But at the end of Rodriguez’s third season, a 7-6 campaign capped by losses to Wisconsin, Ohio State, and Mississippi State in the Gator Bowl by a combined score of 137–49, Dave Brandon let Rodriguez go. The renaissance never materialized. As Rodriguez himself said to his staff, minutes after being fired, “It was a bad fit from the start.”
A week later, Brandon hired Brady Hoke, who was less celebrated but more familiar. He led Michigan to an 11-2 record his first year out, including a long-awaited win over Ohio State, and a BCS bowl victory.
But 2012 had not been as kind, with the Wolverines getting gutted by Alabama, falling over themselves against Notre Dame, and worse, losing a laugher to Nebraska the previous week after Robinson went down with an injured elbow. The coaches seemed utterly unprepared for this emergency. Instead of giving the ball to heir apparent Devin Gardner, whom Rivals had ranked the nation’s top high school quarterback in 2009, the coaches kept him at receiver to shore up the weakened ranks there and put redshirt freshman Russell Bellomy under center. He promptly went 3 for 16, with 3 interceptions. Nebraska caught as many of his passes as his own receivers did.
This resulted in a 23–9 embarrassment—with the Big Ten title on the line, no less—which marked Michigan’s third game without a touchdown, along with the Notre Dame and Michigan State contests. It also ignited a predictable flame out on the blogs, with fans wondering why Michigan’s coaches didn’t have a Denard Emergency Plan in place, why Devin Gardner hadn’t been put into duty, if Robinson would return that weekend against Minnesota, and if he couldn’t, would the coaches put Gardner in or Bellomy?
Under that was a bigger question: Was Michigan moving forward, or backward? And what did it all mean for the “Michigan brand”—which is what Brandon was selling?
“Greetings,” former Harbaugh tailback Brian Weisman wrote to the gang, to set up our little party. “I question the quality of the game we intend to watch, but not the idea itself. I can make at least half the game, which is probably more than how long the game will be in doubt (in favor of U-M if Denard plays, in favor of the Golden Gophers if Bellomy plays). I have to give a shout-out to Michigan’s offensive coordinator for having no ‘plan B’ for Denard getting hurt.
“So, our special teams are actually quite good this year for the first time in a long while, our D is getting stronger and stronger, yet our offense is very spotty, and just a big hole when Denard is on the sidelines.
“The Big 10 blows—and RichRod [now at Arizona] beat USC in his first try. It’s all a jumble!!”
And that’s why we watch.
• • •
Throughout the long NFL season—with four exhibition games, sixteen regular-season contests, and up to four playoff games—thirty-two teams compete for just one trophy, the Vince Lombardi Trophy. Never mind that Lombardi himself hated the Super Bowl, resented having to play in it, and wasn’t that fond of the eponymous trophy, either.
But in college football, 124 teams will play not one exhibition game—it is the only sport without them—jumping right into a twelve-game season. A few will play a single conference title game, and half of them will finish with a bowl game. Fourteen games, max. Still too many, in my opinion, but a far cry from the NFL’s maximum of 24.
Those college teams will compete not merely for one trophy, but 102 trophies—not even counting the manufactured trophies the conferences, bowls, and the BCS now pile on. The best college trophies don’t go to league or national champions, but to the winners of rivalry games, games that stir deeper passions than the Super Bowl ever will. Honestly, do the Baltimore Ravens even hate the San Francisco 49ers? Hardly. They don’t even know them—and some of them could be playing for the other team next year. You can’t say that about the annual game between Georgia and Georgia Tech, officially titled Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate.
Those 102 rivalry trophies are the result of organic tradition, not corporate marketing. College rivals have played for seven bells, four buckets, and two spittoons, not to mention beer barrels, bourbon buckets, peace pipes, and even a shot glass—which leaves little room for the winner to engrave its name.
The game between Montana and Montana State is officially titled the Brawl of the Wild—surely one of the most testosteroni contests around—with the winner getting . . . a painting. That’s right, a painting. Okay, it’s a painting of their two mascots, a bobcat and a grizzly—but still.
The victor of the epic clash between LSU and Tulane gets—yes—a rag.
But the best of the batch—considered the oldest in all of football—is the Little Brown Jug, which has been awarded to the winner of the Michigan–Minnesota game since 1909.
The story goes like this:
In 1903 the Michigan football team was riding a 28-game winning streak. Coach Fielding Yost so distrusted Minnesota he directed the team manager to buy a container to store their own water during the game. Thomas B. Roberts walked into a dry-goods store and bought a putty-colored jug for thirty cents.
It didn’t seem to help much. In the waning minutes of the game, Minnesota tied Michigan, 6–6, setting off a near riot when Gopher fans charged the field before the final gun, forcing the refs to call the game a tie. The Wolverines scrambled off the field to avoid the mob, leaving their clay water jug behind. Back in Ann Arbor, the penurious Yost decided he wanted the thirty-cent jug back. Minnesota athletic director L. J. Cooke replied, “We have your little brown jug; if you want it, you’ll have to win it.”
Historian Greg Dooley has learned that story has been beefed up over the years—but that’s part of a real rivalry, too.
The Wolverines returned to Minneapolis in 1909 and beat the Gophers 15–6. They walked across the field and reclaimed their water jug, initiating a ritual generations of players have repeated for over a century.
A rivalry was born—all centered around a thirty-cent water vessel.
Thanks to that jug, Minnesota and Michigan played every fall from 1919 through 1998—eighty seasons in a row, making Minnesota Michigan’s longest unbroken rivalry. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Patrick Reusse, “For the first fifty of those seasons, Michigan was the number one rival on Minnesota’s schedule. Not Iowa, not Wisconsin, but Michigan.”
When the Big Ten added Penn State, the league teams naturally could not play each other quite as often, which included interrupting the Michigan-Minnesota series in 1999 and 2000, and again in 2009 and 2010. But when the addition of Nebraska forced the league to create two divisions, they wisely put Michigan and Minnesota in the same division, securing the annual ritual for the foreseeable future.
Or so we thought.
• • •
Soon after the usual suspects arrived at my place to watch the game, they were disappointed to see Denard Robinson still on the sideline.
But the gang was excited and relieved to see Devin Gardner in at quarterback, instead of Bellomy. The Wolverines had a chance. On Michigan’s first possession, however, Gardner got sacked on third and 2, and on the second, he threw an interception. Maybe he wasn’t quite ready for prime time, after all.
The Gophers, who entered the game with the same 5-3 record Michigan had, weren’t doing much either, until the second quarter, when they went ahead, 7–0.
“Here we go.”
“This sucks.”
“I can’t believe we’re going to see another season go down the drain.”
The Wolverines were in danger of getting buried early. Even when Denard was healthy, their offense had shown little stomach for comebacks. In the four games they had trailed, they had only come back against Michigan State—with four field goals.
Things looked even bleaker on third and 17 from Minnesota’s 45-yard line, when Gardner appeared to be caught deep in the backfield for yet another sack. Instead of throwing the ball away, however, Gardner trusted his instincts, cut a deep loop back to his left, 15 yards behind the line of scrimmage, then found Drew Dileo camped out by himself in the end zone and launched the ball acros
s his body. It had just enough juice to get to Dileo before the defenders caught up. Touchdown.
The play capped a 91-yard drive, and seemed to mark a change in Michigan’s fortunes. The Wolverines followed it up with a 90-yard drive to take a 14–7 lead into halftime.
• • •
It was time to move the chips and salsa aside to make room for the Hawaiian Heartstoppers, two large ham, bacon, and pineapple pizzas, and pick up our complaining where we’d left off.
“Hell, we spend most of our time bitching,” Paul “Barney” Barnett said. “We even had the nerve to bitch during the Tom Brady era.”
Undaunted, we started bitching anew, this time about the wild uniforms that Notre Dame had worn for certain games, which added a blue stripe down their trademark gold pants, with a leprechaun logo on the side. They even messed with the very helmets NBC featured in a special segment seemingly every week—always mentioning that the equipment managers repainted them before every game, with real gold—replacing them with a bizarre gold-and-navy-blue version, again with the leprechaun on one side. Bleacherreport.com gave them an F—which sounded to us like grade inflation.
“If I was a Notre Dame fan,” Barney offered, “I wouldn’t be one anymore.”
“My God, are those ugly,” Weisman added. “Why do they need to change their uniforms? They’re Notre Dame, fer crissakes!”
“Why do we?” Barney said, referring to the five different uniforms Michigan had already donned during the Brandon era, midway through its third season. These included “throwback” jerseys for the September 10, 2011, night game against Notre Dame, with a series of blue and yellow stripes on the shoulders suggesting bumblebees, whose design went all the way back to September 10, 2011. Michigan’s jerseys have never had stripes—and when you saw what they looked like, you gained a new appreciation for just how wise Michigan football’s founders had been.
We didn’t have to ask why. The answer was easy: the $79.99 price tag on the Michigan Adidas “Throwback Premier Jersey.”
When fans complained about the “special” uniforms, Brandon often replied by saying how much the players like them. But no player in his right mind would ever speak out against the athletic director’s pet project.
Until they graduate, that is, and even then, cautiously. When I raised the matter with David Molk, the nation’s best center in 2011, he said, “I remember when the players were the main attraction.” I quoted Molk back to the crew, who pointed out that Michigan football had attracted crowds of one hundred thousand or more for thirty-five consecutive years—a total of 242 straight games, to that point—before Brandon introduced the “wow experience.”
But our far-bigger complaint was the soaring price of actually going to the games, which had become prohibitive for young families, like the ones in my living room.
“How can they claim to have a waiting list for season tickets when they try to sell you ‘ticket packages’ for one Big Ten game and two losers?” Barney asked. “And even for those, they’re asking you to pay for a ‘Personal Seat Donation.’ ”
My friends have discovered that paying the premium, however steep, is not nearly enough to satiate the beast. After you get to the game, the marketing begins anew. Because every game is televised, fans have come to expect about twenty commercial breaks per game, most lasting one to two minutes. To loyal fans, who sit in a stadium that is too hot in September and too cold in November—and often too rainy in October—this feels as galling as taking the time, money, and effort to drive downtown to a local store, only to have to wait there while the clerk talks on the phone with someone who didn’t bother to do any of those things. The most important man in the stadium is not the quarterback or the coach or even the athletic director, but the anonymous person on the sideline wearing the red gloves. He signals the refs when to stop the game for TV ads, and when they can start the game back up.
Michigan and Notre Dame have long been the only two stadiums to forbid advertising in their buildings—a point of pride for both fan bases—but at U-M, it’s creeping in on the concourse pillars, which feature ads for two banks, an oil company, a car company, and StubHub; and on the big screens, where endless promotions try to get you to buy tickets to other sporting events, or to host your corporate event or wedding in the stadium, all while those season-ticket holders wait for the man with the red gloves to restart the game.
If fans want to escape the rock music—in lieu of the marching band—or loud solicitations for soccer tickets, they can go to the concession stand, where a bottle of water costs four bucks, a container of popcorn five, and a hot dog six. One friend calculated that taking her husband and two kids to the games—without dinners or hotel rooms—costs about $500 per Saturday, more than a day at Disney World. And Mickey never loses or snows on you.
For all these reasons, my friends—who developed what they thought were lifelong habits of attendance as kids—have found themselves in the last few years rarely going to the stadium anymore.
The straw man of the hour was Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon. Brandon talks a lot about “brand loyalty,” but that combines two words that, to a college football fan, aren’t related. College football fans are fiercely loyal, but their loyalty is to something they most definitely do not see as a brand, rather something much deeper. If Michigan football ever lost loyal fans like my friends in the living room, who were raised on Michigan football, could it win them back?
Clearly, Brandon was betting that the endless branding would keep them in the fold. And perhaps if not, other fans could replace them.
But Jim Duderstadt was not so sure—and he’s given this more thought than most. Michigan’s former nuclear engineering professor, dean, and president, who authored the book Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective in 2003, had worked at the forefront for reform in the 1990s, and still weighs in on the subject in national publications.
“A lot of schools and colleges are hiring a lot of staff in the branding area,” he told me, “which I think is both expensive and dangerous. They’re building their marketing departments, their Internet presence, and hiring outside marketing companies for their bicentennials. When you do that, who owns your history? Who tells it?
“You’ll see that the budget for the athletic department has skyrocketed in the four years Dave Brandon has been here.”
And, in fact, from the $100 million budget Brandon started with in the 2010–11 fiscal year, it has quickly expanded to $137.5 million for 2013–14. (This does not include the estimated $340 million in capital expenses for the athletic campus’s new master plan).
In June 2013, Brandon presented his budget to the Regents, adding, “I tell our coaches we have an unlimited budget for achieving championships and receiving incentive-based pay.”
Brandon will more than cover the $37.5 million increase in operating expenses with a projected $146.4 million in revenues, for an $8.9 million surplus. Three million of that will come from the one-time NHL “Winter Classic” to be played at the Big House on January 1, 2014.
But far more will come through a 30 percent increase in football season ticket prices, from $50 per game for the 2009 season, before he took office, to $65 per game for the 2012 season. While ticket prices remained stable in 2013, seat license fees jumped that year from 20 percent for the best seats—from $500 to $600—to 60 percent near the corners, an increase from $125 to $200.
When you include both the ticket prices and the seat license fees, season ticket holders saw a per-game price increase anywhere from 34 percent (to $150 per seat per game on the 50-yard line) to 51 percent (to $75 per seat per game in the end zone).
The few analysts I’ve talked with who’ve compared the numbers have been alarmed by the increases, but Duderstadt is more concerned about “how little of these revenues are actually spent on student-athletes—for financial aid, academic support, and health care—and instead are spent on the expansion of facilities and the staff
, in areas such as marketing, fund-raising, communications, other auxiliary activities, and coaching salaries. In the revenue sports, these are approaching levels that are truly extreme and quite unwarranted when compared with other university activities.”
Once again, the budget numbers back up Duderstadt’s concerns.
The budget spent on scholarships, for example, over which the athletic department exercises little control, grew steadily by about 5 or 6 percent a year, from $16.2 million in 2010–11 to $19.7 million in the 2013–14 budget, while staff salaries have grown from $34 million to $49 million, or about a 45 percent increase. This expansion included a 62 percent increase in administrator compensation, from $7.4 million to $11.5 million.
Although far from the department’s biggest item, “Operating and Administrative Expenses” have nearly doubled over those same four years, from $8.6 million to $16.5 million.
What does the additional $7.9 million go for? In the 2010–11 fiscal year, the department spent $473,000 on “Marketing, Promotions and Ticketing,” but in 2013–14 it will spend $1.54 million on those things, an increase of 225 percent. (This does not include the marketing personnel hired.)
During the 2010–11 fiscal year, the department spent $444,000 on “Professional Travel and Conference Dues.” In the 2013–14 budget, it tripled, to $1.324 million.
An item titled “Hosting, Food and Special Events” increased in the same four years from $436,000 to $2.6 million—an increase of almost 500 percent.
“It’s a different operation now,” Duderstadt concluded. “And most of the expenditures are not associated with what’s going on on the field, but it’s the branding business—and I think it’s a house of cards.
Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football Page 33