After describing it as a “fair question, and one I’ve thought about,” Delany separated the four schools’ situations. It was a big leap from Nebraska’s minor infractions over textbook-purchasing policies, he said, to the Ohio State coach “who lost his job for not being honest about answering questions about tattoos,” to the tragedy at Penn State. “I think it’s intellectually and morally difficult to even discuss those things in the same sentence.”
But Delany pointed out that no one, least of all him, had ever claimed the Big Ten had a spotless record. “In fact,” he said, “if you look at history . . . we’ve had, I think, thirty-two [NCAA probation] cases in thirty years. We’ve had thirteen basketball cases; fifteen football cases. We’ve had a few cases of academic fraud. But some are much worse than others.”
In other words, the present wasn’t as bad as it seemed, partly because the past wasn’t as great as believed. It was a refreshingly honest assessment.
Since the Sandusky case, he said, the Big Ten office had been intent on getting to the core issue: “institutional control, concentration, and power.” For comparison, he cited the NFL and the NBA, where there was no question who the owners were. But it was not nearly as clear who was in charge of a university’s football program “because power is diffuse [among] trustees, presidents, faculty, athletic directors, compliance directors.”
It’s worth noting, however, that the athletes and the fans did not make Delany’s list of power brokers. The leverage each possesses—to play or not to play; to pay or not to pay—are considered givens, when they’re considered at all. For all the perceived cracks in the edifice of college football, and all the suggested patches, few of the would-be repairmen are even entertaining the possibility that either players or fans might ever call it quits.
• • •
These hypotheticals would be largely academic if millions of fans did not prefer college football to the pros. Why do they?
College teams were organically and spontaneously created more than a century ago by the students, just for fun.
The NFL and all its teams since were created by league executives, lawyers, and chief marketing officers, just for profit.
Almost every Division I college football team predates the oldest NFL teams by three or four decades. Most schools built their current stadiums before most NFL teams built their first—or second, or third. College football is one of those few passions we have in common with our great-grandparents.
College teams play on college campuses, where students actually go to school. The students feel as connected to these campuses as they do to their homes—and this connection typically lasts for life. That also goes for the jocks, who live in the same dorms as the geeks; they take classes in the same buildings; and they eat at the same pizza and burger joints everyone else does. Just about anyone who went to college has a story about running into the big man on campus.
NFL players make millions and live in gated communities. You’re not likely to meet them, no matter how many years you pay to watch them play. Their teams play in big cities, and they don’t have homecoming games.
College teams never threaten to change their colors or move to Oklahoma City if you don’t build them a new stadium—at taxpayer expense. No, they play in the nation’s oldest, grandest stadiums, surrounded by lush green lawns, old trees, and two-story homes where students live. They have marching bands and fight songs and quirky customs that go back a century.
NFL teams play in sanitized, soulless domes—usually subsidized by the taxpayers—with loud scoreboards that tell you exactly what to yell and exactly when to yell it, all surrounded by vast oceans of asphalt.
The NFL’s rules are constantly tweaked to create as much parity as possible—which is why every team seems to finish 9-7 or 7-9. The margins are so close as to render the competitive differences almost meaningless. The Pittsburgh Steelers’ Larry Foote told me most games boil down to three or four mistakes. Pro football functions like a giant gumball machine, jumbling players around the league, then spitting out winning teams virtually by dumb luck.
When you hear the score of an NFL game, you have to stop and think, Was that expected, or an upset? But when Utah beats Alabama, or Navy beats Notre Dame, or Appalachian State beats Michigan, you don’t need to check the latest polls to know something historic just happened.
Pro teams choose their players, but college players choose their teams—which leads to another major difference: universities, because they started long before their football teams, represent a particular set of values, priorities, and strengths that stamp the teams that wear their name. It was for this very reason the Big Ten presidents formed their conference. If these players were going to represent their schools, they reasoned, they should do so honorably.
In 1941, Michigan’s legendary Fielding Yost said at his retirement banquet, “My heart is so full at this moment and I am so overcome by the rush of memories that I fear I could say little more. But do let me reiterate . . . the Spirit of Michigan. It is based upon a deathless loyalty to Michigan and all her ways; an enthusiasm that makes it second nature for Michigan men to spread the gospel of their university to the world’s distant outposts; a conviction that nowhere is there a better university, in any way, than this Michigan of ours.”
But the beauty is this: the fans, alums, and players at Ohio State, Penn State, and Northwestern—and dozens of other schools—all feel the same way. When college teams compete, it isn’t just a game between two teams. We see it as a battle between two ways of life. Is there a single professional team that can claim anything like this?
This is why, when schools are caught violating NCAA rules, it bruises the identity of their fans. But when the New England Patriots were caught filming opponents’ hand signals, did their fans hang their heads in shame? No, it was just a passing nuisance.
Professional teams don’t stand for anything more than a can of pop. The players go on strike, the owners lock them out, and they repeat the cycle every five or ten years, as needed, for more money. Their fans respond in kind, often caring less about the actual teams in their state than the fantasy teams on their computers—or the point spreads in their paper, and the wallets in their back pockets.
About 17 million people attended NFL games in 2011, but almost twice that many, 33 million, participated in fantasy football leagues—as pure an expression of the players-as-gumballs model you could conceive. The sites that host those fantasy leagues don’t even bother posting versions for college football because virtually no one plays fantasy college football. College football fans actually care about college football, not just its parts.
If the NFL has benefited greatly from fantasy football fans, it’s nothing compared to the viewers it attracts through gambling. (Several NFL franchises were actually founded and owned by gamblers.) The NFL is a $9-billion-a-year business (helped considerably by the $17 billion it extracted from taxpayers for its stadiums). But that doesn’t include the piles of money gamblers bet on the NFL, which, by most estimates, is approaching a billion dollars a year. Of course, plenty of college football fans bet on their games, too, but I’ve found it as rare to hear them talk about the point spread at a sports bar as it is to not hear NFL fans discussing the same subject during their games. The two fan bases are not motivated by the same things.
In other words, many of the NFL’s “fans” are simply fellow travelers, along for the ride for ulterior motives. That simply isn’t the case with college football fans, whose devotion is based on a passionate attachment to their team.
The same fellow travelers label could be applied to NFL players. As Jerry Seinfeld said, professional players are traded so often, you’re really just cheering for your team’s jerseys. Those teams don’t even represent their cities—six of the NFL’s thirty-two teams have moved a total of eight times since the Super Bowl started in 1967. If the Rams play in Los Angeles or St. Louis, what difference does it make?
Of the 124 FBS Division I teams, no
t one has ever moved, gone on strike, or been locked out. Ever.
College athletes are more passionate playing for a scholarship than pro athletes are playing for millions. And we admire them more for this very reason. It’s the difference between citizen soldiers volunteering for the army and hired Hessians. Give us the doughboys, the G.I. Joes, and the grunts fighting for a cause.
And this is why we watch: not for perfection, but passion—the same reason over a million fans watch the Little League World Series every summer. This point is easily proven: the worst team in the NFL would crush the best team in college football, every year. Yet college football is the only sport in the world that draws more fans to its games than the big league teams it feeds. The attendance at Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State home games typically averages 50 percent more than that of the NFL teams in those states—and often doubles it. No minor league baseball or hockey team comes close to matching the attendance of their parent clubs.
This basic truth escapes both the proponents of paying players and the NCAA executives who try to squelch minor leagues from starting: college football is selling romance, not prowess. If ability were the only appeal, we’d move NFL games to Saturday and watch those games instead. But if you lose the romance of college football, you will lose the fans of college football.
Joining a hundred thousand like-minded strangers solves a modern problem, too. The Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa have both noted that the great disease of Western civilization is loneliness. Yes, it’s possible to be lonely in a crowd—but not this one.
Studies show our endorphins spike when we’re marching in formation, singing in unison, or cheering together in a stadium. Where else can you be certain a hundred thousand other people are feeling exactly what you’re feeling, exactly when you’re feeling it? This is why such places are more important now than ever.
Think about it. The Big Ten’s twelve teams do not play one game this season that’s not televised. You can sit back in your easy chair right at home and watch every game for free. Likewise, every song in the world can be purchased for a few bucks, and every movie is on DVD. Yet we still go to concerts, movies, and games, just as our ancestors did almost century ago. If Beethoven, Humphrey Bogart, or Fielding H. Yost visited those places today, they would think almost nothing had changed.
We need to be together. We need to share something we care about with strangers. And to fill that need, you could do worse than Big Ten football.
“We have too much pluribus,” filmmaker Ken Burns said twenty years ago, “and not enough unum.” If that was true then, before the flourishing of designer news stations, gated communities, and the Internet, it is surely more true now. College football stadiums are now one of the few remaining places where we connect across race, religion, and politics. And we do it with vigor.
Dr. Ed Zeiders, the pastor of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church right in downtown State College, has seen what the football team can do for the faithful in ways others might not.
“We are desperately needy,” he told me. “We need something to cheer about and rally around. Our culture is devoid of these things.
“We need a place to stand, and a people to stand with, and a cause to stand for. That is not original with me. That came out of World Methodism. And those three propositions hold the key to healthy and value-oriented living.
“I’ve taught and preached that for a lot of years.
“I have this belief that academics should be that unifying principle, but the evidence points to something else.
“Sports has the capacity to make that happen. That can get skewed and twisted, especially in the marketing side of the equation, but my interest in sports is more in the community that forms around them.
“Obviously, football’s an important consideration for us—they’ve been very good here for many, many years—but part of what my wife and I enjoy is the friendships we create in the stands. There is an ease with which sports fans connect with each other. The sport has a tendency to create an environment, and a way for people to live vicariously through their teams. And in the case of Penn State it has the potential to hold up something that is admirable and unifying.”
I’ve spent four of the past five years following Big Ten football players at close range, and I can tell you that, with few exceptions, they are hardworking, honest guys who care deeply for their school and their teammates. For many fans, when their favorite running back breaks through the line into the end zone, then simply hands the ball to the ref and celebrates with his teammates, he represents our cherished Midwestern values at their best.
One Wolverine fan who lost his dad at a young age wrote to Michigan’s athletic director that “Michigan football is my father.”
A foreign concept, perhaps. But not to us.
Our love for college football is irrational—and that’s where they’ve got us.
• • •
Back at McCormick Place, after each coach gave a fifteen-minute speech in the main room, they joined three of their players to meet with smaller media groups in the room next door.
I have no idea what kind of players each coach left back on campus, but the ones they brought to Chicago were not just smart, sincere, and well-spoken—the kind of guys you’d want to hire for your company—they demonstrated the kind of message control that political campaigns could only dream of.
• • •
Urban Meyer, as the first head coach to migrate from the SEC to the Big Ten in . . . as long as anyone can remember, had to field the usual questions about the Big Ten—repeatedly.
Characteristically, he didn’t sugarcoat his answers.
The SEC had “won a bunch of national championships,” he said, and were clearly “the kingpin in the BCS bowls.” For Ohio State to catch up to the best of the SEC—and by proxy, the rest of the Big Ten to do so, as well—he believed it needed faster, more athletic players. “But the defensive front seven is the difference in the SEC right now,” he said, which entailed everything, from recruiting to coaching.
He pointed out, however, that eight of the twelve Big Ten teams had started running some version of the spread offense. “That’s obviously a drastic change historically.”
When yet another reporter asked Meyer what the Big Ten had to do to catch up with the SEC, he said simply, “We have to win, and win some bowl games. The bottom line in all this is the same: to win.”
When Meyer first laid out his expectations to his new team, Zach Boren recalled, “We knew we were in store for a long, hard ride—and that’s why we came to Ohio State. That’s what we signed up for.”
“I was off-the-charts excited,” senior linebacker Etienne Sabino said. “His passion, his enthusiasm for the game, his sense of urgency for us as players—that’s what we needed.”
When the inevitable bowl-ban question came up, fellow senior John Simon provided the team’s stock answer: “We’re going to treat every game like a bowl game.”
Of course, some “pretend bowl games” are bigger than others. When someone asked Meyer if he needed to do anything extra to motivate his team for the Michigan game, he looked surprised. “I hope not. I hope we’re really good by then. If we’re not, maybe I’ll have to make up some secret slogan and put them on T-shirts. But if you have to do that, you’re already in trouble.
“So, no, I don’t think so. It’s the greatest rivalry in college football, a game I’ve known all my life. Buckeye Nation is very clear on what it expects from that game.”
His expression suggested that he intended to give it to them.
• • •
Michigan head coach Brady Hoke arrived with co-captains Denard Robinson and Jordan Kovacs and junior offensive tackle Taylor Lewan, who had flirted with the NFL after his sophomore year and was expected to jump after the 2012 season, possibly as a first-rounder.
Robinson’s and Kovac’s prospects looked a little different. Robinson capped his first year as Michigan’s starting quarterback in 2010 by winning t
he Big Ten MVP award. Then he watched the staff that recruited him get broomed, and his numbers slip as a junior under new offensive coordinator Al Borges, who favored the NFL passing attack to the system Robinson was born to run, the spread offense. While Michigan’s defense jumped, leaped, and pole-vaulted its way from 110th to 17th in the nation, a stunning achievement, the offense seemed to be going the opposite direction, though surely not as fast.
When Rodriguez’s staff was fired, many assumed Robinson would transfer to a spread-option program, perhaps one closer to his home in Deerfield Beach, Florida. But he had promised his parents he would get his Michigan degree and told his teammates that he would not leave them. His word proved good on both fronts.
For Kovacs, whom Rodriguez plucked from a campus tryout, every day wearing the winged helmet was gravy. His dad had walked on for Bo Schembechler, but only got in a few plays. Jordan found himself starting in his third game, a thrilling win against Notre Dame, and finished his junior year as the team’s leading tackler. So, here he was, an unrecruited walk-on turned cocaptain of the sport’s winningest program—with no desire even to try out for the NFL draft. As a movement-science major with a 3.1 GPA, he didn’t need the NFL to consider his college career a success.
As for Hoke, he was fresh off his 11-2 “rookie season.” If any coach had a happier honeymoon than Hoke’s, on and off the field, it was hard to remember. From the fans to the guys on the front line, the affection for the second-year coach seemed universal. “I love him,” said David Molk, who won the Rimington Trophy in 2011 as the nation’s best center. Molk is not given to gushing, but of Hoke he said, “He’s a great coach, he’s a great mentor, he’s a great friend. He’s every single thing you want a college coach to be, and he does it flawlessly.”
Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football Page 9