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

by Bacon, John U.

  The fans, former players, and reporters responded with their “usual level of cool maturity,” as Dave Barry would say, “similar to the way Moe reacts when he is poked in the eyeballs by Larry and Curly.” One Ohio politician introduced a resolution demanding the game never be moved.

  So what’d the Big Ten leaders finally decide? They surprised the many critics of their logo and division names and came up with a format that’s intelligent, even elegant. They listened to their constituents and established the Michigan–Ohio State game as a “protected divisional crossover” at the end of the season, right where it belongs.

  The conclusions were clear enough: when the people who run college football listen to the fans—by adding Nebraska, and maintaining traditional rivalries—things work well. When they don’t—think logo and divisional names—they don’t.

  It’s a simple lesson, but would the Big Ten—not to mention other conferences and the NCAA itself—heed it?

  • • •

  If the Big Ten’s decision to add Nebraska created some unintended by-products inside the league, it was nothing compared to the chain reaction the small spark started outside the Midwest, throwing the nation’s biggest conferences into major upheaval—perhaps the biggest in the history of college sports.

  After Nebraska bolted to the Big Ten, former Big 12 brothers Missouri and Texas A&M bolted to the SEC, and Colorado went to the Pac-10, along with Utah, making it the new Pac-12. Shortly thereafter, Syracuse and Pittsburgh announced they would be leaving the Big East to join the Atlantic Coast Conference.

  Those changes aren’t as geographically twisted as seeing Marquette and DePaul—and even, for a little while, Texas Christian, Boise State, and San Diego State—join the Big East. Which raised the question: Just how big is the East, anyway? Big enough to swallow half the Midwest and chunks of Idaho, Texas, and California?

  By the time the dust settled, all eleven major conferences had gained or lost at least one member.

  In the aftermath, I was struck by how many people who don’t care too much about sports seemed to care a lot about this. For nonsports fans, college conferences are kind of like your parents as you get older. You might not check in with them every day, but it’s good to know they’re there, something you can count on in an uncertain world.

  Nothing defined our nation’s regions better than our conferences used to.

  What is the Midwest? Depending on who’s talking, it could span from western Pennsylvania to Montana, from North Dakota to Oklahoma. But when someone said “Big Ten Country,” you knew they meant the Great Lakes states. The Big Eight connected the Great Plains states—nearby, maybe, but night and day to those of us who live here. The Southeast Conference connected the Deep South and was fundamentally different from the Atlantic Coast Conference—which was exactly what it said it was. The Ivy League—well, that’s a label unto itself, while the Big East linked the biggest schools in the biggest cities in, yes, the East. It all made perfect sense. It fit.

  These bonds were part of our very identity. Of course, each school’s students, alums, and fans think their conference is the best and can even give you specific reasons why it’s better than the one next door, but fans from all conferences felt a connection to the center, and it held. What these conference schools all had in common was sometimes hard to pinpoint, but—to paraphrase Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s famous line about pornography—we knew it when we saw it. When the university presidents founded these conferences, they sought kindred spirits—and they were amazingly successful at finding them.

  Somehow Iowa has more in common with Wisconsin than it does with Iowa State—and all parties seem to understand this intuitively, just as we all knew where to sit in the high school cafeteria. No one told us, but we knew where we belonged.

  These conferences were so stable for so long, it was easy to identify with them. Schools bragged not just about their teams, but about their conferences, painting their league logos on their fields and their courts. If you wandered into a sports bar in any of those college towns, hanging overhead you would see the banners of every member of their league—and that meant the banners of their rivals, too. And no other sport has rivalries like college football has rivalries.

  I have never attended Indiana or Wisconsin or Michigan State, but I’ve visited them many times. I can get around their beautiful campuses and talk knowledgeably to their alums in Chicago bars, where everyone seems to end up.

  But suddenly, by the fall of 2012, the whole jigsaw puzzle had been tossed up in the air, and all for two reasons: greed, and fear—the fear that some other football team would make more money on its TV deal than you did on yours.

  The frantic, thoughtless redrawing that followed was akin to the way the British carelessly carved up the Middle East in the 1920s, without knowing the difference between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, with disastrous results we’re still living with to this day. This mindless game of musical chairs threatened many of the biggest reasons why millions of us prefer college sports to the pros: geography, affinity, stability, and identity. And it tore apart rivalries that go back to the birth of modern sport.

  When the Wall Street Journal asked Bill Martin, Michigan’s former athletic director, about the state of the game, he said, “We’re chipping away at what makes college football unique.”

  When I followed up with him, Martin added, “The last thing you want college to do is become a professional environment. The last thing. Don’t let the NFL be your model.

  “Take the band. That’s one of the most unique appeals of college sports. There’s not a professional team in the country that wouldn’t love to have the quality of a college band playing—and for free! Let ’em play!”

  Martin couldn’t answer one question, however: How many more chips can college football take before we can no longer distinguish it from the pro game?

  • • •

  The tornado that rearranged the college football landscape seemed to soften it for the NCAA to build a playoff system right in the middle of it all—something it had longed to do for years, for a simple reason: money. Unlike March Madness, which would generate a record $1 billion in advertising revenue alone in 2013 that went straight to the NCAA to distribute, the NCAA didn’t make a dime off the bowl system. The bowls did.

  When NCAA president Mark Emmert announced Penn State’s sanctions on July 23, 2012, he bolstered the NCAA’s new “get tough” image—just in time to return to the podium a week later to announce the long-awaited creation of a four-team playoff, whose TV rights alone would be worth $5.64 billion over twelve years, or about $470 million a year, all for three games.

  So, after decades of debate, it was finally upon us—a bona fide Division I college football playoff. But in fairness to the NCAA, it was a committee of twelve university presidents—not coaches or even athletic directors, but presidents—that approved the plan to create a four-team playoff for college football, the last major sport to have one.

  So what if college football had somehow survived without a playoff since students from Rutgers and Princeton played the first intercollegiate game in 1869? That was twenty-two years before James B. Naismith invented the game of basketball, thirty-four years before the first World Series, and fifty-one years before the National Football League was even formed, let alone mattered.

  In the past forty years the game’s leaders have tacked on enough bowl games for virtually every team still standing to play in one, from twenty-two teams to seventy—which is more than half the Division I schools currently fielding football teams.

  But that wasn’t enough, so they added a twelfth game, which schools have used to play tomato cans like Arkansas–Pine Bluff, Prairie View A&M, and Gardner-Webb (not to be confused with the furniture chain), solely to grab another payday on the backs of unpaid players. Then they piled on conference title games, too—increasing the total games a division winner could play from eleven to fourteen, just two shy of the NFL’s regular season.
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  But we need a playoff now, they told us, to take the competition out of the hands of computers and pollsters and to settle it on the field.

  How are they going to fix that? Instead of picking two teams based on polls, strength of schedule, and computerized rankings, they are going to have a selection committee pick four teams—based on polls, strength of schedule, and computerized rankings. Problem solved.

  So, instead of the third-ranked team complaining that it got screwed out of a title shot, the fifth-place team will now do all the whining. Another problem solved.

  A four-team playoff will not end arguments, just expand them. It won’t heighten the regular season—something unique to college football, where every game actually matters—it will diminish it. It’s not going to shrink the schedule, but extend it. It won’t reduce injuries—especially concussions—but increase them.

  Here are a few other sure bets: the playoffs will result in more insane incentives in coaches’ already insane contracts. In the 2012 national title game, LSU head coach Les Miles would get a $5 million bonus if his Tigers beat Alabama—which would have doubled his salary for coaching sixty minutes of football.

  But LSU lost, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. How many coaches, faced with a star receiver who got caught plagiarizing a paper, or a quarterback with a concussion, would have had the integrity to do the right thing and bench those players—and forfeit a $5 million payday?

  However many currently exist, it’s a safe bet that, with these temptations, there will be fewer in the future.

  • • •

  In the Big Ten, at least, stability still seemed more the rule than the exception. Nebraska finished its first season in the league in 2011, to great acclaim. The Cornhuskers didn’t win the division, but their team and their fans won over the Big Ten faithful wherever they went.

  For Delany’s part, when I talked with him in August of 2012, he seemed content with the twelve-team league. For a man who played basketball at the highest level in the ACC, his grasp of Big Ten football culture seemed secure.

  “What makes us unique? I would say, first, our history—117 years—would be one big differentiating factor.

  “Second, our location and our culture. There is something essentially Midwestern about our character. I realize there’s loyalty every place—every school, every conference—but the Midwest is a very stable place culturally, and I think given to greater loyalty than most places.

  “Adding Penn State and Nebraska didn’t change that. The schools we added are in contiguous states. That was important to us.

  “We’re not going to add teams to add teams. We like what we have. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t expand, or we won’t. But it’s like I said about Nebraska, it has to be a good fit.

  “When you sit down and talk with their people, you know it when you see it.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “IT ALL STARTS SATURDAY”

  Saturday, August 11, 2012, 5:30 a.m.

  Bill O’Brien is preparing to dash out the door to go to the office.

  That’s all the more impressive because he’d had two or three beers with his brother Tom in his kitchen the night before—the only time he’d had to catch up with him in months. They talked about their parents, their kids, Bill’s team, and Bill’s half-joking final assessment: “Given the sanctions, if we end up no better than .500, they’ll probably fire me in two or three years.”

  He hadn’t considered the worst-case scenario: they wouldn’t.

  Five hours later, he was up—an average night of sleep, for him. He wolfed down a nutrition bar—ninety calories—and a cup of yogurt, leaving the spoon in the sink. He muttered about the fifteen or so pounds he couldn’t seem to get rid of—on his way to Dunkin’ Donuts. You can take the man out of Boston—the chain’s spiritual center—but you can’t take Boston out of the man.

  “Love this place,” he said, pulling into the parking lot in the darkness. He bought a $2 coffee and headed back out to his van.

  I asked the guy at the counter if he knew who that was. He looked up, stared for a moment, then said, “Nope.”

  He was saved by his coworker. “Oh, that’s Mr. O’Brien,” she said. In a month, just about everyone in the state would know who Mr. O’Brien was.

  • • •

  So, who is Mr. O’Brien?

  William James O’Brien was born in 1969 in Dorchester, Massachusetts, the third of three boys. His father, John, a big, amiable guy partial to khaki pants and plaid, button-down shirts, played football at Brown just a few years after Joe Paterno himself, and his sons followed in his footsteps.

  But Bill O’Brien probably got his fighting spirit not from his former football-playing dad, but his polite, petite mom. Anne O’Brien dresses like Miss Manners but, if provoked, she could probably take the etiquette queen.

  While sitting on a couch in Bill’s office next to her husband, she was cajoled into telling a familiar story. Because Bill attended St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, about thirty minutes from their home in Merrimack, he carpooled home after practice every day at five thirty with two other kids. The mother of one of them, Russell, never picked them up, and one day on the drive back, Ms. O’Brien casually asked him why.

  “My mom works,” Russell said. “She’s a teacher.”

  That’s all Anne needed to hear. “And here I am, a librarian, working till five every day, when the teachers get out at three.” At the next stoplight, two miles from Russell’s home, she turned to him, sitting in the backseat, and said, “Get out! Get out, Russell, and walk home!”

  And that’s exactly what the stunned Russell did, while Bill and his classmate cracked up.

  “You ask any of my buddies that story,” Bill said, “they all know it. My friends love my mom.”

  When St. John’s played rival Malden Catholic, fans from both schools had to sit on the same side—never a good idea, of course. The entire game the Malden parents chanted, “St. John’s sucks! St. John’s sucks!”

  The diminutive Anne O’Brien stayed silent, until St. John’s won the game on the last play. She stood up, pointed her finger at the Malden parents, and said, “We’ll see who sucks now!”

  “We had a reunion [last year],” Anne said, “and the parents just love telling that story.”

  “They don’t have to,” Bill said. “Everyone already knows it.”

  • • •

  At Brown, O’Brien played defensive end and linebacker on unremarkable teams. He had no illusions about playing pro football, but that didn’t matter because he always knew what he wanted to do: coach.

  “He wasn’t all that big or fast,” recalled Jim Bernhardt, who served as Brown’s defensive coordinator and now works as O’Brien’s special assistant—a fancy term for “trusted right-hand man.” “But he was tough and smart, and very hardworking.” Bernhardt did not bother adding the obvious: those are qualities that make great coaches.

  After O’Brien graduated in 1993, he stayed at Brown as a graduate assistant football coach, until a similar position opened up at Georgia Tech. Head coach George O’Leary called Bernhardt and said, “I need someone smart enough to get into grad school here, and dumb enough to coach football for nothing while doing it.”

  Bernhardt didn’t miss a beat. “I got the perfect guy for you.”

  And that’s how Bill O’Brien started his coaching career.

  • • •

  Monday, August 27: “All right, we have to get this right,” O’Brien said.

  It was seven o’clock on a Monday morning, and O’Brien’s assistants had already been up for a couple of hours themselves, yet were every bit as alert as he was. O’Brien wasn’t directing this message to them, though, but to video coordinator Jevin Stone, who has a staff of three and an office second in size only to O’Brien’s—which tells you something about how a modern program functions.

  “You have to break tape down differently,” O’Brien said flatly. “I look at this stuff by personnel and situ
ation, not by possessions or game time. All those cut-ups—if you guys want them, fine, but they’re useless to me.”

  Stone took notes.

  “First thing I do is take out the two-minute plays. I want those separated and labeled. In mine they’re not labeled.

  “I do it backwards as the week goes on. I start on Monday by looking at the two-minute defense, then their red zone, then third downs. So then all I have is first and second downs left by the end of the week. And that’s how I want them broken down and labeled. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.”

  How coaches work with film today mirrors how investment banks started handling loans in the 1980s. As Michael Lewis described it in Liar’s Poker, bankers three decades ago discovered they could cut up loans into their components, bundle those parts in big chunks, and create a new commodity.

  Likewise, a head coach might watch an entire game, start to finish, once. But after that, it’s all situational: offense, defense, running plays, passing plays, red zone, and the like. When coaches are scouting their opponents or breaking down practice film, they care even less about the game itself and more about the individual components. When they’re looking at film, they’re far more scientists than fans.

  They didn’t notice, for example, that in this game between Ohio University and Bowling Green University—two ancient MAC rivals—the stands were virtually empty. If it happens outside the lines or doesn’t involve the team they’re scouting, coaches simply don’t care. If the bleachers collapsed or the other team’s quarterback was on fire, they probably wouldn’t notice—unless the defensive end on the team they’re scouting failed to tackle him.

  “This is a five-game breakdown,” O’Brien said to his staff while watching Ohio’s defense on the screen. “Out of fifty plays, they only called three plays of diamond,” a common defensive setup.

  “These guys don’t tackle very well,” he added as an aside. “These could’ve been big plays if Bowling Green could run better.”