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

by Bacon, John U.

  “The Cowboy Classic was made for TV and nothing else,” Weisman concluded. “It’s a serious compromise from what could have been a great home-and-home series,” one where Michigan fans could have walked Alabama’s campus and eaten at mom-and-pop shops like Houndstooth and visited the Paul W. Bryant Museum, and Tide fans could have walked Michigan’s “Diag” and visited Pizza Bob’s, Blimpy Burger, and Mister Spots—no chains in the mix.

  Nonetheless, none of us even considered not watching the game, in person or on TV. And either way, we gave Jerry Jones and the two schools’ athletic directors exactly what they wanted: a chance to make money off us.

  • • •

  Just inside the stadium’s east entrance, the Ann Arbor–based souvenir chain M Den set up a tent to hawk Michigan apparel and jerseys designed for this game, attracting a line of customers longer than the field they would soon be watching. It took Scott Bell, a former student of mine at Michigan who’s now a Dallas Morning News sports reporter, about thirty minutes just to get inside the tent—and once he did, still two hours before kickoff, the ravenous fans had already emptied a number of cubbyholes and racks.

  The money makers didn’t stop there. Both schools posted ads inside the stadium, something Michigan has made a point never to do in the Big House, and ran more ads on the jumbo TVs for—well, for just about everything. Even alcohol was for sale—another Big House no-no. If you were willing to wait in line for ten minutes or so, you could get a good ol’ twelve-ounce Miller Lite for a mere $8.50, which buys twelve of them at the Walmart across the parking lot, with a buck-fifty change.

  • • •

  Even at those prices, those drinks came in handy for Michigan fans.

  Michigan entered the game a 14-point underdog. A point or two might have been attributed to Brady Hoke’s decision, announced the day before the game, to leave starting running back Fitzgerald Toussaint at home due to his DUI conviction a month earlier.

  “The decision was not easy, but I feel it is in the best interest of this program and for these kids, and those always will be my priorities,” Hoke said in a press release. “It’s about teaching life lessons, and if this helps these kids or someone else make a right decision later, then we’ve won. That is ultimately what we are here for, to help them grow and mature to become better sons, fathers, husbands, and members of society.”

  Hoke’s decision was roundly heralded by Michigan fans as proof that their program was not run by a win-at-all-costs coach, a virtue they value deeply—and one pro fans wouldn’t even consider.

  But even without Toussaint, a genial young man who had led the 2011 team with 1,041 yards, Michigan fans were almost uniform in their belief that, if Denard Robinson could just get rolling, Michigan could pull the upset.

  “Hey, Appalachian State beat us, right?” State Street Barber Shop’s Bill “Red” Stolberg said, back in Ann Arbor. “If they can do it to us, we can do it to ’Bama!”

  As votes of confidence go, I’ve heard stronger. But two things became clear early, then often: First, though the crowd was evenly split between the two schools, the folks in crimson were twice as loud—before anyone had scored. Second, Touissant’s presence would have made little difference.

  Thanks to Alabama’s “containment” defense, Michigan’s coaches felt compelled to keep Denard Robinson in the pocket—where he is at his most uncomfortable and ineffective. He proved it when the Wolverines’ first six possessions ended with four punts and two interceptions.

  Michigan’s defense, however, looked as if it might be up to the challenge when it sent the Tide’s potent offense to the sidelines after its first three downs. Unfortunately for the Wolverines, that proved to be the rare exception. Alabama quarterback A. J. McCarron and company scored three straight touchdowns in the first quarter alone to take a 21–0 lead, which they expanded to 31–0 with 4:31 still left in the half.

  It was all over but the shouting, which Tide fans happily provided by the decibel. Wolverine fans had little to cheer for until halftime, when the Michigan Marching Band took the field. I’m told the Michigan fans in Dallas did, in fact, enjoy every note.

  When they’d signed the deal months earlier, Jerry Jones compared this game to the Super Bowl. He didn’t realize just how right he’d be: the event provided weeks of hype and unbridled commercialism, followed by a fizzle. This game would have fit in just fine among the many forgettable Super Bowl blowouts of the seventies and eighties.

  The final scoreboard read 41–14, Michigan’s two touchdowns coming off two Robinson bombs, but the fans knew the real score: if the best of the Big Ten was going to compete with the cream of the SEC, it still had a ways to go.

  “The ’Bama fans were treating us like Michigan fans treat Michigan State fans,” Steve Chronis said. “Now I know what it feels like to be a Sparty.”

  Michigan’s football truck, festooned with the winged helmet, rode through the night to get to Schembechler Hall the next morning. While the equipment managers unloaded the gear, and the coaches graded the players, the Wolverines refocused on their original mission: get good enough, fast enough, to win their forty-third Big Ten title.

  On the season’s first day, they discovered national acclaim was out of reach for at least another year.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE BRAINIAC BOWL

  If you want to see what a Big Ten school that doesn’t care about football looks like, all you have to do is revisit Northwestern between 1972 and 1991. Within those twenty years you have two eras: the Bad Years, from 1981 to 1991, when two coaches led the ’Cats to a record of 20-79; and the Really, Really Bad Years of 1976 to 1981, when they posted a record of 3-62.

  That’s no typo. Three victories against 62 defeats. If the team had flipped those numbers around, the Wildcats would be considered the greatest dynasty of the modern era. Only the Washington Generals, who get paid to lose to the Harlem Globetrotters, had a worse record.

  “We won three games in six years,” said Northwestern’s current president, Morton Schapiro. A celebrated professor, he has written five books and over a hundred academic articles on the economics of higher education, and he possesses a savantlike ability to conjure scores, records, and even the dates of big games for all of Northwestern’s nineteen varsity teams. He follows them assiduously through GameTracker, which provides every pitch, shot, and play. “We were three and sixty-two—and one! We tied one in there.” And he was correct.

  “But it wasn’t just six seasons of losing. It was two decades.”

  Again, he was right. And it wasn’t just embarrassing. It was costly.

  “Northwestern was losing a lot of money for the conference,” recalled Jim Duderstadt, who served as Michigan’s president from 1988 to 1996.

  “Back then they had shared gates, and Northwestern wasn’t really interested in making the investments necessary to help out,” he told me. “They were losing about ten million dollars a year in the early nineties, and with about ten thousand students, that’s about a thousand dollars per student to stay in the Big Ten.

  “They’re much more Ivy League–like than Big Ten. If they could have conveniently moved into the Ivy Leagues, they would have done it.”

  In fact, Duderstadt recalled, before he became president in 1988, “They actually explored it in the eighties, with a serious proposal to the Ivy League, but both sides ultimately backed away.”

  And what if Northwestern had followed through on its proposal to drop out of the Big Ten?

  • • •

  A decent model of that alternative universe can be found just fourteen miles down Lake Shore Drive in Hyde Park—home of the University of Chicago.

  In the late 1800s, it had become fashionable for America’s richest men—Cornell, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Rice, and Duke, to name a few—to create colleges in their names. But the richest of them all, John D. Rockefeller, named his school after its home: the University of Chicago.

  In 1891, a year before they opened the doors, the universit
y hired a Yale professor, William Rainey Harper, to become its first president.

  Harper’s first hire was not a vice president, a provost, or a dean, but his former Hebrew student Amos Alonzo Stagg, a coach trained by Yale’s Walter Camp himself, the father of football. Both Rockefeller and Harper knew the fastest way to put their new school on the map was to make a splash in the sensation sweeping the nation—and therefore became the first school to leverage football success for academic prestige, a model later followed by Notre Dame, Michigan State, Penn State, and now Ohio State.

  According to John Boyer, dean of the University of Chicago since 1992—and the most knowledgeable historian on campus—Harper focused more on the graduate schools than the undergraduate program. “But counterbalancing this was Harper’s incredible love of student life,” Boyer told me. “He recognized the school needed a vibrant culture, loyal alums, and successful—underscore successful—Big Ten athletics.”

  President Harper hired the right guy. Stagg made the Maroons strong enough fast enough to join the brand-new Big Ten in 1895, winning five of the league’s first eighteen titles, and two more in 1922 and 1924. Chicago’s seven Big Ten football titles were not exceeded by Iowa until 1990, by Wisconsin until 1993, and by Purdue or Northwestern until 2000. Eighty-eight years later, Indiana, Michigan State, Penn State, and, of course, Nebraska have yet to pass Chicago’s mark.

  Stagg invented the Statue of Liberty play, the man-in-motion, and the end-around. Knute Rockne himself once said, “All football begins with Stagg.” That might be a bit hyperbolic, but there is no discounting what Stagg did for the game, the Big Ten, and the University of Chicago. In fact, Stagg might have done his job too well, gaining such notoriety for his school that he and his team were no longer needed.

  “We were already the third-wealthiest university in the country by 1910, behind only Harvard and Yale,” Boyer explained. “By the 1920s, many of our schools and colleges were in the number one or two spot nationwide.”

  Chicago’s fifth president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, served from 1929 to 1951. According to Robin Lester’s authoritative book, Stagg’s University: The Rise, Decline and Fall of Big-Time Football at Chicago, Hutchins decided the university’s undergraduate program had grown so strong through a new Great Books curriculum that, by 1939, it wouldn’t matter much if he killed the football program.

  Of course, Hutchins’s contempt for athletics in almost all forms didn’t help. “Whenever I get the urge to exercise,” he famously said, “I lie down until it goes away.”

  His disregard for organized collegiate athletics was even greater, as captured in this classic: “Football is to education what bullfighting is to agriculture.”

  It’s a safe bet, however, that if Chicago’s teams hadn’t tanked in their last fifteen seasons, Hutchins would not have been so predisposed to cut the squad.

  After Stagg won Chicago’s seventh and last Big Ten title in 1924, he managed only one winning season in his next eight and was fired. Stagg’s successor, Clark Shaughnessy, never achieved a single winning season in his seven-year stint, despite coaching Jay Berwanger to the first Heisman Trophy in 1935.

  “Even in the twenties,” Dean Boyer told me, “we had a difficult time fielding successful teams, and then the market for our team collapsed. The Bears were at Wrigley Field, and Northwestern was on the rise, so attendance and wins began to decline. This continued into the thirties.”

  In 1939, the Maroons managed to beat Oberlin and Wabash (now Division III schools), but suffered four straight midseason losses to Harvard, Michigan, Virginia, and Ohio State, by a combined score of 254–0—an average of 63.5 to, well, 0, of course.

  “Looking at scores like that, what can Hutchins do?” Boyer asked, “He wasn’t going to keep putting a team like that on the field to represent this university. Really, Hutchins was killing off a program that had already died.”

  But Hutchins’s revamped undergraduate offerings atrophied, too. By the 1980s, the University of Chicago had become a serious success, but a joyless campus. A popular T-shirt on campus featured THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO on the front, and on the back, WHERE FUN GOES TO DIE.

  When the late, great Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy once said, “A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall,” this is what he was talking about.

  As a result, Boyer recalled, applicants stayed away in droves. When he started at the university twenty-one years ago, the school had a 71 percent admit rate. In other words, just about everyone who could do the work and bothered to apply to one of the world’s most prestigious universities was all but guaranteed admission.

  “The education has always been first-rate,” he said. “But you can’t sell that just by itself anymore.”

  So, what to do about it? Liven up the atmosphere by bringing back big-time sports—as Connecticut and Buffalo have done—or come up with another plan?

  Characteristically, Chicago opted for Plan B—and executed it cleverly.

  “We were not investing enough in residential life—in dorms, and dining halls, the theater, sports,” Boyer admitted. “We were not paying attention to the world beyond the life of the mind. We may not need tailgating, but you need nice dorms, good dining halls. And the university made significant improvements in all those areas, investing massively.”

  Chicago also put good money into a new arts center on campus, first-rate pools and gyms—Hutchins’s hatred of exercise notwithstanding—and even Division III athletic teams.

  “Sports are important to us,” Boyer said, “but it’s not the tail wagging the dog. We require calculus for all freshmen—admissions are very tough—but we have very good teams in cross-country, tennis, and soccer, among others. They’re all competitive, they have a good time, they make lifelong friends, and the alums think it’s great. But the most popular campus activity is theater.”

  Chicago’s formula is working. The 71 percent admit rate the school had twenty years ago has dropped to just 9 percent, making Chicago more selective than any university outside of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—a truly dramatic turnaround.

  “What we do isn’t for everyone,” Boyer acknowledged. “But it’s working very well for us.”

  • • •

  By the early nineties, Northwestern’s football team had been almost as bad, on and off the field, as Chicago’s had been during the Maroons’ death rattle. It probably wasn’t too hard for Northwestern’s leaders at the time to understand President Hutchins’s decision to pull the Maroons out of the Big Ten in 1939. But seeing a great university such as Chicago struggle to get high school seniors simply to apply probably gave Northwestern’s executives pause.

  During the football team’s two lost decades, Northwestern was still a great university, populated by world-class professors and ambitious students from around the country and the globe, who loved their school. But, like Chicago, the place lacked something just about every other Big Ten student body could take for granted: fun.

  According to the authoritative Insider’s Guide to the Colleges’ 1995 edition, Northwestern students’ primary social outlet was “going to the library. . . . The social scene is very uptight for a large university.”

  Evanston itself often struck outsiders as a tight little town, and for good reason. In 1851, local Methodist lay ministers founded Northwestern, and their leadership helps explain why there are still eighty churches in a college town of about seventy thousand people. In its twentieth year, the school absorbed the Evanston College for Ladies and named its president, alumna Frances Willard, the first dean of women. She stepped down in 1874 to become the leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the driving force behind Prohibition—which is also the reason Evanston does not have a single bowling alley to this day. It’s not too surprising, then, that as late as 1995 Evanston had just one liquor store in the entire city and not a single bona fide bar.

  Evanston, in short, could have used a little levity—but the football team
was only equipped to provide comic relief through horrible seasons.

  Northwestern’s president and athletic director could have left well enough alone or attempted an experiment like Chicago’s. Neither option seemed too appealing, however, especially since Chicago’s plan hadn’t yet borne fruit, and even if it did, two such universities in the same county might flood the market for that niche of students who prefer theater to football.

  Instead, Northwestern’s leaders wondered, what would happen if Northwestern’s football team actually—gasp!—started winning games.

  Enter Gary Barnett, who had just led Colorado’s offense, under head coach Bill McCartney, to that school’s only national title in 1990. Barnett’s mere arrival signaled things were changing in Evanston. “Northwestern used to be a place to hang your hat while you made calls for your next job,” former athletic director Rick Taylor told me. But when Northwestern started paying competitive salaries, they started attracting competitive coaches.

  Two new NCAA rules also helped the Wildcats: the eighty-five scholarship limit, which kept teams like Michigan and Ohio State from hoarding all the good players; and Proposition 48, which mandated certain academic minimums for incoming freshmen—and prompted parents to start asking recruiters about graduation rates. Suddenly, Northwestern’s high academic standards were transformed from a liability to an asset. To make sure the more talented recruits weren’t overwhelmed by Northwestern’s classrooms, Barnett instituted mandatory tutoring for all freshman players, which all programs do now.

  The players also developed a confidence beyond their record. When Northwestern was recruiting Pat Fitzgerald—a self-described “Irish-Catholic kid from the South Side who heard Notre Dame scores announced at mass every Sunday”—he recalled going to a campus party with two Wildcat linebackers. When they asked him where else he was looking, and he said Georgia Tech and Notre Dame, “I’ll never forget what they said: ‘Would you rather play for Notre Dame or beat Notre Dame?’ ” he told me. “That took me back, made me think.”