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

by Bacon, John U.

  When a reporter asked, “When you first got here, you said you wanted this place to be ‘an inferno.’ Is that what you saw?”

  Meyer replied, “I didn’t like the first couple weeks. I saw fans too far away, and players with their headsets on. That’s not what we want. We want people to enjoy their Ohio State players.”

  With the victory, plus Minnesota’s defeat the previous week and Northwestern’s loss earlier that day to Penn State, Ohio State was already the last undefeated team in the Big Ten, and would be the only conference team in the Top 10.

  On that night, you could see Meyer’s challenge clearly: He had to respect Ohio State’s past, and the rabid fans who revered it, while leading the program into the future to battle the new kings of the sport. And he intended to do it for a program that would never have to apologize for anything.

  The Buckeyes were 6-0.

  “Don’t tell anyone this,” one Ohio State employee told me, “but I hope we lose just one game. If we go undefeated this year, the pressure next year will be insane.”

  CHAPTER 15

  SING TO THE COLORS

  Long before I knew the difference between a post pattern and a flea-flicker, I was captivated by the sight of Michigan’s marching band gathering inside the stadium tunnel, flags high. The announcer’s baritone boomed over the speakers, with a trademark phrase any Michigan fan can mimic: “Laaaaaadies and gentlemen! Innnnn-troducing the two-hundred-and-thirty-member Meeeeeshigan Marching Band! Baaaaaaaand—take the field!”

  You’d hear the drum major’s sharp, staccato whistles, then the urgent thumping of the drums as the band high-stepped out of the tunnel, expanding magically to create a perfect block M. It got me going every time and was the first reason I fell in love with football Saturdays.

  In junior high, the game became the thing. I knew the players, the plays, and even who the bad guys were. But I still loved the band.

  One Saturday every fall, the band’s size doubled. The newcomers, wearing all manner of ragtag Michigan regalia, were older folks, but they marched almost as fast, twirled their batons just as well, and sounded just as good as the young, snappy college students. I learned that these reinforcements were the alumni band, back to relive their college days. I looked forward to their return every fall, and they never disappointed.

  So, before the Michigan Marching Band went the way of the Michigan–Notre Dame rivalry, I wanted to find out what made it so special.

  • • •

  Friday, October 12: On a sunny, fifty-five-degree Friday, I walked down to Elbel Field, home to two softball diamonds, two sand volleyball courts, and enough room in the middle for impromptu football, soccer, lacrosse, rugby, and ultimate-Frisbee games. It wasn’t named for a wealthy donor but for a music student named Louis Elbel, who wrote Michigan’s famous fight song, “The Victors.”

  The marching band has practiced here for over a century. This is where families bring their kids for a free concert every fall weekday, and where the alumni band gathers to begin its reunion on the Friday before homecoming. The mood this year, as always, was fun and light, fueled by cold beer and warm stories, but even this merry band of some 350 alums could not ignore the changing climate of Michigan football.

  Garland Campbell, a tall African-American man with a tidy mustache, played tenor sax from 1979 to 1983, literally following in his father’s footsteps. He had flown in from California, as he did every year, to see his coterie of old band buddies.

  “Who was first chair in high school?” he asked his friends.

  “All of us!” replied Jack Miner, a euphonium player whose son now plays trumpet in the band.

  It’s the shock most freshmen face. Athlete or engineer, you learn that a lot of people in college can do what you can do.

  For these folks, that first hit home at band camp—though it’s no camp. Potential band members move into the dorms two weeks early and spend just about every waking hour at Revelli Hall. The tryout is brutal. The musicians in your section form a circle, with each person facing outward, eyes closed, head down. The candidate stands in the center, and plays the piece. Then the next person plays, and the listeners vote on who sounds better.

  The winner slides up the row, the loser slides down, and so it goes until the last candidate has played. Slide too far down and you won’t make the band—a merciless process.

  Of the 380 who qualify, only 270 play at halftime (the rest stay in their seats), and just 230 play the pregame concert. So if you rank between 271 and 380, you practice just as hard, but you play only after the game, when all but a few hundred fans have left.

  You’re judged on marching, too. The test sounds simple enough: play “The Victors” while marching twenty yards. But you have to march exactly eight steps for every five yards: “8 to 5” is the slogan, each step measured at exactly 22.5 inches.

  “Let me tell you,” Campbell said, “after your eighth step, the ball of your foot damn well better land on that yard line!”

  Players used to complain about two-a-day hitting practices (something almost no one does anymore, thanks to NCAA limits on scholarships and practice times), but when you’re at band camp, you get:

  “Three-a-days!” Campbell said.

  “Try six-a-days!” said Andy Pervis.

  “No one’s wearing makeup,” said Stephanie Pervis. “Nobody’s even showered.”

  “We smelled!” Campbell said. “But who cared? We all smelled!”

  It creates a bond.

  Despite the load, the band’s collective GPA hovers around 3.4, even though typically half the members are engineering students who take their classes on the North Campus, a twenty-minute bus ride away.

  Then there are the tangible benefits: two credits and $100 a year to dry-clean your all-wool uniform—which is too thick for Notre Dame in early September, and too thin for Ohio State in late November. The band members often pocket the Benjamin as a bonus—the kind of sophomoric sleight of hand for which the NCAA would suspend a player and put a program on probation.

  Likewise, if the band were an NCAA sport, the twenty-five hours per week of scheduled practice would be cut to twenty, while the extra practices any section leader can call after practice would be considered “voluntary.”

  “Yeah, ‘voluntary’!” Campbell coughed, getting laughs.

  In the band, at least, common sense still ruled.

  • • •

  Saturday morning, October 13: On a cold, rainy Saturday morning I got to Revelli Hall by 8:00 a.m., but it was already packed with 350 alumni, ready to rehearse. John Wilkins, a dapper man wearing a navy-blue suit, a maize-and-blue tie, a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, and the demeanor of, well, a band conductor, took the podium. He started leading the pack twenty-one years ago when the athletic department asked the alums to fill in at hockey and basketball games when the student band members went on vacations.

  Wilkins had a message for his fellow alumni: “We are on a mission to fully endow the program, so the [student] marching band will be fully independent and not at the mercy of . . . other departments”—his pause got a laugh. They all knew he was talking about the athletic department—“which may or may not have the funding for us going forward.”

  The need to protect the marching band is nothing new—but the urgency was, thanks to the near miss in Dallas.

  “The endowment,” Wilkins continued, “will fund the entire program, including staff, instruments, composers—arrangers cost more these days!—facilities, and, yes, travel!” They all got the joke.

  The mission, he said, was not just to pay for plane tickets or tubas. “It’s to make sure that what we are, and what we do, will not be compromised, for as far as we can see.” He let that sink in before delivering the punch line. “To do all this, to endow the entire program, we need to raise forty million dollars.”

  A few heads tilted back—but then Wilkins went in for the kill. “We are already halfway to our goal.” He paused to let the alums’ surprise rise to the
rafters. “Our goal is one hundred percent participation. Track that?”

  They cheered. They tracked that.

  • • •

  Wilkins turned his attention to the day’s music.

  “We’re gonna run out there onto the field,” he said, “make the crowd drop their Cokes and hot dogs, and we’re gonna play ‘The Victors Trio.’ ”

  They leaped into the medley, but Wilkins soon put his hands up, tapped on his stand, and gave them a pained expression. He told the percussionists to play their part again.

  “Good!” he said with warm sarcasm. “I hear a rhythm similar to what we’re doing!” Wilkins got a laugh, and the percussion section got the point.

  Next came “Let’s Go Blue!” then a lighthearted campus classic, “I Want to Go Back to Michigan.” Someone in the glee club—no one knows who—wrote it well more than a century ago, and the bars mentioned are long gone, but every current student (and their parents) would understand the lyrics:

  I want to go back to Michigan,

  To dear Ann Arbor town,

  Back to Joe’s and the Orient,

  And back to some of the money I spent.

  Oh! Father and Mother pay all the bills,

  And we have all the fun,

  In the friendly rivalry of college life, Hooray!

  The band members’ heads bobbed in unison. Some had been away for decades, but no one needed to tell them when to swing their trombones or lift their shiny sousaphones to the sky. Somehow, this had been grafted on to their collective DNA, and it looked like it was there to stay.

  “Give our percussion a hand!” Wilkins commanded. “They were wonderful!” He had forgiven their sins.

  Then he called up the director of bands from 1970 to 1995, Professor H. Robert Reynolds, a kindly man in his eighties, bald on top with white hair running down the sides.

  “Okay!” Reynolds called. “ ‘The Yellow and Blue’!”

  This is the alma mater, a sentimental ballad, the emotional grace note of the Michigan canon.

  Reynolds waved his wand for the first note, but he was soon so displeased that his hands fell away in disgust, and the band stumbled to a stop. (One mystery solved: they really do watch the conductor.)

  “Noooooo!” he said. “Play it with enthusiasm!”

  A drummer yelled from the back, “Play it for the band!”

  This time, even a tin-eared writer could tell the difference. They were no longer playing the notes. They were playing the song, with the spirit behind it.

  • • •

  The best moment wasn’t on the field, before the largest crowd in college football that day, nor inside the stately Hill Auditorium, whose acoustically perfect design was copied by Radio City Music Hall, where the band plays at least once a year to a packed house. It was in the dark silence of the stadium tunnel, where no one could see or hear them. This was the time they treasured most, alone in the dark, and they sang—not played, but sang—the alma mater, to themselves, and for themselves. They had not, after all, been picked for their voices.

  “Singing the alma mater in the tunnel beforehand means as much to us as playing ‘The Victors’ in the stadium,” Thomas Rhea told me.

  “My last time in the tunnel, as a senior,” said Paul Sutherland, ’08, “the emotion . . . I’m not embarrassed to admit it, I cried. A lot of us do, and that’s when the younger people in the band see that and realize what this means. A junior came up and hugged me. There’s no judging. There are not many situations where you see people that visibly moved.”

  They walked into the tunnel and lined up, in order, along the cold, dank wall; 350 of them, in five rows, from the top of the tunnel near the parking lot all the way down to the field, the crowd, and the M GO BLUE banner outside.

  Their ages spanned the spectrum. There could be a dozen or so from your year, but the band is so big, you might not even know those who showed up from your class. There is no alumni band uniform, but almost everyone wore something from their Michigan days. Their arms were bent at ninety degrees, instruments in front, pointing down. A few had dug up a pair of the white gloves they’d been issued years before.

  The song started with a single note—an A-flat concert pitch played by a trombone—then a measured pause, followed by 350 voices softly singing words written only twenty years after the Civil War;

  Sing to the colors that float in the light;

  Hurrah for the Yellow and Blue!

  Yellow the stars as they ride through the night

  And reel in a rollicking crew;

  Yellow the field where ripens the grain

  And yellow the moon on the harvest wain;

  Hail!

  Hail to the colors that float in the light

  Hurrah for the Yellow and Blue!

  “When you get to heaven,” Marianne Swenson said, with red eyes, “that’s what they’ll be playing.”

  The trip will be paid for.

  CHAPTER 16

  IT MATTERS TO US

  After beating Northwestern in thrilling fashion, Penn State got the next Saturday off. Northwestern recovered nicely against a decent Minnesota team, 21–13. Ohio State expected a cakewalk against Indiana, but had to fight off a late Hoosier charge to win 52–49. That gave the Buckeyes a record of 7-0, and 3-0 in the Big Ten. Their dreams of a division title and a perfect season were very much alive.

  Despite the bone-chilling rain on homecoming weekend, the Wolverines did just about everything right in their 45–0 beatdown of Illinois. But the students had the following Monday and Tuesday off for fall break, so many of them had skipped the game to take a four-day weekend at home. That made Michigan’s next game against Michigan State a better chance for a reunion.

  • • •

  Almost everything we love about college football is economically irrational: marching bands, alumni bands, tailgating, the hundreds of volunteers working around the stadium, even amateur athletics itself.

  Almost everything that threatens its future is profit-driven. TV networks insist schools play almost every day but Sunday—out of respect for the NFL, not the Sabbath—and at 9:00 p.m. on Saturdays. The NCAA added a twelfth game, so powerful teams can pound punching bags in contests no one wants to see. It’s allowed another game for conference championships, and even more for the playoffs to come. Schools use the windfall from the games to pay increasingly outrageous salaries for coaches, athletic directors, and the guys in silly coats who run bowl games.

  All of these pose a threat to the health of the game—and the young men who play it—but for now, let’s focus on the bowls. Those who run them need us to believe their games are rewards for teams that had a great season, that the games offer players and fans a much-wanted vacation, and that these events are nonprofits, while the schools make a killing.

  These claims are nice—and would be even nicer if any of them were actually true.

  Forty years ago, college football got by with just eleven bowl games. Back then, when your team got into a bowl game, you knew they’d done something special. Those twenty-two invited teams were truly elite, and so were the bowls—like the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, and the Granddaddy of Them All, the Rose Bowl.

  But in the past four decades, the number of bowls has more than tripled, to a staggering thirty-five, so the bowls need seventy willing teams. But there are just 124 Division I teams to choose from, and by definition, only 62 are above average. So some bowls settle for teams that didn’t even finish in the top half of the sport—let alone their conferences. This year, thirteen bowl teams don’t have winning records. When your team gets into a bowl game today, you know they must not be on probation.

  So we now have such timeless classics as the the Meineke Car Care Bowl, the AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl, and the legendary TaxSlayer.com Bowl. How many TaxSlayer.coms fit into a bowl? It’s a question for theologists.

  What used to be a special trip is now a chore. If players are not going to one of the elite bowls, most w
ould rather skip the fifteen mandatory practices, and a trip to Shreveport, Boise, or Detroit, and stay home for the holidays.

  Fans feel the same way. Few bowls sell out, and a third of them draw fewer than forty thousand fans. You could fire a cannon in those stadiums, then find the cannonball and fire it again, and still not hit anybody.

  This is all silly excess, but it crosses the line into corruption when you look at the finances. The bowls are nonprofit and want you to believe schools make out like bandits. But the only ones not profiting are the schools and their players. It’s the bowls themselves that make the money—and the coaches and the athletic directors, who receive bonuses for dragging their teams to these backwaters.

  Here’s how the scam works: The schools have to pay for their flights, hotels, and meals—which adds up fast for 150 players, coaches, staffers, and university VIPs. Then the bowls force them to buy thousands of tickets they can’t give away—and that sets up the final outrage: the bowls make the schools accept far less than the advertised payout, right down to nothing, which, according to Death to the BCS, is exactly what the Motor City Bowl actually paid Florida Atlantic in 2009.

  Only half the teams lose bowl games—but almost all of them lose their shirts going to them.

  That’s bad enough, but get this: the men in the ugly blazers who run these “nonprofit” bowls walk off with hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary—all for setting up one game a year that no one wants to play or watch.

  How to fix this mess? Simple: Prohibit forcing schools to buy tickets they don’t want. Make the bowls actually pay the schools what they proudly announce they’re paying them. And while we’re at it, make them pay for the schools’ travel expenses, too.

  If the bowls think it’s still worth it—and the better ones will—great. Everybody wins, just like the old days.

  But if the bowls don’t, they can close shop and end the charade.

  They would not be missed.

  • • •

  Given all this—and more—it’s tempting to ask which side will win in college football: passion or profits?