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

by Bacon, John U.

  But in the fall, the students and professors return right on schedule, concerts and shows pack the calendar again, and the whole cycle starts over. If you’re lucky enough to follow the football season campus by campus, you’ll also notice the founders of Big Ten schools had a knack for planting their campuses on the hilliest, most beautiful land around, usually with a river running through them.

  You often hear people in Big Ten country say, on a cool, crisp fall day, with the colors just starting to turn, “Perfect football weather.” For us, it’s a recognized climatological condition.

  Yes, we know football started between Rutgers and Princeton, and was advanced by Yale. But we think it was born here, on these sprawling campuses among the cornfields, the perfect setting for the perfect game.

  • • •

  It was on just such a perfect fall Friday I approached the world’s most verdant campus. You know you’ve arrived when Grand River Avenue crosses M.A.C. Avenue—which you would pronounce “MAC” Avenue, because you’re not from here. Locals spell it out as “M-A-C,” a nod to its origins: Michigan Agricultural College.

  That was the school’s given name in 1855, the same year taxpayers gave birth to Pennsylvania Farmers High School, now known as Penn State. The two schools were the “First of the Land Grant Colleges,” commemorated by a three-cent stamp on their centennial. Both received their land from their states, predating the Morrill Act, which President Lincoln signed into law in 1862. The idea was simple, and utterly American: after most states had established their flagship universities—almost always called the University of Blank, à la the universities of Oklahoma, Iowa, and Michigan—to provide a liberal arts education to future professors, doctors, and lawyers, the government created over a hundred land-grant schools to give more practical training in agriculture, science, and engineering. Some of these schools started life as their state’s Agricultural College, or A&M (for agricultural and mechanical), but today are usually called Blank State University, as in Oklahoma State, Iowa State, and, yes, Michigan State.

  Every state that is home to this familiar pair of schools—U of Blank, and Blank State U—including Washington and Oregon, Utah and Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma, and Mississippi and Florida, just to name a few—breeds uncannily similar stereotypes: the U of Blank students are the rich, elitist bookworms, more likely to come from out of state and more likely to leave when they graduate, while the Blank State students are the local, friendlier, fun-loving partyers going to a “cow college” and more likely to stay in-state when they finish.

  These stereotypes don’t have that much to do with contemporary state universities. Just about any class you want to take at University of Blank, you can take at Blank State University, taught by similarly skilled professors (or more likely lecturers or grad students these days), surrounded by similarly motivated classmates. The number of students at University of Blank who don’t drink on Thursday nights is probably equal to the number of students at Blank State University who milk cows. But the very fact that these once disparate schools are becoming increasingly similar makes fans of both schools work that much harder to keep the old distinctions alive.

  This is what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences,” which he described as “the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other” and exhibit extreme “sensitiveness . . . to just these details of differentiation.”

  The good doctor Freud probably wasn’t analyzing American college football, but no one has ever explained the nature of these rivalries better. It matters that contemporary students can still hurl the same insults their fathers and grandfathers did. And it matters that college football teams, from Maine to Hawaii, still draw most of their players from their region. Those players grew up on those stereotypes, and picked their schools accordingly.

  These labels have lasted less because they’re still valid than because they’re persistently perpetuated by both sides, and have been for generations. If you dropped a Michigan State student in Ann Arbor, or vice versa, no one would know he’s from the Other School—until he expressed his opinions on his current location. The arguments and insults that would surely follow are ultimately all that matters. The differences may be small, but if both sides care about them that much, they’re big enough to keep the school’s identities separate.

  The schism between Michigan and Michigan State runs a little deeper than most, with the first drops of bad blood between them falling before Michigan State even existed.

  On the heels of Ireland’s potato famine, America’s education leaders realized they needed to treat agriculture as a science, one that could determine the most productive practices, and teach them to farmers. This created the rush of land-grant colleges—but where to put the state of Michigan’s?

  In Kim Clarke’s great research on the subject, she unearthed a revelation that will prick the pride of the Wolverines: the university’s first president fought fiercely to host the “cow college,” arguing that the state’s premier agricultural school should be under the auspices of the state’s flagship university.

  “O say, farmers of Michigan, that our great desire is to make the University useful to you and we are determined to do it,” wrote President Henry Philip Tappan. “It is better to have one great institution than half a dozen abortions,” he added, marking the first recorded insult from a Michigan man to the school that did not yet exist.

  Michigan professor Alexander Winchell followed Tappan’s plea by trying to overcome the objection that starting an agricultural school in Ann Arbor would take longer than starting a new one in East Lansing. “Let us remember,” he wrote, “the evils of delay are only of two years continuance, while the evils of an unfortunate location will be enduring.”

  And there is your second recorded insult.

  When Michigan lost that battle, Winchell concluded the new school “cannot be more than a fifth-rate affair. . . . I cannot believe the best thing has been done.”

  And there’s your third.

  The Wolverines could wail all they liked. The folks at the new school quickly realized they were onto something good.

  In 1925, Michigan Agricultural College changed its name to Michigan State College of Agricultural and Applied Science (MSC), and again in 1955 to Michigan State University of Agricultural and Applied Science. Finally, in 1964, it became simply Michigan State University—reflecting the expansion of its curriculum and the growth of its research.

  I didn’t know it then, but the next day I would meet the man whose vision made Michigan State what it is today.

  • • •

  As you wind along Grand River Avenue, Michigan State’s campus emerges on your right. By the time you hit M.A.C. Avenue, you can already see this is no “unfortunate location,” but quite simply one of the world’s prettiest campuses. Built on some ten thousand acres, with the Red Cedar River cutting through the middle, it’s a picture of rich green grass and thick, sturdy trees surrounding redbrick buildings, with enough space among them to enjoy all three.

  The other side of Grand River is lined with the shoe stores and sandwich shops, the bookstores and the bars typical of every Big Ten town—and that’s where I was headed.

  I walked over to Harper’s and took a seat on their wraparound patio, surrounded by grad students, alums, and parents in for the weekend, many already wearing their kelly green and white, or scarlet and gray. Life was good.

  It was a perfect fall Friday in the Big Ten. Football weather.

  • • •

  I was soon joined by Nick—yes, the U-M alum and MSU law student who hopped on the Magic Bus to South Bend. After finishing our pints of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale—a Michigan thing—we headed off to a famed burger joint with the decidedly noncorporate name of Crunchy’s, which is just about the last thing you want your burger to be. But according to Complex.com’s City Guide, it’s th
e sixth-best college bar in the country—and, worth noting, one of six Big Ten bars in the top thirteen. This is what we do.

  Just to get in the place on a home football weekend you have to wait in a narrow alley with a single overhead light—and people do it, happily. When someone comes out, people waiting cheer and clap, because one of them gets to go in.

  Inside, the darkness does not suggest a nightclub but a cozy cabin “Up North,” with a fire going. The booth benches are surrounded by photos of famous sports scenes: Michigan State point guard Mateen Cleaves cutting down the nets after the 2000 NCAA basketball title game, and Steve Yzerman hoisting the Stanley Cup. Above the door to the kitchen, they’ve posted signs that say WE SERVE WOLVERINES—WELL DONE! and DIRECTIONS TO ANN ARBOR: SOUTH UNTIL YOU SMELL IT. EAST UNTIL YOU STEP IN IT. The dark-stained pine tables and walls have been carved and drawn on so many times, the layers look like Jackson Pollock artworks from his little-known “Wood Period.”

  We happened to run into an old high school friend of Nick’s, Chris Pozza, who invited us to join his gang of grad students—a lucky break. In a packed house, we got to sit at the end of the long picnic bench in the middle, leading right up to the ten-foot stage at the front window. Beer arrived in two-and-a-half-gallon mop buckets. We scooped the beer out with pitchers, then passed them around while they dripped over everybody.

  Crunchy’s is the kind of classic campus joint that would never make it past a focus group—or its first year, if they opened it today. But it works because it’s been working for so long. Generations of students, locals, and alums have come to love it and pass on its traditions. It feels good to know you’re doing the same things thousands before you have done.

  Only in a college burger joint do local customs like two-and-a-half-gallon mop buckets full of beer, pictures of Bubba Smith and Magic Johnson, and discussions of how a Michigan State professor invented hybrid corn to feed the world come together at the same table, and it all makes sense. I didn’t even blink when they started with the karaoke, which was less American Idol than campfire sing-along, a sort of Cornfield Kabuki Theater: everyone knew who would get up, sing what and when, and we all joined in.

  “Michigan State is so unpretentious,” Nick said. “I love this place!”

  “You don’t find anything like this anywhere near Ann Arbor,” Pozza added.

  The real differences between the schools, their students, and their fans might be minuscule, but in their minds, they are many, and major. Both sides cling to that belief because their identities depend on it. They all might cheer for the Detroit Lions—and given their usual failure, let’s underscore might—but even when it’s in their rational self-interest for their in-state rival to beat someone else, they just can’t cheer for the Other Guys to win.

  This is not a small point. The entire multibillion-dollar industry of college athletics is built on the assumption that these identities are so powerful that those who embrace them will spend irrationally on everything from licensed jerseys to seat licenses to toilet seats claiming that they, in fact, are “Number One!” These two schools offer the state’s residents traditions that cannot be manufactured, but the people making the most money from them aren’t the ones who built them.

  Whether the marketers understand this or not, the future of college football depends partly on how well those traditions are protected by the businesspeople who have bought them.

  • • •

  Saturday morning, walking across the beautiful school grounds, you see something else that makes the Spartans’ tailgate experience unique: it is the only school I’ve visited where the fans tailgate on the main campus itself, in the shadows of the classroom buildings students filled the day before.

  Granted, some schools make it easier than others. At Oxford University in England, wrought-iron gates keep visitors out of its quads. You are not welcome. At Michigan, they recently put a half-million-dollar fence with turnstile revolving doors around Elbel Field, which used to be open to everyone, earning it the nickname “the Practice Beach.” But most of the campus—outside of athletics, notably—is still open to all, and that’s the rule in the Big Ten, and the nation: almost all American universities encourage visitors to wander about their campus and imagine—or remember—what it’s like to be a student there.

  This casual fun, I believe, has been one of the secrets of the tremendous growth of the greatest public universities the world has ever seen, and for a simple reason: people rarely support institutions they haven’t seen. They are far more likely to support what they know. Picnicking on the grounds makes kids more likely to go to the university, and it makes their parents more willing to pay for it.

  But no one does it better than Michigan State.

  As I approached the Red Cedar River, which the TV networks have used for years for their cutaway shot, I came across the John A. Hannah Administration Building, and in front, a bronze statue of the man, his coat over his arm, forever walking across the campus. While I scribbled down the quotes inscribed on Hannah’s statue, a small group of fans walked by.

  “Who’s that guy?” one of them asked.

  “I think he used to be the president,” another said.

  Well, yeah—but that’s like saying Albert Einstein used to be a college professor. It doesn’t quite do the man justice.

  Every school has its giants, of course, but those schools born around the Civil War needed bigger men than most to carve these campuses out of forests, then build them to rival the world’s greatest institutions—and do it all in mere decades.

  The list of icons includes the University of Chicago’s President William Rainey Harper and Amos Alonzo Stagg, who put their new school on the map; Michigan’s James B. Angell and Fielding Yost, who made Michigan what it is today; Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne, who made Notre Dame famous, and Father Ted Hesburgh, who made it great.

  At Michigan State, that man is John A. Hannah.

  Born in Grand Rapids in 1902, he was a proud graduate of Michigan Agricultural College in 1923, earning a degree in poultry science. He rose to become the school’s vice president, whose job description included serving as the state’s secretary of agriculture. He married the president’s daughter, then succeeded him as president in 1941.

  Hannah’s timing was unusually good, with the G.I. Bill opening the doors for 2.2 million returning veterans nationwide, and the state’s auto industry entering its golden era, generating unprecedented wealth for the state’s citizens, who dreamed bigger dreams for their children. Seemingly unrelatedly, the University of Chicago’s football team dropped out of the Big Ten in 1939.

  Hannah cleverly exploited all three opportunities. Back when state schools were funded by the state, Hannah knew he needed more help from Lansing, which had long favored the flagship university in Ann Arbor. So, while U-M’s President Harlan Hatcher rolled up to the capital in a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car, the unassuming Hannah hopped in his pickup truck for the trip up Michigan Avenue to the statehouse—and got more money each time from his old friends in the legislature.

  When Hannah gathered enough funds for a new dorm, he built a beautiful brick building with green trim, filled it with former GIs, then took their tuition and built the next dorm—and kept doing it, for decades. At the same time, he lobbied hard to take Chicago’s place in the Big Ten, over the strenuous objections of Michigan’s coach and athletic director Fritz Crisler, a proud Chicago alumnus who had played for Stagg.

  In 1947, President Hannah fought back by hiring Clarence “Biggie” Munn, who had been Crisler’s former captain at Minnesota, and his former assistant at Michigan. To gain stature, the next year Michigan State started an annual rivalry with Notre Dame, which was only too happy to help the upstart Spartans stick it to their mutual enemy.

  When the Spartans finished both 1951 and 1952 as undefeated national champions, even the powerful Crisler could no longer justify keeping them out of the Big Ten. The Spartans enjoyed their greatest success during Hannah’s last t
wo decades, claiming four more national titles and a 14-4-2 record against the “Arrogant Asses” in Ann Arbor.

  Hannah attended every Spartan football game, home and away, for “a ridiculous number of years,” his daughter told me. Ripley’s Believe It or Not even published a piece on his streak. He recognized the central role the Spartans’ success played in raising the profile of the former cow college, which in turn helped attract more state funding, more skilled students, and more first-rate professors to East Lansing—following a familiar formula.

  Hannah’s strategy transformed the humble Michigan Agricultural College of just six thousand students into the forty-thousand-student Michigan State University, a major research center good enough to be admitted to the prestigious Association of American Universities—and he did it all in about two decades, arguably the fastest growth in the history of higher education.

  Perhaps most impressive, what President Hannah built has endured, surviving Michigan’s turbulent economy, the Big Three’s troubles, and the Spartans’ sporadic performance. In the forty-two years since Hannah retired, they have won only four Big Ten titles and no national crowns.

  One side of the statue’s base quotes President Hannah’s speech to the National Conference on General Education, on November 3, 1961: “If educators are agreed on anything, it’s that the fundamental purpose of education is to prepare young people to be good citizens.”

  The other side takes a line from his penultimate State of the University address, on February 12, 1968: “The university is an integral part of a social system that has given more opportunity, more freedom and more hope to more people than any other system.”

  President Hannah greatly increased all three through improved state funding, the G.I. Bill—and football.

  Michigan State University would not be half of what it is without him.

  • • •