Hey kids. John's answered your questions in an extensive post below. I know his points hit close to home as we approach the last time Michigan Stadium will host Notre Dame for the foreseeable future. The book is Fourth and Long, and it's available now.
See also: John fields questions from MVictors and talks with the PostGame. Also he was on Olbermann!
Is there a way of putting the genie back in the bottle, or have the aggressive, business-oriented strategies of highlighted in the book (and there are MANY instances therein) put Michigan on an irreversible, faulty trajectory?
[My question is in his estimation, where is that "tipping point" for Michigan, and what happens when we reach it?]
Great question, and one I’ve examined from as many angles as possible for this book. Really, for Michigan fans – and fans of college football generally – it is the central question.
Michigan happens to make a great case study, on two fronts: the loyalty of its fans, and the department’s profitably, both of which are virtually unequaled in college football.
First, the good news, from the book:
“Brandon’s style might not please everyone he deals with, but he delivers what he promises. Under Brandon, the department increased its operating surplus to $15.3 million in fiscal year 2012, 72 percent higher than the previous fiscal year. In 2012, the Michigan football team alone generated $61.6 million in profits, second only to the University of Texas, which has the considerable advantage of its exclusive twenty-year, $300 million TV deal with ESPN.
Brandon has delivered more than dollars, too. After hiring Brady Hoke in 2011, the Michigan football team beat Notre Dame on the last play of the Big House’s first night game, defeated Ohio State for the first time since 2003, and won a thrilling overtime game over eleventh-ranked Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl, Michigan’s first BCS bowl victory since a young man named Tom Brady beat Alabama in the January 1, 2000, Orange Bowl.
In the 2011–12 school year, the hockey team earned a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament; the men’s basketball team won a share of its first Big Ten title since 1986; and the following fall, Michigan’s other twenty-nine sports combined to run a close second behind Stanford, and ahead of such perennial all-sport powers as Texas and UCLA, in the Directors’ Cup, which Michigan has never won.
If the Michigan athletic department had issued a 2012 annual report to its shareholders, it would have been the shiniest publication in college sports, packed with enough good news to make the competition envious. By those measures, its creator could be considered an all-American athletic director.
The Wolverines are not alone in spending millions, of course, engaged as they are in an arms race with the Buckeyes and the Southeastern Conference that shows no signs of slowing down. In Brandon’s speeches to alumni clubs, service groups, and the press, he has been unabashed in laying out a simple equation: if you want titles, this is what it takes.
But it can come with some unexpected prices.”
One of them, of course, was the initial decision to leave the Marching Band in Ann Arbor for the Alabama game in Dallas – about which former band director Scott Boerma was willing to clarify several misconceptions in our interviews.
But the bigger price might be the disaffection of thousands of loyal fans, some of whom have dropped their tickets. At Michigan, as of this writing, those numbers don’t seem to be too great, and the Big House still attracts over 100,000 passionate fans each game. But just down the road at Penn State, whose fans are every bit as rabid as Michigan’s, driving an average of four hours to see their team play in State College, you can see the effects of squeezing your supporters too hard.
The scoreboard scroller at Penn State’s third game, against Navy, announced the game’s attendance at ninety-eight thousand. As I write: “This would have brought heartbreak to the Michigan crowd, which had never dipped below one hundred thousand since 1975. But the Lions’ six-year streak had already been broken at the opening game of the 2011 season, months beforeSandusky was arrested, thanks to the overpricing of tickets through a misguided and ill-timed seat-license plan called the “Step Program.” This had caused attendance to drop by about three thousand a game in 2010, when the program was introduced, again in 2011, and would again in 2012.”
My sources tell me the trend is likely to continue in 2013, and this brings us to a central issue for meccas like Beaver Stadium, the Horseshoe and the Big House: faith. From the book:
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.
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.
“Just because you cancharge them more,” Bill Martin told me, “doesn’t mean you should. You’re not there to ring up the cash to the nth degree. It’s a nonprofit model!
“Look into how much is spent on marketing, then look at how effective it is,” he said. “Look at the increase in men’s basketball attendance this year,” he added. Michigan’s top-10 men’s team played twenty games at home, attracting capacity crowds of 12,693 for fifteen of those games, with only two under 10,000. “That would happen if you didn’t spend one penny on marketing. You don’t have to do marketing at Michigan. We have the fans. We have the support. We have a great reputation. All you have to do is win. If you win, they will come. You just need to make it as affordable as possible for your fans.”
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.”
Both those questions, I believe, will be answered in the near future. And they will be answered by you, the loyal fans, who will vote with your feet, and your credit card.
[After THE JUMP: is college football worth saving? Does Bill O'Brien want to strangle Tim Beckman? What does the U stand for?]
What's wrong with a world where college football becomes NFL lite? Some traditions are worth preserving - why is amateur/college football one of those?
If the “tipping point” question above is the central one for fans, this question might be the central question for the sport of college football itself.
When Bo Schembechler accepted Don Canham’s offer to coach the Wolverines in 1969, he was paid $21,000. At that rate, I’d imagine, most players on his team knew that, if they got their Michigan degree, they could do better financially than their coach, and probably hundreds of them have. Few at the time, if any, were arguing that the players were being exploited.
But even though the value of a scholarship has gone up considerably, it has not kept pace with the skyrocketing coaches’ salaries.
From the book:
“Head football coaches at Division I public universities now average more than $2 million a year, an increase of 750 percent (adjusted for inflation) since 1984, which is about twenty times more than professors’ salaries increased over the same period. In 2012, the highest-paid state employee in twenty-seven states was a football coach, and in thirteen it was a basketball coach. The number of states whose highest-paid public employee was a university president? Four. The explosion in CEO pay, and the rationales that go with it, would be a fair comparison.”
In the face of this unprecedented influx of money, the contrast between the lifestyles of the players and the coaches and administrators becomes more glaring – and more galling. As you are probably already aware, this chasm has widened in the past three years, making for interesting contrasts among Bill Martin, Dave Brandon, and the players, but the details can be striking.
From the book:
“During the 2008 recession, Martin’s administration actually lowered ticket prices and gave free full-page ads in every football program to the Big Three automakers, who have generously supported the department for decades. It’s also why Martin insisted on being paid a dollar for each of his first two years as athletic director, then agreed to the going rate of about $300,000 per year thereafter.
Already a multimillionaire, Martin turned down the president’s offer to double his salary, and all bonuses. When he traveled to New York on university business, he and his staffers flew coach on Northwest Airlines, then took a cab in the city, or the subway, or, most often, simply walked.
Dave Brandon is estimated to be worth tens of millions, but he is now paid roughly three times what Bill Martin received. For the first time in Michigan’s history, the athletic director makes more than the president. When university business calls Brandon to New York, he often flies out on a donor’s private jet, then pays a limousine service to drive him to meetings around the city.
Back in Ann Arbor, for his first two years Denard Robinson borrowed his teammates’ beat-up cars—Thomas Rawls’s pickup truck was particularly popular among the players—before he bought a rusty clunker of his own, a Pontiac Grand Am, possibly a ’98, though he wasn’t sure. His protégé, Devin Gardner, picked up a little blue coupe, which had “wires hanging out from the engine over the front bumper, and half the back bumper missing,” teammate Elliott Mealer told me. “Devin couldn’t have resold that thing to a blind man. So, no. No one’s giving us cars.”
After a point, the contrasts start to matter.”
And at some point, the players might stand up en masse – really, the only way they have any power – and decide to, well, sit down. Before the Michigan State game, I ran into Michigan cross-country coach Ron Warhurst in the Pioneer parking lot. From the book:
He looked around at the thousands of people happily spending about $500 on that day’s game—and many of them much more. Two golf courses across Main Street were just as full. So was the stadium parking lot and dozens of residential blocks within a mile of the Big House.
“You look at all this, you look at how much money people spend, and how much those guys make,” he said, pointing a thumb at the Big House, “and you have to think, one of these times the players are going to run out of that tunnel, sit down on the benches, and refuse to play until they get paid.
“One of these days.”
William Friday, the former president of the University of North Carolina, told the writer Taylor Branch that if a certain team—not his own school’s—reached the NCAA basketball championship game a few years ago, “they were going to dress and go out on the floor, but refuse to play.” Because the team didn’t make it to the finals, we’ll never know if they would have followed through. But any team in the tournament could do it, jeopardizing the $1 billion March Madness generates in TV ads alone ,the highest ad revenue of any sporting event.
Just as Warhurst postulated, any football team could do the same—which demonstrates just how fragile the game’s foundation really is.
As the salaries of coaches and athletic directors escalate, while the players’ income remains stuck at zero, it’s not hard to imagine a point when the players finally say, “Enough.”
So, obviously, as the gap grows between the talent and the management, if you will, the long-held practice of not giving players a cut of the cash becomes harder and harder to defend. But I still believe there are compelling reasons not to, because once that line is crossed, a big element of what we love about college football – and why a study commissioned by Martin shows UM football fans have much less interest in professional sports – will be lost, and I believe lost forever.
From the book:
These hypotheticals would be largely academic if millions of fans did not prefer college football to the pros. Why do they?
College teams were organically and spontaneously created more than a century ago by the students, just for fun.
The NFL and all its teams since were created by league executives, lawyers, and chief marketing officers, just for profit.
Almost every Division I college football team predates the oldest NFL teams by three or four decades. Most schools built their current stadiums before most NFL teams built their first—or second, or third. College football is one of those few passions we have in common with our great-grandparents.
College teams play on college campuses, where students actually go to school. The students feel as connected to these campuses as they do to their homes—and this connection typically lasts for life. That also goes for the jocks, who live in the same dorms as the geeks; they take classes in the same buildings; and they eat at the same pizza and burger joints everyone else does. Just about anyone who went to college has a story about running into the big man on campus.
NFL players make millions and live in gated communities. You’re not likely to meet them, no matter how many years you pay to watch them play. Their teams play in big cities, and they don’t have homecoming games.
College teams never threaten to change their colors or move to Oklahoma City if you don’t build them a new stadium—at taxpayer expense. No, they play in the nation’s oldest, grandest stadiums, surrounded by lush green lawns, old trees, and two-story homes where students live. They have marching bands and fight songs and quirky customs that go back a century.
NFL teams play in sanitized, soulless domes—usually subsidized by the taxpayers—with loud scoreboards that tell you exactly what to yell and exactly when to yell it, all surrounded by vast oceans of asphalt.
Pro teams choose their players, but college players choose their teams— which leads to another major difference: universities, because they started long before their football teams, represent a particular set of values, priorities, and strengths that stamp the teams that wear their name. It was for this very reason the Big Ten presidents formed their conference. If these players were going to represent their schools, they reasoned, they should do so honorably.
In 1941, Michigan’s legendary Fielding Yost said at his retirement banquet, “My heart is so full at this moment and I am so overcome by the rush of memories that I fear I could say little more. But do let me reiterate . . . the Spirit of Michigan. It is based upon a deathless loyalty to Michigan and all her ways; an enthusiasm that makes it second nature for Michigan men to spread the gospel of their university to the world’s distant outposts; a conviction that nowhere is there a better university, in any way, than this Michigan of ours.”
When college teams compete, it isn’t just a game between two teams. We see it as a battle between two ways of life. Is there a single professional team that can claim anything like this?
This is why, when schools are caught violating NCAA rules, it bruises the identity of their fans. But when the New England Patriots were caught filming opponents’ hand signals, did their fans hang their heads in shame? No, it was just a passing nuisance.
Professional teams don’t stand for anything more than a can of pop. The players go on strike, the owners lock them out, and they repeat the cycle every five or ten years, as needed, for more money. Their fans respond in kind, often caring less about the actual teams in their state than the fantasy teams on their computers—or the point spreads in their paper, and the wallets in their back pockets.
College football fans actually care about college football, not just its parts. The two fan bases are not motivated by the same things.
Of the over 100 FBS Division I teams, not one has ever moved, gone on strike, or been locked out. Ever.
College athletes are more passionate playing for a scholarship than pro athletes are playing for millions. And we admire them more for this very reason. It’s the difference between citizen soldiers volunteering for the army and hired Hessians. Give us the doughboys, the G.I. Joes, and the grunts fighting for a cause.
And this is why we watch: not for perfection, but passion—the same reason over a million fans watch the Little League World Series every summer. This point is easily proven: the worst team in the NFL would crush the best team in college football, every year. Yet college football is the only sport in the world that draws more fans to its games than the big league teams it feeds. The attendance at Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State home games typically averages 50 percent more than that of the NFL teams in those states—and often doubles it. No minor league baseball or hockey team comes close to matching the attendance of their parent clubs.
This basic truth escapes both the proponents of paying players and the NCAA executives who try to squelch minor leagues from starting: college football is selling romance, not prowess. If ability were the only appeal, we’d move NFL games to Saturday and watch those games instead. But if you lose the romance of college football, you will lose the fans of college football.
It might be one thing to give the players a stipend so they can afford a new pair of jeans, a nice dinner, and a trip home once in a while – which actually was suggested to the NCAA four decades ago, and almost passed. But I do believe, if college football goes “pro,” it becomes just a minor league for the NFL. And no minor league, anywhere, can compete with the top levels of any sport. If that happens, the days of Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State drawing twice as many fans as the nearest NFL counterparts might be over.
I’ll be presenting a more detailed version of the “Bacon Plan,” if you will, to solve this conundrum very soon, and will obviously let the readers of MGoBlog know when I do.
How does Bill O'Brien really feel about Tim Beckman?
![Bill_O'Brien[1]](http://mgoblog.com/sites/mgoblog.com/files/images/23cb6642a822_BA5B/Bill_OBrien1.jpg "Bill_O'Brien[1]")
![tim-beckman-01[1]](http://mgoblog.com/sites/mgoblog.com/files/images/23cb6642a822_BA5B/tim-beckman-011.jpg "tim-beckman-01[1]")
Bill O’Brien, characteristically, was completely disciplined on the matter of Illinois head coach Tim Beckman sending assistants to State College to recruit his players the day after the sanctions hit. But his players were far more willing to tell me how they felt about Coach Beckman, one of the many private scenes the players gave me for this project.
From the book:
“Penn State’s first Big Ten opponent, Illinois, entered the game with the same 2-2 record as the Lions, with bad losses against Arizona State and Louisiana Tech. The Illini were led by first-year head coach Tim Beckman— the man who flew eight coaches out to State College in late July to scoop up as many transfers as he could get. Despite the effort, he got exactly one: freshman Ryan Nowicki, a scout team offensive lineman. Beckman did, however, manage to become the focal point of the Penn State players’ rage, which they intended to release in full when they visited Memorial Stadium on September 29.
“They were basically trying to break up our team,” said Jordan Hill, who actually drove around Penn State’s campus like a cowboy herding cattle when he heard Illinois’s coaches were afoot. “And really, not only our team, but our brotherhood.”
“I’ve never seen a locker room so intense, so on a mission,” [longtime equipment manager] Spider Caldwell said, grinning. “I almost felt sorry for Illinois. I knew what was coming. And our guys did not disappoint!”
[Senior linebacker Mike] Mauti led the charge, getting a sack, forcing a fumble, and making two interceptions. One of them he returned 99 yards before getting tack- led by their wide receiver on the 1-yard line.
Mauti—still overflowing with anger—stayed out for Penn State’s punt team and launched himself downfield on a 60-yard sprint. The Illini sent a receiver to block Mauti, who launched the poor guy into next week, then blew up the returner. “There’s no better feeling than that.”
Well, maybe one.
Before the game, Mauti promised himself he would find Coach Beckman and personally tell him to fuck off. When Mauti finally caught eyes with him, however, he opted for a bit more discretion, spitting on the ground in front of him. That, and Mauti’s sack, forced fumble, and two interceptions, he reasoned, “are the best fuck-yous available.”
What is a program's 'culture' and does it really have an impact on performance?
Great question, and one that I’ve been thinking about since the Rodriguez era. As Rodriguez himself said to his staff, minutes after being fired, “It was a bad fit from the start.”
As unpleasant as it surely was for all parties involved – including the fans -- I think everybody learned a lot about what it really takes for a coach and his staff to succeed at a big time college program, on all sides. AS I write, “Unlike their NFL counterparts, the best college coaches are not interchangeable parts. You don’t simply install one here or there, flick a switch, and watch them light up the college football world. Too often, schools embark on a blind date, with neither party knowing enough about the other before heading to the altar. Las Vegas weddings tend to end in Las Vegas divorces—just ask the people at Michigan. Both sides had better know what they’re getting into and be ready, willing, and able to bridge the gap between them.”
This idea was quickly confirmed by Brady Hoke at his first press conference, where the relatively unknown coach won over the faithful in a matter of minutes by demonstrating that he knew Michigan’s culture, he respected it, and he was there to protect it.
While Penn State was surely a unique case this past season, the need to know the college’s culture, and preserve it, is just as high at Northwestern and Ohio State.
“I don’t know what being Ohio State means,” Pat Fitzgerald told me. “I never played there. I’ve never coached there. But I do know what being Northwestern means. And we know how to find the kind of people who will appreciate it.”
As Brandon McCurry, a twenty-eight year old Buckeye fan, who now lives in Jacksonville, told me, “Urban Meyer’s been the best fit with his school since [Nick] Saban went to Alabama. He’s a Buckeye through and through, born and bred. Cooper couldn’t beat Michigan because he didn’t understand the culture.”
It doesn’t matter in the pros, but it matters in college. But I believe Michigan fans know that better than anyone.
What does the "U" stand for?
My middle name. ;-)
OTHER INTERESTING STUFF
There are many things, of course, you didn’t ask about – because you obviously can’t know what’s in the book – that I think you’ll find interesting reading, including:
-Michigan’s unequaled love for Brady Hoke, from the players to the fans.
-Michigan’s games against Alabama, Notre Dame, Illinois (with the alumni band) Homecoming (the alumni band), Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern (with the Mudbowl), Ohio State and South Carolina.
-Candid interviews with former Band Director Scott Boerma, Bill Martin, and former U-M president James Duderstadt, who told me, “Brandon always says he’s ‘building the brand.’ But of what? Dave Brandon. That’s the brand he’s building.”
-An eye-opening analysis of the athletic department’s budget, and where your money is going.
-And a lot of good insights from you, the fans, who I still believe are the most passionate, and sophisticated, in college football. Call it brown-nosing if you will, but I’ve had as much contact as anyone with you, and I stand by it.
Thanks, as always, for your smart questions.
See you at the tailgates.
-John U. Bacon