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

by Bacon, John U.

  “You’ve got to be careful that you don’t price your fans out of the experience,” Martin told me. “Don’t put your fans in the position where they think, ‘Why go to the games? What else can I do with my time and my money?’

  “You need to make certain a thirty-five-year-old guy with a couple little kids can afford to come to your event.”

  That brought Martin to a larger point. “My thesis about sports in America,” he said, raising an index finger. “We’ve reached the saturation point. You see this in the NFL, and the NBA. The quality of TV has improved so much, you can stay home, see a great game, and not shell out twenty bucks for parking, ten for a beer, five for a bottle of water, and sit in your Barcalounger and scream your head off and know no one’s going to get mad at you.”

  Even the ones who can afford to keep their tickets are increasingly discontent with what they find at Crisler Center, for which Bill Martin raised funds and developed plans to renovate with an attached basketball practice facility, new weight rooms and offices, new lower-bowl seating, and a gorgeous concourse, to which Brandon added a fancy waterfall near the front. Everybody loves the renovations, but it’s the “wow” factor that Brandon persistently promotes that has left some of them, well, less than wowed.

  “He talks about the ‘wow factor,’ ” Duderstadt told me, “which I saw up close at the Michigan State and Indiana basketball games. The ‘wow factor’ was a lot of loud, piped-in music, flashing scoreboards, and endless ads.”

  After Martin took years to remove all the advertising from Crisler, Brandon has brought the advertising back with a vengeance. If you complain about the noise to the people at Guest Services, one fan told me, they will give you earplugs. Granted, the students are surely more amenable to the piped-in music than the older patrons, and the coaches and players like the energy it provides, but everyone agrees the atmosphere is becoming less like the collegiate kookiness of Duke’s Cameron Crazies and more like the smooth, shiny productions of the Detroit Pistons.

  “The fact that they put the Michigan pep band so far away,” Duderstadt said, “I mean, way, way up there, while they’re blasting rap music—it just doesn’t seem like college sports to me.

  “I’ll be generous and say, I don’t think Dave Brandon ‘gets it’—but he’s not stopping to ask me or anyone else. I’m not sure where he gets his feedback, or if he gets any at all. It’s full speed ahead.”

  Searching for the silver lining, Duderstadt added, “The one good thing they have is a bigger student section, where they’re right down there, all together. But very few university people are in that crowd anymore.” (And, in fact, the new student section was created under Martin.)

  As one friend of mine—a U-M graduate and employee—told me after he took his sons to Crisler for a game, “Michigan athletics used to feel like something we shared. Now it’s something they hoard. Anything of value they put a price tag on. Anything that appeals to anyone is kept locked away—literally in some cases—and only brought out if you pay for it. And what’s been permanently banished is any sense of generosity.”

  The suits will find your fun, buy it up, and charge you for it.

  • • •

  Back in his barbershop, Red Stolberg had his own theory.

  “Ten or fifteen years ago,” he recalled, waving his razor in the air, “they had six or seven thousand folks on the wait list for football season tickets. The last five years, you want a ticket, you got it. I don’t know what the actual numbers are—or if they’d tell ya!—but the demand is a lot softer than it used to be, I can tell ya that.”

  Since his cousin up the street, fellow barber Jerry Erickson, taped tickets for sale in his big picture window, Stolberg had a decent sense of the shifting market.

  Here’s the bigger point. College football fandom depends on the same force that buoys our nation’s currency: faith. Since the United States left the gold standard, the US dollar has value only because billions of people around the world think it does. When a critical mass of people stop thinking that, our dollars will be worth no more than Confederate scrip—without the eBay memorabilia value.

  College football isn’t nearly as important, of course, nor as serious. But the ecosystem works the same way. Going to a football game at Michigan, Ohio State, or Penn State is great largely because over one hundred thousand people at each stadium think it is. If the sellouts stop and the empty seats increase, the fans start questioning why they’re paying such incredible fees for a “wow experience” that cannot attract a sellout.

  Former Michigan athletic director Don Canham once explained to me his simple strategy: everyone wants to eat at the restaurant with the line out the door. His first goal was to create the illusion of a sellout with Band Day, when thousands of high school musicians filled the seats for the weaker games; Scout Day (ditto); and $2 student tickets for all the games. Soon, the illusion became real, the place sold out, the wait list grew, and the price went up. But even he never thought anyone would pay more than twenty bucks—twenty bucks!—for a football ticket. And he was telling me that the year he passed away, in 2005.

  But few predicted the creation and incredible growth of the Big Ten Network, which inspired other conferences to follow suit and dramatically increased revenue for college sports across the board.

  At no time is this more obvious than during March Madness, which generated a record $1 billion—with a b—dollars in ad revenue in 2013, including an increase in Internet revenue from $32 million to $60 million in a single year, a trend that will surely continue.

  But all this was occurring against the backdrop of something new and surprising: “swaths of empty seats” at the arenas hosting the NCAA tournament games, “and declining TV ratings,” according to PennLive.com. “This is how the NCAA has decided to run its single most lucrative event. Given the return the NCAA and networks have seen on the digital platforms, it’s not going away.”

  In other words, if you like off-track betting parlors and the empty stands they create, you’re going to love the future of big-time college sports.

  • • •

  Saturday, November 10, 2012: Instead of thinking about the business of football or basketball, or handicapping the final quarter of the race for the Big Ten title, after I woke up on a cold, rainy Saturday morning, I headed across the Diag and up South University to walk back in time toward something called the Mudbowl.

  In 1933, Alabama won the Southeastern Conference’s first title, Columbia University won the Rose Bowl, and Michigan once again took home the Knute Rockne Memorial Trophy as the national champion, with a man named Jerry Ford playing both center and defensive line. That’s the year the Mudbowl was born.

  For seventy-nine years, every fall the Michigan SAE fraternity—whose house looks like a medieval castle, complete with a turret overlooking the grounds—has made its pledges dig up their front yard, flood it with water, and voilà! Their lawn becomes a mud bowl, ready for the annual football game.

  Nineteen thirty-three was a different world. Seventy-nine years ago, the leap from the Mudbowl to the Rose Bowl—played that year in a “small lake,” making it almost as muddy as the SAE’s front yard—was a lot smaller than it is today. Oh, and a new venture called the National Football League was little over a decade old, but few cared very much, and even fewer still in State College, Columbus, Ann Arbor, or Evanston.

  Fast-forward eight decades, and college football is a lot closer to the NFL than it is to the Mudbowl—which still doesn’t charge its hearty spectators a dime to watch.

  By 10:00 a.m., a full crowd estimated at a couple thousand (they don’t have turnstiles or seat licenses at the Mudbowl) had already lined the bowl-shaped outer rim of SAE’s front lawn, which runs from the South University sidewalk down to the patch of watery mud.

  The “field,” which doesn’t have a blade of grass on it by game day, is not quite twenty-five yards by fifty yards. But that’s okay, because it’s not quite rectangular, either, or even flat. It
runs uphill from west to east about four feet. The SAEs naturally gave the deeper end to their opponents, the Fijis, who’d won a playoff for this honor.

  The play wasn’t pretty, but it was fierce, with almost every down resulting in at least one player getting jammed face-first into the swamp, followed by a five-man shoving match, which usually ended with at least one more player eating mud. If you could claim anything was “beautiful” about a game that was literally the ugliest ever played, it’s that they were playing this hard for nothing more than bragging rights. No money, no fame, just pride—which might explain why neither side backed down an inch.

  On one play, the Fijis had the SAE quarterback on the run. He escaped his attackers, only to tackle himself by tripping in the mud and wiping out. Although he was clearly down—his mud-covered T-shirt told you that—a Fiji slogging by still felt the need to dunk the quarterback’s face into the mud, which started yet another fight.

  That’s when it hit me: All of us watching this primal contest had gone further back in time than just seventy-nine years. We’d flown all the way back to November 6, 1869, and we were watching the first American football game between Rutgers and Princeton. It was glorified rugby—an excellent outlet for excess testosterone, and an effective catalyst for school spirit.

  The forward passes the SAEs and Fijis threw were new, but everything else had been done before, countless times—and these players were showing all of us why football had caught on in the first place. It was cold, it was chaotic, it was crazy, but the pure energy pulled the crowd in, just as it surely did four years after the Civil War. The banks were packed with people the entire game, and I didn’t see a single soul leave. (Of course, not having any TV time-outs helped.)

  Every Michigan football player I’ve ever talked to about the Mud-bowl was dying to play in it. I know of at least a few who—at the risk of Schembechler killing them with his bare hands—snuck out of the Campus Inn hotel early on Saturday morning to see the spectacle for themselves, before dashing back to catch the team buses to the Big House. It’s not hard to understand why, given the forty-hour-plus workweeks they go through just to play big-time college football, they might envy the Mud-bowlers, and their primal fun.

  If you added it all up, the frat brothers might have had the better deal. After SAE dispensed with the Fijis 30–21, they naturally celebrated by diving into the mud—all the brothers, not just the players.

  • • •

  Satisfied, I walked down South U, past the Diag and the President’s House on the right, the first in town to have indoor plumbing, and the picturesque law quad on the left, toward the Student Union, where John F. Kennedy introduced the idea of the Peace Corps from the front steps during his presidential campaign.

  As I turned left down State Street, the crowd grew thicker with each block, while the lines separating homes and tailgate parties got blurrier. With each step, I was walking away from college football’s distant past and toward its present. But the people I was looking for might, I hoped, give me a glimpse into the game’s future.

  They were not football legends, just a couple twenty-three-year-olds. I was in search of Michigan family—literally. And the history I was after wasn’t that old—just a few weeks, when Adam Offerman proposed to Ally Stencel in the first half of the Air Force game.

  I tracked them down outside a students’ house right across Division Street from Elbel Field, and right across Hoover from Revelli Hall—ground zero for tailgaters.

  Offerman had paid for a scoreboard announcement between the first and second quarter of the first home game that fall, then started scheming with Ally’s parents and her best friend to pull it off.

  “I had no idea,” Ally said. “It was just a typical tailgate. My dad kept saying, ‘Beautiful day for a tailgate!’ About ten times!”

  “That man can not keep a secret!” said her mom, Linda.

  As the first quarter came to an end, “my mom makes me start reading the scoreboard, every announcement. Someone put up MOM, HAPPY FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY! And she asks, ‘Why didn’t you do that for me?’ Then they showed the band on the screen. ‘Look at that! How cool is the drum line?’

  “ ‘I’ve seen it! Yes, it’s cool! What is it with you people?!’ But it worked. The next one, I was actually looking. I saw it: ALLY STENCEL, WILL YOU MARRY ME? And I froze!” A couple months later, recounting the story, she got a bit glassy-eyed all over again. “I was shaking!”

  Shaking, yes—but not answering. So Offerman had to ask, “Is that a yes?”

  “Yes!” she said. “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  “Our whole section stood up and cheered,” Ally recalled. “It was a very quiet event—shared with 112,000 of my closest friends.”

  You can pop the question anywhere in the world, so why do it at the Big House, in the middle of a game? Offerman picked this place and that time because Michigan football is how they met, and he knew how important it was to his girlfriend.

  “We’ve been sitting in the same section for ten years,” Ally’s mom, Linda, said. “It’s all walks of life, but after a while you know everyone, and your section feels like family.” Many of those 112,000 people really were among their closest friends.

  This happy little scene could not have happened, at least not in the same way, at a Michigan basketball game. Here was a glimpse into one possible future: if Michigan applies its basketball-ticket policies to football and starts selling Section 38’s seats to the highest bidders, how many fans will want to get engaged surrounded by high rollers they’ve never seen before?

  Decades from now, will the Offermans’ kids be so attached to Michigan football that they’ll want to copy their parents?

  • • •

  By noon, the gray skies had still refused to give way, dumping a cold drizzle on the ticketholders waiting for kickoff.

  Northwestern’s players didn’t care. They couldn’t have been more excited to be there. Thanks to the expanded Big Ten, the Wildcats hadn’t played in the Big House since 2008, when no one on the current roster had made the trip.

  “You hear about it, and you see it on TV,” Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter told me. “When you drive up to it, you think you’re going to see this huge thing—but it’s not that big on the outside. But the one thing I’ll always remember [was] the first time I was jogging into the stadium: it goes down, and it’s huge. During warm-ups, I was just trying to get a feel for how big the stadium is.

  “It’s definitely one of my favorite stadiums to play in. It was awesome. People are so passionate about Michigan football. It really gets my juices going.”

  If Northwestern’s blood brothers are scattered across the country—Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, and Stanford—Michigan might serve as its closest cousin in the Big Ten. The two universities usually sit atop the league in academic standing and have developed a decent football rivalry, to boot. In ways neither party could have imagined twenty years ago, this game mattered greatly to both sides.

  “I have such respect for the people at Michigan,” Northwestern president Morton Schapiro told me, “and how they have achieved so much. I’ve given some lectures up there and know that it is a first-rate school. I’ve always been a Michigan fan—and I love Denard Robinson! I like to see him going to the basketball games, and how he always has a smile. I root for him—when he’s not playing us!”

  • • •

  The crowd got an answer to one pressing question when Michigan’s offense took the field: Devin Gardner was starting at quarterback. Then they got another: Northwestern no longer feared the winged helmets, the Big House, or the Wolverines’ forty-two Big Ten titles, either.

  The Wildcats sent Michigan’s offense to the bench after three downs, then mounted an 80-yard drive, led by the elusive Colter, who mixed up his passes and runs all the way to Michigan’s end zone for a 7–0 lead.

  Amazingly, that marked the first touchdown Michigan’s defense had given up in the first quarter of any game since the opener against Ala
bama, and the first points of any kind since Michigan’s second game, against Air Force. When the man with the red gloves allowed play to resume, the Wolverines responded with a 10-play, 78-yard drive to tie the score 7–7, then converted a Colter fumble into another touchdown for a 14–7 lead.

  After Northwestern tied the game at 14–14 before the half, the Wildcats had made one thing clear: they were done playing Michigan’s patsy.

  In the second half, the Wildcats converted a couple third downs to go ahead, 21–14, then tacked on a field goal for a 24–14 lead.

  “Michigan wasn’t as loud as I thought it was going to be,” senior Northwestern defensive lineman Quentin Williams told me. “It was nice to hear so many fans quiet like that for three and a half quarters. We were on top of the world for a little while.”

  Michigan could have collapsed and conceded the better bowl game and the shot at the Big Ten title to the upstart ’Cats, but Gardner proved just as tough as his mentor, Denard Robinson. On third and 17, deep in Michigan territory, Gardner sent a bomb to tiny Jeremy Gallon, who beat double coverage to get down to Northwestern’s 28. Gardner followed with an easy pass to the equally small and speedy Fitzgerald Toussaint, who ran it into the end zone to close the gap to 24–21, before the third quarter ended.

  With ten minutes left, and tension rising in this do-or-die game for both teams, the stubborn sun finally pushed away the gray to give the fans a great show on a great day. No one would be asking for a refund after this game.

  Gardner gave the fans what they wanted with an impressive 91-yard touchdown drive to go ahead, 28–24, only to see the ’Cats fight back with a touchdown of their own to retake the lead, 31–28.

  With 4:46 left, the Wolverines’ hopes seemed to fly out the window when Gardner’s pass was intercepted and returned to the 50. When Pat Fitzgerald showed some guts by going for it on fourth and one at Michigan’s 41, with Colter barely getting the first down, it looked as if Northwestern might have just sealed the deal. But the ’Cats couldn’t get another first down, which “would have won the game right there,” Fitzgerald said.