-of-the-art pleasure dome, nicknamed Jerry World.

  They called the game the Cowboy Classic, a four-year-old version of the former Kickoff Classic, and it had come to represent the apotheosis—or nadir, depending on your view—of all that modern college football was becoming: the colossal, professional stadium; the seemingly endless corporate tie-ins; and the orgy of interest in a game between amateur athletes.

  Although Michigan did not sell out its allotment of 17,500 tickets for the Sugar Bowl a couple months earlier, the athletic department had no trouble selling all 25,000 tickets for the Cowboy Classic, before they could even offer them to the general public. They were gobbled up entirely by Victors Club members: first to those with the most “priority points” (which they accumulate largely through donations), down to those with just one priority point. Thousands of fans with no priority points got shut out.

  It was all the more impressive because the tickets for the Cowboy Classic weren’t cheap: $125 for a seat in the rafters and $285 for one on the 50, plus $80 for parking across the street. Jerry World also offered standing-room-only tickets, which one website packaged with vouchers for a beverage, a hot dog, and a bag of chips for $89—and sold more than twenty-three hundred of them.

  “Let’s put it like this,” the ever-quotable Jerry Jones said the week of the game. “I’m going to compare it even to the Super Bowl. They’re two different events—but this is the hottest ticket . . . of any game or any event that we’ve had at that stadium.”

  Michigan would net $4.7 million for the Cowboy Classic matchup with Alabama, the highest payout ever for a Kickoff Classic/Cowboy Classic season opener. After the department publicized that fact, fans were surprised to hear Brandon announce he would not be sending the Michigan Marching Band to the game because the athletic department couldn’t afford the $400,000 travel expense. That decision lit up sports-talk shows across the state.

  If one symbol separates college football from the NFL, it’s the marching bands. When the band plays, all the alums in the stadium travel back in time to their college days. Some fans angered over the decision included big donors, who ultimately stepped up to cover half the cost of the band’s trip. Leaving the band behind for a big game proved not to be an option—at least in 2012.

  As the arms race escalates, Brandon does not seem terribly interested in slowing down to ponder it all. He is too busy pressing full steam ahead. “I don’t talk the past,” he said several times in his first year as Michigan’s athletic director. “I create the future.”

  He might just be right.

  If the future of Penn State was in the hands of its players, and Ohio State in the hands of its new head coach, Michigan’s was in the hands of its new athletic director.

  NORTHWESTERN

  In the early eighties, while Penn State was winning national titles, and Ohio State and Michigan were winning Big Ten titles, the Northwestern Wildcats were setting a record of their own: the longest losing streak in NCAA history.

  After the Wildcats finished second in the Big Ten in 1970 and 1971, behind only Ohio State and Michigan respectively, they couldn’t manage even one five-win season for almost a quarter century. Northwestern’s stadium seats 47,130 people, less than half as many as Michigan’s, Ohio State’s, and Penn State’s, but they hadn’t sold it out for a single game since 1963. In 1978 and 1980, Northwestern’s attendance for the entire season was less than what Michigan attracted for a single game.

  The football program came by its incompetence honestly: from the top. In 1981, after the team had lost its twenty-ninth straight game, Northwestern’s then-president, Robert Strotz, told the student paper, “I think having a bad football team can help academic standards.” Apparently, President Strotz believed a losing squad could convince the high-browed that you must be serious about school, or else your football team would surely be better.

  Spend any time in Evanston and you’ll be struck by how every single alum—no matter when he or she graduated—can recite the president’s quote verbatim, more than three decades later. His words are carved that deeply into their collective psyche.

  “He actually came out and said that publicly!” said Eric Chown, ’85, equally amused and appalled—a typical reaction.

  Not surprisingly, given such support, the week President Strotz said this the Wildcats lost that Saturday’s game to Michigan State, 61–14, and the next one to Ohio State, 70–6, to extend its record losing streak to 31—and fuel rumors they would soon be dropping out of the Big Ten. When the team hit 34 straight losses to secure the record, the students tore down the goalposts and, in the spirit of a Bronx cheer, started chanting, “Lake the posts!”—then rushed the white pipes down Central Street and into Lake Michigan.

  Since the “Mildcats” went 35-128-1 during Strotz’s fifteen-year reign, you have to assume he, at least, was thrilled.

  Apathy was in their DNA. The few fans who showed up to see loss after loss after loss had a favorite cheer: “That’s all right, that’s okay. You’re going to work for us someday.”

  • • •

  It wasn’t always that way.

  Unlike Ohio State and Penn State, who were the tenth and twelfth teams to join the Big Ten, respectively, Northwestern is a charter member, forming the world’s first academically based athletic conference in 1895 with Michigan, Purdue, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

  The Chicago Maroons, led by Amos Alonzo Stagg, took seven of the Big Ten’s first twenty-nine football titles. But by the midtwenties, the boys from Northwestern got the upper hand on their Southside cousins, which accelerated the demise of the Maroons. When they finally dropped out of the Big Ten after the 1939 season, Northwestern assumed the mantle of “Chicago’s team,” until the NFL’s Bears captured the public’s attention for good in the 1950s.

  Along the way, the Northwestern “Purple” became the “Wildcats,” so named by a sportswriter for their tenacity in a 1924 game against the Maroons. They took five Big Ten titles by 1936, won the 1949 Rose Bowl, and usually beat Michigan and Ohio State a few times each decade.

  Until, that is, 1972, when the Dark Ages descended upon Evanston.

  The seeds of the Wildcats’ awakening were planted in 1991, when they hired Gary Barnett from Colorado’s 1990 national-title staff. One of his first recruits was a young man from Carl Sandburg High School on Chicago’s South Side named Pat Fitzgerald. Few would have guessed it then, but together those two would change Northwestern’s fortunes.

  When Northwestern introduced Barnett at a basketball game, he told the crowd, “We’re taking the Purple to Pasadena!” Since the Wildcats had made only one appearance in the Rose Bowl, in 1949, it sounded crazy—but he believed it. Even crazier, his players did, too.

  “Losing so much was sort of a badge of courage,” former athletic director Rick Taylor (1994–2003) told me. “I never bought into that. The university would never allow such failure to continue in any other field, so why ours?”

  The Wildcats finally emerged from their twenty-three-year slumber in 1995, the same year Henry S. Bienen became Northwestern’s fifteenth president. While Bienen certainly didn’t seek to transform Northwestern into an Ohio State wannabe, he didn’t confuse failure on the football field for academic excellence, either.

  Although Barnett’s first three teams finished sixth, tenth, and tenth in the Big Ten, the 1995 Wildcats stunned Notre Dame in South Bend for the first time since 1961, then beat the Wolverines in Ann Arbor for the first time since 1959, followed by victories over Wisconsin, Penn State, and Illinois to finish the Big Ten season undefeated for the first time since 1936.

  The impossible had happened: th
e Purple was going to Pasadena. The entire nation cheered on the ’Cats, who were celebrated on the Wheaties box.

  The next year, rather amazingly, the Wildcats beat Michigan again and won a share of another Big Ten title.

  The school raised $20 million for long-overdue stadium renovations and started planning for a new indoor practice field, too. “Given our facilities,” President Bienen said, “Gary’s been recruiting with one hand tied behind his back.”

  The arms race, it seemed, had been joined.

  The stadium was renovated, and an indoor practice facility, Trienens Hall, was completed in 2001, but that didn’t stop the Wildcats from a vertiginous fall back to earth, finishing eighth in the eleven-team Big Ten in 1997, and dead last in 1998, with an 0-8 conference record.

  If any of the Big Ten’s “big three” had gone 0-8—in any year, for any reason—the local papers would have plastered the unbearable disaster across the front page and put the actual Apocalypse on the second.

  But at Northwestern, a funny thing happened: not much.

  No one freaked out. They didn’t search their souls to determine where they had lost their way. They didn’t wonder what deep-seated flaw in their collective character the winless year had revealed.

  When the Wildcats win, it wakes up the whole campus. But it’s a bit of a lark. Nice, but not necessary. The day after the Wildcats finish a winless Big Ten season, the faculty and the students wake up and walk across the street to one of the greatest universities in the world.

  After Barnett left Evanston in 1999 to return to Colorado as the head coach, Northwestern hired Miami University’s Randy Walker. His arc mirrored Barnett’s, peaking with a Big Ten title in 2000, followed shortly by a return to tenth place two years in a row.

  When the fifty-two-year-old Walker died in 2006 of a heart attack, Northwestern hired his understudy, thirty-one-year-old Pat Fitzgerald. The promotion made Fitzgerald, Northwestern’s only nonkicking all-American between 1982 and 2000, the youngest Division I head coach in the country, by a full five years.

  If Northwestern has a golden boy, the flat-topped, square-jawed Fitzgerald is surely it. No one could understand Northwestern, and how it works when it works best, better than Pat Fitzgerald.

  If Meyer’s marriage to Ohio State makes perfect sense, the same is no less true for Fitzgerald and Northwestern.

  Consider this: the coaches at the big-time programs would never take a job like Northwestern’s. The Wildcats have all the obstacles those coaches have worked so hard to get beyond, including a small stadium, fewer fans cheering for your team than your opponents, rare coverage by the national media, second-class facilities, and none of the academic back doors many teams have traditionally used to get their stars through school. Yet the team still graduates 97 percent of its players—a higher rate than that of the student body at large—and it would be higher still if the formula counted the team’s fifth-year engineering students.

  Most coaches believe Northwestern is the toughest place to win in the Big Ten—and Northwestern’s record up to that magical 1995 season stands as solid proof.

  Yet, all those reasons are exactly why Fitzgerald loves coaching the Wildcats, even declining overtures from Michigan’s Dave Brandon after he fired Rich Rodriguez in 2011. Fitzgerald is competitive, but he agrees with the priorities of his alma mater, which proudly places academics ahead of athletics in funding, facilities, and favoritism. He even claims the university’s higher standards make it easier for him to produce winning teams—something no one who had not played at Northwestern would ever claim.

  If it is, in fact, harder to win the Wildcat way, it’s surely more fun when they do, as just about every Hollywood script about the underdog will attest.

  Not only does Fitzgerald know Bienen’s successor, President Morton Schapiro, would never say, “I hope Fitzgerald doesn’t fire me!”—he knows athletic director Jim Phillips wouldn’t say it either. Fitzgerald makes roughly $1.3 million a year—significantly less than the $2 million Division I head coaches average at public universities, and about the same as President Schapiro. There’s a message in that. At Northwestern it’s clear the football coach works for the athletic director, the athletic director works for the president—and the relative power accrues accordingly.

  The question is, Can that chain of command produce a football team that can beat Michigan or Ohio State?

  • • •

  When Fitzgerald became Northwestern’s head coach in 2006, it took him two seasons to lift the Wildcats from 4-8 to 9-4. But, just like Barnett and Walker, he found success hard to maintain in Evanston, where his teams steadily slid down to eight, seven, and six wins, capped by four straight losses in progressively weaker bowls. The last point was a touchy one for the Wildcats, who had won just one bowl game—in 1949.

  “You look on my shelf over there,” Fitzgerald told me, sitting at a table in his office, “and we have two stuffed monkeys.”

  “The first one goes back to 1995. We hadn’t beaten Iowa in something like twenty straight years. [Twenty-one, actually.] One of our teammates, Chris Hamdorf, went to Iowa City High, so his parents bought us all stuffed monkeys before that game. We beat ’em [31–20]—and our guys destroyed those monkeys!

  “My first time back to Iowa City as the head coach, seven years ago, I brought that monkey out. We beat ’em again [21–7, in an otherwise disappointing 4-8 season]—and our guys destroyed that monkey in the locker room after that game. So, that monkey was two for two.

  “The new monkey, the big one, is for our bowl game. We’ve brought that along for the last four bowl games.”

  The problem was, the new monkey was undefeated—and therefore unharmed—and had been around long enough to start feeling more like a gorilla on their backs.

  But in the summer of 2012—with their head coach secured through 2020, a $220 million budget set aside for a new facility on the Lake Michigan shoreline (one designed for all students, not just varsity football players), $24.6 million coming in from the Big Ten alone, more than Notre Dame’s $15 million from NBC, and a four-year president in place who understood what athletics could do for Northwestern—hopes were once again high in Evanston.

  “We have everything we need to be a champion now,” Fitzgerald said in late July. “And we have some things that no one else in the country can say they have.”

  Like Barnett, Fitzgerald actually believes this. And he leverages Northwestern’s advantages through clever recruiting, usually bypassing the four- and five-star players Ohio State, Michigan, and the SEC scoop up, to secure recruits who are strong students, captains of their team, and from winning programs. They also have to commit to Northwestern early and expect to stay for five years to develop as players and graduate. If Fitzgerald can find all that, he believed the Wildcats could compete with anyone in the league.

  If the football gods could give him something extra—such as a senior class not just willing but eager to meet on their own time to ensure they’re getting the most out of their team—Fitzgerald believed they could beat anyone and perhaps claim their fourth Big Ten banner since his junior year.

  Fitzgerald’s confidence in his alma mater was admirable—but was it misplaced? Did Northwestern truly have enough to compete with the best in the Big Ten? And even if they could battle the big boys, could they do so without losing their values—or their sanity?

  Having dropped one win a year for three straight years—with the next stop being the dreaded “bowl ineligible” five-win season—2012 was sure to provide some answers.

  • • •

  Other teams would fight for the 2012 Big Ten title, of course, including Michigan State, which had leveraged its football prowess after World War II to join the Big Ten and become a world-class research university, and Nebraska, which had sacrificed over a century of success in the Big 12 conference to escape Texas and its stability-shattering TV deal, to join a conference it barely knew. Was it a mistake? The 2012 season would offer plenty of answers
there, too.

  If all these players, coaches, athletic directors, and presidents would be under tremendous pressure in 2012, it was nothing compared to the scrutiny college football itself would receive.

  The sport was under attack for myriad sins, including academic fraud, the exploitation of amateur athletes by millionaire coaches and athletic directors, a profoundly corrupt bowl system, and the rank hypocrisy of the NCAA. By 2012, college football had attracted more critics than the IRS—and not just the usual skeptics such as Murray Sperber and Rick Telander, but writers like Taylor Branch and Joe Nocera, who usually focus their lasers on Capitol Hill and Wall Street.

  “I swear,” Charles P. Pierce wrote in April 2012, “the NCAA uses a dictionary from beyond the stars. It’s taken longer than it did for golf and tennis, and even longer than it took for the Olympics, but the amateur burlesque in American college sports is on its way to crashing and the only remaining question is how hard it will fall. The farce is becoming unsupportable.”

  It was no longer just college sports’ critics who were saying this, either, but former players—who were pushing class-action lawsuits to redress financial and physical exploitation—and the fans, whose seemingly boundless passion for college football appeared to be approaching some boundaries, after all. The exponential increases in ticket prices, seat licenses, and TV time-outs were testing the loyalty of even the most rabid fans, who were starting to foster an embryonic protest that showed signs of growing into a full-scale revolt.

  The lines were beginning to form. On one side, the players and the fans—the true believers—wanted to keep what they had, while on the other, the suits—athletic directors, league commissioners, the NCAA, and TV—were trying to extract more and more from the very people who comprised the heart of the enterprise.