The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football

by Jeff Benedict

  Instead, through a friend, he gravitated toward coaching. Working with parolees and wanting to protect presidents, he discovered, wasn’t all that different from trying to help kids. Coaches at Ball State had straightened him out. He could do the same. Teaching high school athletes the importance of honoring your name, family and school.

  In 1983, when Hoke was an assistant coach at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, he and his wife, Laura, snuck into an empty Michigan Stadium. They walked out of the tunnel onto the field. This is where I want to coach, Brady told her. And so he set out to accomplish his goal, spending eight years as an assistant under Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr, before resurrecting the football programs at his alma mater and San Diego State.

  In January 2011, Michigan’s athletic director, Dave Brandon, found himself in the market for a new head football coach. The previous three seasons under Rich Rodriguez had dissolved into a frustrating snarl of missed opportunities that included an embarrassing NCAA investigation into excessive off-season workouts (later found to be minimal) and the worst defensive season in the 131-year history of the program. An athletic department known for its efficiency, stability and integrity was headed the wrong way in far too many areas. Worse, the game atmosphere had become as predictable as the fight song. The largest living alumni base in the world—at 450,000—was restless. Decades of fan loyalty had been put to the test.

  Adding to the pressure was the fact U-M was truly a Big House divided on the man to replace Rodriguez. One alumni group pressed Brandon to reach into the past and hire former Wolverines quarterback Jim Harbaugh, then the head coach at Stanford; another group pulled for LSU’s head coach, Les Miles, a former Michigan assistant. Hoke was seen as a long shot at best.

  Prior to taking the Michigan athletic director job in March 2010, Brandon had served as chairman and CEO of Domino’s Pizza for eleven years. He had been well schooled in the ingredients of marketing success, including a stint with the consumer giant Procter & Gamble. But he was a Michigan man through and through. A star at Michigan’s South Lyon High School, he’d earned a scholarship at quarterback to U-M in 1970 but ended up playing sparingly as a tight end and defensive end under legendary head coach Bo Schembechler. His reward for sticking it out: three Big Ten championship rings—of which Brandon was immensely proud—and an enduring father-son relationship with Schembechler, a towering figure in Michigan legend and lore, a coach who believed, above all, in “The Team … The Team … The Team.”

  “One of the things I was looking for [in a head coach] was, who can be the unifier?” Brandon said. “Who is going to see the program is bigger than any one person? Who can put their arms around this whole community and say, ‘Let’s win football games’?

  “So I had this form I put together. Listed the twelve things I wanted to rate each [potential head] coach on. Basic stuff. Track record in recruiting, track record in turning around a program; I was looking for someone with a passion and propensity for playing defense. Fund-raising, NCAA record, that sort of thing.”

  In Brandon’s scoring system, candidates were ranked in each category on a scale of 1 to 10. When he sat down with Hoke, the coach was hot off the rebuilding of struggling San Diego State. Still, Hoke carried an under-.500 record as a head coach.

  Brandon had never met the SDSU coach, so he allotted a couple of hours for the interview. Hoke went on about Michigan’s unique culture, its storied football tradition (the most wins in college football history), iconic winged helmet and eleven national championships. He said he wanted to build a team that honored the past—tough, hard-nosed, competitive kids who loved the school and got chills running out of the tunnel.

  By the time Hoke shook Brandon’s hand and said good-bye, five hours had passed.

  At that point Brandon pulled out his form, went to work and tallied up Hoke’s score.

  “I looked at the number, and I said, ‘This can’t be right, I added it wrong.’ So I added it again,” he said. “Then I took out a calculator and added it one more time because I thought I had miscalculated. The number was so much larger than anybody else I had met and, frankly, anyone else I thought I was going to meet. I just looked at it and said, ‘Wow.’ ”

  Still, Brandon knew he could ill afford to make a mistake. For an athletic director today there is no more important hire than that of a head football coach. Mess up and bowl and television revenue begin to dry up, donations drop, the entertainment and merchandising dollars find other outlets.

  “You’re dead,” Brandon said.

  At 9:00 a.m. on January 11, 2011, Michigan held a press conference to announce its new head football coach.

  “I must have got four hundred e-mails telling me what an idiot I was,” said Brandon.

  Then Brady Hoke, he of the teddy-bear body and gravel-dusted voice, stepped up to the microphone. He said he would have walked from San Diego to Ann Arbor for the job. He spoke of “the game” and the days until they could beat “Ohio.” Such was his distaste he couldn’t bring himself to say the word “State.” The “Go Blue!” nation could hardly believe its ears.

  Then, during the Q&A, someone asked whether Michigan was still an elite job.

  Elite?

  Hoke’s answer—as unrehearsed as it was unapologetic—was destined to earn a place in school history. In one single, unforgettable phrase, he declared how much the state, the school, the pride and the program meant to him, to anyone born to—or in love with—the maize and blue.

  “This is Michigan fergodsakes.”

  “That press conference happened,” said Brandon, “and I got four hundred e-mails from people saying, ‘Thank God. We got a Michigan guy back.’ ”

  It was going on seven o’clock inside Cowboys Stadium when the “This is Michigan fergodsakes” guy rallied his team in the middle of the field. Brandon looked on from a few feet away.

  “Nobody gives us a chance,” he said. “I’ve been watching TV all day, and nobody gives us a chance.”

  In less than twenty-four hours the steel-and-glass palace would be filled with more than ninety thousand fans, at least half decked out in maize and blue.

  “Well,” he said, “I think we do.”

  “When I came into this job, I knew how the business of athletics worked,” said Brandon, who spent eight years as a U-M regent. “What you don’t understand about the job is the intensity. One of the reasons it’s so intense is because it’s so competitive, it’s so important to me. You don’t take this job for the money. You don’t take this job because it’s easy. You take this job because you believe in the purpose of what we have to do.”

  It was Friday before the 2012 spring game, and Brandon, long and lean with close-cropped hair, looked relaxed sitting around a small circular table in his office on the second floor in Weidenbach Hall. An American flag fluttered in the breeze outside a large glass window overlooking the corner of Hoover and State. The place appeared to have been organized by a regiment of marines. Family photographs, a signed “Tribute to Bo” football and other personal mementos were neatly arranged around the room.

  At heart, Brandon was a numbers guy. At the moment, in his mind, some of his most important were 109,901, 130, 29, 880, 15, 228, 5.8 and 22. The 109,901? Stadium capacity. Brandon had the biggest stadium in the country, complete with eighty-one luxury suites and thirty-nine hundred club seats. Michigan had led the nation in attendance for thirty-four of the last thirty-five years and needed to continue to fill the Big House to stay on top.

  Why? Projected athletic department revenue was estimated to be around $130 million for the fiscal year 2012–13, second only to Texas. Given the full-throttle race his department was running, Brandon needed virtually every dollar to self-fund twenty-nine varsity sports and 880 student-athletes, including $18 million for financial aid, $44 million in department salaries and about $15 million in interest on the debt load associated with $228 million in upgrades and renovations to just the football and basketball facilities.

  What k
ept Brandon—and so many other athletic directors up at night—was the razor-thin margin for error. Michigan’s overall surplus for fiscal year 2012–13 was estimated to be just $5.8 million. The athletic department needed rivers of cash to stay out of the red. More than 70 percent of that money—or nearly $90 million—flowed from a single source.

  “Michigan athletics cannot be successful if Michigan football does not lead our success, because the revenue it creates is what we live off of,” said Brandon. “I think it was Mark Twain who said, ‘If you put all your eggs in one basket, you better watch your basket.’ That’s our basket. It can’t get sick. It can’t falter.”

  That’s where the number 22 came in. According to the latest NCAA figures, just 22 of the top 120 FBS schools had turned a profit in 2010–11. The average institutional debt of the other 100 or so schools was approaching $11 million each.

  But Brandon didn’t see it that way. He didn’t see some unhealthy arms race behind the massive facilities boom sweeping across college athletics. Instead, he saw plain old American competition, with football as the economic driver to provide the coaching, the training and the academic and counseling support every one of his student-athletes deserved.

  “I need that kid to get everything he or she deserves, just as if they’re some star running back on the football team,” he said. “Because if I’m not doing that, I’m doing a real disservice to that kid. Yeah, football is a huge driver for what we do, but we’re here for a greater purpose.”

  At Michigan there was no question as to how that purpose would be accomplished. Plain and simple, it was Building the Brand. And nobody in college sports had proved more capable, more creative and, at times, more cutthroat in doing it than Brandon.

  “Our plan is over there on the wall,” Brandon said, pointing to the right side of his desk. “It’s one sheet of paper.”

  Indeed, the Michigan Athletics Game Plan had been reduced to a single page, sectioned off into twelve distinct boxes. Running vertically, along the left side, were Long-Range Goals, Strategic Initiatives and SMAC Objectives, short for Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Compatible Objectives, a product of Brandon’s days at P&G. Across the top of the page were four headings:

  GROW IN EVERY WAY

  BUILD THE BRAND

  DRIVE CHANGE AND INNOVATE

  TALENT AND CULTURE WINS

  Listed inside the twelve boxes were forty-seven different goals and initiatives, such as “Achieve annual revenues of 160 plus million,” “Own social media,” “Encourage and reward risk-taking” and “Achieve #1 national ranking in licensing revenues and total football attendance in the same year.”

  For Brandon it all started with that block-M logo and what Michigan football meant to his alums. He was fearful of television’s impact on game-day attendance. More than anything, he wanted that “wow” experience for his fans. So he upgraded the video boards, facilities and equipment inside Michigan Stadium, Crisler Arena and Yost Field House to the tune of $18 million. Out went the traditional pregame marching band music in the Big House in favor of a joint-jumping mix of hip-hop, rap and rock, as well as video board entertainment. Suddenly game balls were dropping out of the sky, delivered by “Rocket Man”; flyovers by stealth bombers kicked off games. Boring was out. Entertainment was in.

  “We began to focus on what we call the ‘driveway to driveway’ experience,” he explained. “Everything you see, from the pregame action on the field, to halftime, to postgame, to how we usher you out to your car and get you back to your driveway, every step of it, is going to drive your thinking about how many season tickets you want to buy next year. And what you’ll pay for them. And my job is to get that ticket price as competitive as any other ticket price in the country.”

  At the spring game Brandon had barely slowed down—a nonstop sixteen-hour whirl of meet and greets, interviews and donor and sponsor work. Through it all, he moved with the natural ease and grace of an athlete. He honestly seemed to enjoy his game-day job—the endless shaking of hands, slapping of backs, chatting up alums, donors, sponsors and recruits.

  Fresh off Hoke’s spectacular first season—an 11-2 record complete with a win over Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl—about ninety former players had come back to the Big House to play in the alumni game. One of Michigan’s greatest players, Desmond Howard, didn’t suit up, but he was there, watching from the sideline, sporting dark jeans, white tennis shoes, shades and a black watch cap.

  “I heard there was a Desmond sighting!” said Brandon with a laugh, wrapping his arms around the former Heisman Trophy winner.

  “He’s a game changer, that’s what Dave Brandon is doing,” said Howard a few minutes after the athletic director had moved on to shake yet another set of hands. “He understands the business side and he understands the athletic side and he understands the marketing side. He’s a blend of all three.”

  As a self-described “left brain” guy, Brandon craved information, metrics and data. He barely slept and personally answered a couple hundred e-mails a day from friend and foe, often in exacting detail. His single-day record for meetings was seventeen, and his days often ran that long or more in hours.

  “Truly a CEO, a man for our times, and I think it’s great that someone with his acumen comes into our business,” said Ben Sutton, president of IMG College, the sports business powerhouse that represented multimedia and marketing rights for more than forty BCS schools, including Michigan. “Our Michigan business, which, quite frankly, we’ve struggled with financially as a company, is getting between incrementally and exponentially better in large part due to the things he’s done in and around the program.”

  When Brandon assumed ownership of Michigan athletics in the spring of 2010, about 275 people worked in the athletic department. Since that time about 80 had either voluntarily or not so voluntarily moved on. More than 300 people worked there now, but it was a completely different place—and pace. He lured Hunter Lochmann from his job as VP of marketing for the New York Knicks to be chief marketing officer for Michigan’s athletic department. Twenty-two months into the job, Lochmann had redefined goals and cleaned up the school’s sales, marketing, media, digital and social media platforms. Finding new ways, he said, to engage fans on Facebook and Twitter while optimizing ticket and merchandising sales on MGOBLUE.com one of the top collegiate sites in the country.

  “He just has this sixth sense,” said Lochmann of Brandon. “In every conversation, in every meeting, in every phone call, I learn something. The way he analyzes a situation. He always has an idea for a solution or maybe a different question you didn’t think of. Not many people have it.”

  “I tell our marketing team I want every Michigan home football game to feel like a Super Bowl,” said Brandon.

  By Saturday afternoon the lobby of the Sheraton Fort Worth was a nonstop parade of officially licensed products. Shirts, skirts and hats mixed with funky football fashion: crimson bow ties and madras shorts; cropped tops and cowboy boots; a hot maize mini ripped in all the right places.

  Four hours before the early-evening kickoff, streets around Cowboys Stadium had a festive feel, the parking lots packed with tailgaters.

  The good cheer extended inside the stadium as well. Fans from both teams bellied up, side by side, at bars soaking in the pregame festivities. The feeling was that of a giant indoor cocktail party, thirty thousand strong.

  About forty minutes before kickoff, Hoke and his Wolverines took the field. The Michigan band blasted out “The Victors.” Alabama’s marching band matched the musical challenge as Saban and his Crimson Tide tore out of their tunnel.

  As he stood on the field, Brandon’s eyes told the story. This was the kind of memorable “wow” experience he lived—and loved—to create. Not the veiled corporate sell some NFL fans experienced on Sunday. No, on this night, college football was the greatest spectacle in sports. A regular-season record $10 million payout for both teams, an athletic director’s dream.

  “It’s everything
we could have hoped for,” he said. “This game will sell merchandise. It will create interest for the tickets back home. It will hopefully get other networks bidding for these opportunities for us.”

  Brandon’s first big “wow” had occurred on the night of September 10, 2011. When Brandon floated the idea of the first night game in U-M history, critics howled. Brandon listened and pushed ahead, breaking out new “throwback” jerseys for the occasion (on sale at an M shop near you). The team played its part, rewarding a record crowd of 114,804 with a thrilling, last-second 35–31 victory over Notre Dame. In yet another bold move, Brandon had authorized the purchase of ninety thousand yellow pom-poms. The resultant “Under the Lights” aerial photograph with those pom-poms pounding the air went up on the school’s official site. Tens of thousands of people logged on and tried to pick themselves out of the crowd; the photograph hung like a trophy on the wall outside Brandon’s office.

  By the second series of the kickoff classic, Alabama had taken control of the game where it meant the most: in the trenches. Its massive, athletic offensive line—averaging six feet four inches and 320 pounds per man—simply overpowered Michigan’s defensive front. What started out as a quick 7–0 lead methodically grew to 31–0 with less than five minutes left in the first half.

  “Bigger, stronger, faster,” said ESPN anchor Scott Van Pelt as he hustled down the ’Bama sideline. “I don’t know what planet [D. J.] Fluker’s from,” he said, referring to Alabama’s six-foot-six, 330-pound apartment building at right tackle, “but I know it’s not one where you and I live.”