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

by Bacon, John U.

  • • •

  On his Facebook page, Wolverine writer Andy Reid boiled down our love of college rivalries quite efficiently.

  “GO TEAM! BEAT RIVAL!

  “Rival’s fans are rude and ill-informed, and their coach is morally ambiguous. And don’t even get me started on the relatively poor physical appearance of Rival’s female students. Or our team’s historical dominance of Rival. Yeesh.”

  Reid could have added that Rival’s graduates make less money and often find themselves working for alums from your school—probably due to Rival’s appallingly low admissions standards. Or, if you prefer, you can take the other side, pointing out what heartless, money-grubbing snobs Rival’s fans are, fostering an insufferable arrogance that makes beating them so sweet.

  But even while reveling in their differences, college football fans have far more in common than not—though they’d never admit it. They speak the same language, value the same history (though they might tell it a little differently), and follow the same rituals. They even love their opponents’ customs—particularly if they can make fun of them.

  Because sports columnists and pundits often follow college football on Saturdays and pro football on Sundays, they tend to lump them together as the minor league and major league of the same sport. But college football fans do not. They lump their alma mater’s teams together—football, basketball, hockey, and more—and are happy when any of them beats their rival’s counterparts.

  In 2005, former Michigan athletic director Bill Martin commissioned a professionally conducted survey, which revealed that Michigan football season-ticket holders are doggedly loyal, with slightly more than half of them holding their seats for more than two decades. They are about 50 percent more likely to buy Michigan basketball season tickets than season tickets for any professional team. Only 9 percent of Michigan season-ticket holders also bought season tickets to any professional team, and this survey was taken when Michigan basketball was down and the Detroit Red Wings and Pistons were just a few years away from their latest titles.

  This tells us a basic truth: College football fans don’t just love football. They love college football—the history, the traditions, the rituals, and the rivalries that surpass those of the pro game. They are attracted to the belief that it’s based on ideals that go beyond the field, do not fade with time, and are passed down to the next generation. And that loyalty spans the spectrum of your school’s teams. No Ohio State football fan is going to cheer for Michigan’s basketball team. Ever.

  With few exceptions, professional rivalries are passing fads based on personalities. The Magic-Bird battles of the eighties were legendary, but when the NBA tried to market the 2010 Lakers-Celtics Finals as a rematch, no one bought it. But when Alabama and Auburn get together, you don’t need Joe Namath or Bo Jackson to make the fans care.

  When you talk to college football fans, it doesn’t take long to hear them say the same things: their “student-athletes” are better than your “student-athletes”—in every way. Their school is superior to your school, which their football program conveniently demonstrates. In other words, they care as much about the values as the victories. Rival fans prove this when their teams start losing and they invariably cite their unusually high academic and ethical standards as the reasons—something fans of losing NFL teams can’t hide behind.

  But how deep does their devotion go? Are they willing to put their money where their mouths are?

  The players are constantly being tried, but they are not on trial. The fans are. They pay for the seat licenses and the cable bill and the alternative jerseys—not to mention the hotel rooms and the restaurant bills and bar tabs that keep college towns humming.

  The entire enterprise of big-time college football is based on the assumption that the players will continue to play, and the fans will continue to pay. But this raises a question too few have stopped to ponder—one that the NCAA, the leagues, and the universities that play big-time sports should be asking: What would it take for fans to stop opening their wallets—obscene prices, eroding traditions, ridiculous league realignments, the end of treasured rivalries? Does the fans’ irrational passion for their favorite college football teams have a limit—and if so, where is it?

  I’ve come to view the fans as frogs sitting in a shallow pot of water, with the suits turning up the heat ever so slightly over a long period, until finally it’s boiling, but the frogs just sit there, until it’s too late.

  But, it turns out, it’s a myth: Even frogs are smart enough to eventually jump out of boiling water. Are we?

  • • •

  To find out, I was going to hop into the pot of water myself and see how hot the moneymakers could turn it up before I jumped.

  It was also a fine excuse to realize one of my long-standing dreams: traveling in a monster recreational vehicle to a football game with a bunch of buddies. (Okay, I dream small.) The idea came to me just six days before the Michigan–Notre Dame game, so I had to work fast. My first calls went to friends who owned monster RVs, but one was in Canada and the other was married, so they were out.

  I then enlisted Bob “Chili” Spence and Brian “Westy” Westrate, two bar buddies from our college days at Rick’s American Café in Ann Arbor, then roped in Nick Standiford, a former hockey player and student of mine turned law student. Nick naturally had the least money, so we put him in charge of finding the RV.

  Nick found a local operation that was willing to rent us a thirty-two-foot highway yacht that slept six to eight, with no charge for the generator, propane, insurance, and the first three hundred miles—with no special license required (or, apparently, background check on my driving record, which may or may not reveal an endless string of speeding tickets going back to high school). All of that for just $750.

  Heck, divide that by five guys, and it came to $150 each for a three-day weekend, and even a horrid hotel within thirty minutes of Notre Dame would cost twice that. Okay, so food, gas, and parking would be a few bucks more, but so what? We couldn’t afford not to do this!

  But, by Wednesday, we still hadn’t recruited anyone else—and at some point, it is too many dollars more. So, we either had to kill the dream or come up with Plan B, which we did: put the offer on Facebook and let our friends make their case for the remaining one or two spots.

  I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Would my little contest elicit a flood of responses from witty and willing friends—or crickets?

  The early answer was crickets, confirming the obvious: this bizarre little dream was not shared by sane people. I’d be driving my car to South Bend on the morning of the game, then turning right back around to save the two-night minimum at the Holiday Inn Express in Elkhart, Indiana (“The City with a Heart!”), which is forty minutes from the stadium in gameday traffic.

  I had just set myself up for a major public face-plant.

  But within the next few hours, I received over a hundred responses.

  Rent it, and they will come.

  My friends responded from Florida, New York, and Chicago. I heard from a friend of a friend in Mississippi: “Awesome! Ready to fill my gas tank up and head North!!!” And the best part was, he was dead serious.

  I heard from teachers of friends, daughters of friends, and people I’d never met before—often pitching for their student, dad, or husband. I heard from Rod Payne, Michigan’s all-American center in 1995, who had won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens in 2000, and from the mother of Steve Kampfer, who had just won the Stanley Cup with the Boston Bruins, offering to bring a replica of the cup.

  “I am confident by Saturday night,” I replied, “we would not know the difference. ‘Big silver thing with beer in it? Yeah, that’s Lord Stanley’s. Drink up!’ ”

  You say “road trip” and people just want to go. John Steinbeck captured the impulse in Travels with Charley, his account of circling the United States in a pickup with his dog:

  “And then I saw what I was to see so many times on
the journey—a look of longing. . . .

  “ ‘Don’t you like it here?’

  “ ‘Sure it’s all right, but I wish I could go.’

  “ ‘You don’t even know where I’m going.’

  “ ‘I don’t care, I’d like to go anywhere.’ ”

  Even better if you have a fun destination and a cause to rally around—like a college football game.

  Contestants in our Facebook derby mentioned road trips they had taken in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. For the Michigan crowd, this included trips to Notre Dame in 1978, when the rivalry resumed after thirty-five years; to Ohio State just about every even year, when they play in Columbus; and to Penn State in 1997, when Michigan, on their way to a national title, blew out the second-ranked Lions. One told of the trip he’d just made to Dallas, where he fed 138 Wolverines before the game against Alabama.

  The desire to hop on board ran strong in these fans.

  Out of this pile of entries emerged a few aces: Jim Carty, a former Ann Arbor News columnist turned attorney; his boss, Alan Harris, who thought he could get us free RV parking; and Tim Payne, aka the Rhino, a college friend who was famous for his ability to drink a beer at the speed of gravity, minus friction.

  “One of the best days of my life,” he wrote, “was the day I was declined admission to ND and thus attended U of M.”

  We had our band.

  • • •

  Nick and I drove to HW Motorhomes in Canton, Michigan, where we gave Dan White a $1,000 security deposit in exchange for the keys. When he asked where we were going—the voice of experience, no doubt—he lit up.

  “Now that sounds like fun,” he said.

  When the RV guy—who’s been on, heard about, or cleaned up after every kind of trip imaginable—envies your journey, you’re onto something. Turned out he was a big Michigan State fan, who named his daughter Kelly so her full name described MSU’s two official colors. “I much prefer the college game,” he said. “The NFL, I can barely watch it. Just mercenaries. But the college kids, they mean it. It makes all the difference.”

  Our gang meant it, too. Westy loaded something called the Big Trunk of Mystery on the Magic Bus. I knew better than to ask.

  Rhino asked me, “You got room for the coffin?”

  “What’s the coffin?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  I found out: it was a gleaming white Cooler of the Gods, measuring two feet by three feet by six feet. When I asked Rhino how many beers it could hold, he didn’t hesitate. “Two hundred and twelve,” he said. “The two hundred and thirteenth you have to put in your pocket. Because that’s just too many.”

  The dream had become a reality. We were on the road, looking for adventure, and whatever came our way.

  • • •

  Friday night, we got the Magic Bus through a Taco Bell drive-through—$40—and found a chain bar, where we dropped another $100 or so and ran into Matt Cornicelli, brother of Joe, part of our Sunday-morning team on WTKA. Matt grew up in Ann Arbor, went to Notre Dame, then returned to U-M for medical school.

  “This game is always special for me,” he said. “For a lot of people—that’s your family. Your ties go back generations. I think Notre Dame fans are more loyal. But, for me, because of my Ann Arbor roots, the last three years have been the worst. The. Absolute. Worst.”

  And for good reason: Michigan scored three consecutive last-minute comebacks over solid Notre Dame teams. The most dramatic was the 2011 clash, the first night game in Michigan history, when the Wolverines completed an unforgettable 28-point fourth quarter to win on the game’s final play, a jump ball launched from Denard Robinson to Roy Roundtree in the corner of the end zone.

  “After the night game last year,” Cornicelli said, “I walked out of the stadium and collapsed. I knew Joe and my friends in med school were going to give me so much shit. We had the lead, and we knew we’d find some way to screw it up. And we did.

  “I said, ‘I give up.’ And I lay on the sidewalk.

  “After five or ten minutes, my fiancée had to say, ‘It’s not that bad. Get up. It’s not worth lying on the sidewalk.’

  “I got up. I had to.

  “That game! I don’t care if we go six and six the rest of the year. We have to win that game. If it happens again . . . ”

  It was a sentence Cornicelli could not finish.

  • • •

  We returned to the Magic Bus and scrambled for the best beds. Despite the Rhino snoring like, well, a rhinoceros, I had finally gotten to sleep when the Magic Bus started rocking, thanks to two security guards who wanted us to leave their lot. Westy and Chili woke up first, and drove us to a grocery store, where they dropped $300 to fill the Magic Bus with everything we’d need. But we soon realized we had not considered a couple big-ticket items—namely, tickets.

  “No, seriously, do we have tickets?” Rhino asked repeatedly.

  “No, dude, we don’t,” I replied repeatedly. “But it’ll work out.”

  It turned out everyone already had a ticket, and I had a press pass, which left only poor Rhino out. We promised to find him one as game time approached.

  Another sizable expense we hadn’t considered: $300 to park an RV anywhere near Notre Dame Stadium.

  On Saturday morning, Westy and Chili set up our canopy, with mountains of food, beverages, foam fingers, and, naturally, a skull-and-spine-shaped beer bong. Westy pinned his U-M–themed baggy boxers to the corner of the tent as a flag, and the party was on.

  Westy opened up the Big Trunk of Mystery to reveal a pile of bizarre wigs and costumes, which were actually just horrible fashions from the seventies, such as a three-piece denim suit, inappropriate for all occasions. These guys might have taken it to the extremes, but really, they were just doing what everyone else already was—embracing the college in college football, and the opportunity to step back for a few hours into your school days, wear crazy clothes, play the old music, do the old dances, and forget for a little while that time has marched on.

  Whether they knew it or not, the marketers of college football were selling something similar to the fountain of youth: a ticket to the past. That it required substantial suspension of disbelief, didn’t last longer than an afternoon, and often resulted in a pounding headache didn’t dull the appeal.

  The water might be nearing the boiling point for us frogs, but at least it was our water, and we’d been swimming in it for generations.

  “The thing that makes college football different from everything else,” Jim Carty said, “is this: in theory, we all took the same classes as Denard Robinson. You don’t have that in pro sports, that connection.”

  When we finally turned our attention to finding Rhino a ticket, we were in for a shock: $300, $400, or even $500 for a single seat. According to SeatGeek.com, the average price of a ticket for that game was $371, making it the nation’s most expensive ticket of the year to date. At the end of the season, it would finish fourth, behind only Alabama-LSU ($566), Texas-Oklahoma ($463), and Alabama-Auburn ($406). Poor Michigan fans would find three more of their contests in the top ten—Ohio State, Alabama, and Michigan State—ranging from $356 to $301 respectively, making Michigan the nation’s leader for big-ticket games.

  And this brings us to a surprising finding. For a group of guys who would not think twice about dropping $750 for an RV, a few hundred for each fill-up, $300 for groceries and beer (and then more beer), and $300 for one day of parking—not to mention a bunch of ancillary expenses that added up pretty fast—when I asked them who would pony up that kind of money for a ticket to the game, not one of my six traveling partners said yes. They told me $200 was their limit, if not lower.

  That included the Rhino, who said even if he did have a ticket, he would have sold it for that price and watched the game on our twenty-four-inch color TV in the RV. Which, it turned out, he did anyway, just without the black-market profits.

  We were willing to engage in plenty of irrational behavior to foll
ow our passion, but I had just discovered that these frogs had a jumping point.

  • • •

  About 3:00 p.m., I headed to the stadium. This wasn’t the intimate scene Northwestern offered—you could see Notre Dame Stadium for miles, with tailgaters packing the acres around it—but it wasn’t the hot, smooth sea of pavement Jerry World presented, either.

  I passed hundreds of RVs and thousands of revelers, including a few dozen hovering around the coolest RV I’d ever seen, painted like the famed Michigan football helmet. Its owners, Tom and Jackie Anderson, are both dentists, living in Ludington, Michigan, in the northwest corner of the Lower Peninsula.

  “I was in the navy in the late eighties,” he told me, wearing a classic block-M baseball hat—he kept his actual wolverine carcass hat on the bus—and a blue sweater, while swirling a beer. “I saw a bus on the side of the road, near the Great Lakes naval base in Illinois, and I thought, ‘One day, I’ll have a bus like that to tailgate in.’

  “So, six years ago, when I saw this old Greyhound on eBay, I knew that was it. I bought it and started to convert it.”

  “It’s always a work in progress,” Jackie said, but it looked pretty finished to an outsider, with a tap protruding from its side, and a three-foot-tall bobble-head Bo standing sentry. Inside, it’s set up like a rock-and-roll star’s tour bus, with a bonus seat from Michigan’s ninety-nine-year-old Hill Auditorium. He has three flat-screen TVs, a table from the long-defunct campus bar Pretzel Bell, and autographs on the walls from Gary Moeller, John Beilein, Red Berenson, and Brady Hoke—plus a horn that he got from Amtrak, which is technically against the law.

  “The RV is okay for sleeping,” he said, “but it’s built for tailgating! We wanted to make a gathering place.”

  Judging by the happy crowd partying around his bus, he had clearly succeeded. For the honor of hosting the best party in the lot each Saturday, however, it cost them about $1,500 a week.