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

by Bacon, John U.

  Without the passion of the players and the fans, there would be nothing to profit from. The more passion we feel, the more profit others make. But this can create a vicious cycle. If our passion becomes an insatiable appetite, will it merely tempt the suits to take advantage for more profit, and will that in turn start to strangle the very passion that made those profits possible?

  If so, where is the tipping point—and how long before we get there?

  So far, few tailgaters behave like demanding superdonors. They may grumble about this coach or that play, this season or that rival, and they will always find fault with the offense and the officiating. But they don’t expect anyone in power to listen because they don’t presume to own any of it. Yet if you added up the financial contributions of the hundred thousand Michigan fans tailgating within a mile of the stadium, the total would make them a powerful donor, indeed.

  Almost without exception, the fans have grudgingly accepted the changes engulfing college football. But as Bill Martin’s survey suggests, they care less about the overall quality of play—let alone the professionals who perform at a higher level—than they do about their team’s traditions, and their connection to them.

  You have to wonder if anyone operating the turnstiles has ever asked, will the fans always pay? Or will they get so fed up with the shifting kickoff times, the subpar opponents, and the skyrocketing cost of sitting in a cold seat, waiting for the endless TV time-outs to end, that they finally pack up their grills and go home—for good?

  • • •

  The night before the Michigan–Michigan State game, I joined a group of about twenty friends who had flown from every time zone in the country for their annual Michigan football weekend. The conversations ran the gamut, but they never strayed too far from Michigan football—the magnet that draws them together every fall.

  But all was not well in Arborville. Instead of the usual armchair quarterbacking, this time the natives were getting restless with bigger concerns.

  “They are ruining college football,” Jason Conti said, a view echoed by many that night. Why? “Because the essence of college football is not a national title. That’s as cheesy as a unicorn. It’s tomorrow’s game against Michigan State. It’s regional rivalries that go back generations.

  “Honestly, I don’t give a damn if Alabama wins the national title by a hundred points,” he added. “If we beat State tomorrow by three, I’ll be thrilled.”

  The next morning, I walked down to the massive high school parking lot kitty-corner from Michigan Stadium, where, every football Saturday, hundreds of RVs and countless cars disgorge coolers, grills, generators, footballs, cornhole boards and beanbags, and a sea of tailgating fans.

  I ran into an old friend of mine, former Michigan cross-country coach Ron Warhurst. He won two NCAA titles as a runner and two Purple Hearts in Vietnam. As a coach, his runners won eight Big Ten titles, and twelve Top 10 finishes in the NCAA.

  Warhurst 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.”

  • • •

  With Michigan riding a two-game Big Ten winning streak and a 4-2 overall record, ESPN had planned to cover the game. Then Michigan State lost to a weak Iowa team in overtime, giving the Spartans a record of 4-3 overall and 1-2 in the Big Ten. ESPN went elsewhere, leaving the game for the Big Ten Network.

  The fans weren’t going anywhere. The stakes for Michigan–Michigan State, always high, were higher than usual in Ann Arbor this year, since the Spartans had won the Paul Bunyan Trophy—four feet of carved kitsch—four years straight.

  Thanks more to sputtering offenses than great defenses, the first quarter ended 0–0. In the second quarter, Michigan faced third and goal on State’s 7-yard line, but Denard Robinson’s toss to Roy Roundtree in the end zone wasn’t close, so Hoke took the field goal. The Spartans failed to convert on a third and one from Michigan’s 21-yard line, then their kicker missed the 38-yard field goal attempt. The half ended with Michigan ahead, 6–0.

  ESPN was looking pretty smart.

  Sportswriter Steve Grinczel, who’s covered more than twenty of these matchups, said, “I can’t recall a Michigan–Michigan State game with so little sizzle.”

  But the crowd’s energy never waned. They hadn’t planned their tailgates for weeks or spent hundreds or thousands of dollars to watch twenty-two professionals in the cold pursuit of perfection. They’d paid to see college kids they cared about play with unbridled enthusiasm. Both teams were providing that in spades.

  In the second half, State’s first-year quarterback, Andrew Maxwell, finished a 10-play drive by finding Paul Lang wide open in the end zone, making the easy toss for a 7–6 lead. The Wolverines countered with their third field goal to go ahead 9–7.

  In the fourth quarter, MSU coach Mark Dantonio—never afraid to roll the dice—faced a fourth and 9 deep in his own territory and called for a fake punt. The Spartans executed it perfectly, got to midfield, and kept driving to Michigan’s 2-yard line. It looked as if State had made the play of the game. Then Dantonio’s nerve let him down, and he settled for the field goal and a 10–9 lead with 5:48 left.

  After State got the ball back, with just 3:07 left, Dantonio did Michigan a favor by passing twice instead of running the ball to kill the clock. Michigan got the ball back on its own 38-yard line, with exactly two minutes left.

  Against Notre Dame, Michigan had failed to score a touchdown, and in nearly four quarters against the Spartans, the Wolverines still hadn’t crossed the goal line—but incredibly, they were still very much in the hunt. On second and 11, from Michigan State’s 41-yard line, Robinson completed a crucial pass to Drew Dileo to set up a last-second field goal attempt from 38 yards—exactly the distance from which the Spartans’ kicker had missed in the second quarter.

  By any objective standard, the game had been horrible. Neither team could crack 200 yards, rushing or passing, a mark Robinson routinely reached by himself as a sophomore—in the first half. But the crowd didn’t seem to care. It was a close, hard-fought game between two ancient rivals—exactly what the fans hoped to see—and it was all going to come down to the last play.

  After the 2009 Michigan–Michigan State game—which the 1-4 Spartans pulled out in overtime against the 4-0 Wolverines—all-American punter Zoltan Mesko told me the outcome hammered home a basic truth: “Fans have so much invested in these games that a ball tipped by six inches can change the chemical composition of a million brains.”

  Sound crazy? It’s actually more than that, 2 or 3 million brains on each side of the equation. Now, once again, a few million brains teetered on the edge of agony and ecstasy. />
  When kicker Brendan Gibbons ran out to the field, punter Will Hagerup stood on the bench, helmet off, rubbing his face, muttering, “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  One hundred and thirteen thousand people were on their feet. One hundred and twenty Michigan players were standing on benches.

  Brendan Gibbons stepped into the kick, drove his foot straight through the ball, then watched it go up, up, up—and straight through the uprights.

  Good!

  It’s unusual for fans to swarm the field at the end of a Michigan–Michigan State game. This time, a Spartan beat writer told me, “I almost got trampled.”

  Against the night sky, the scoreboard flashed the dates of Michigan’s “century” wins: the 100th in 1901 against Case College, the 200th in 1915 against Mt. Union, the 300th in 1932 against Michigan State College, leading up to . . .

  900: October 20, 2012.

  MOST WINS IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL!

  Another jolt for maize-and-blue brains.

  Michigan had invited dozens of top recruits for the game. They might have seen a better game, but they couldn’t have seen a better show. Winning begets winning, and Hoke’s recruiting skills were attracting historic quantities of blue-chip players.

  If the teams had worn different uniforms or played in a stadium built with taxpayers’ dollars for millionaire professionals, the game would have been seen for what it was: a dog of a dog, with thirteen penalties and exactly one touchdown. Michigan had won simply because the Spartans missed their 38-yard field goal, while the Wolverines had made their 38-yard field goal.

  But the identity of these schools and their fans, their fraught relationship, and the long history between them had powered the contest—and the Big House contained more of those commodities than any NFL concrete doughnut could ever hold. That’s why, if the Spartans had made their kick, or the Wolverines had missed theirs, millions of brains would have fired the opposite direction in an instant.

  Another year, style might have mattered. Michigan fans would have complained about their “lucky win,” the lack of a single touchdown, and the 2-point victory over an increasingly mediocre foe.

  But not this year. Having endured their longest losing streak in the series since 1962, Wolverine fans were euphoric.

  “The world is back to normal,” one Michigan fan said on Facebook.

  “Order restored,” wrote another.

  “Ugly Trophy—but OUR ugly trophy.”

  “Thank fucking god.”

  At the press conference, a reporter asked walk-on-turned-senior-cocaptain Jordan Kovacs if the 12–10 game was “dull.”

  “Against anyone else, yes,” he said. “We won it for the guys who came before us.”

  I walked back through revelers partying in the dark—who were in no hurry to pack up and leave—then past houses and yards and all the places I’d seen on the way down, then long lines stretching out of the bars on campus and downtown. The previous week’s blowout against lowly Illinois was not the real homecoming. This was.

  That’s when I realized Jason Conti had been right the night before when he’d told me, “The essence of college football is not a national title. That’s as cheesy as a unicorn. It’s tomorrow’s game against Michigan State. It’s regional rivalries that go back generations. . . .

  “If we beat State tomorrow by three, I’ll be thrilled.”

  Michigan beat Michigan State only by two—but Mr. Conti was no less thrilled.

  CHAPTER 17

  “ALL THE THINGS WE ADMIRE”

  On October 20, fans around the league saw scoreboards that said: PURDUE 22, OHIO STATE 29 FINAL (OT).

  Fans surely concluded that Ohio State had dodged another bullet. It was actually a cannonball. A loss to either 2-3 Indiana, which Ohio State had beaten in a squeaker, 52–49, or a 3-3 Purdue team, at home, would have turned the Buckeyes’ hopes of a miracle season to confetti.

  But the scores didn’t tell the whole story.

  It had started two weeks earlier, when senior linebacker Etienne Sabino broke his leg early in the Buckeyes’ impressive win over Nebraska. Urban Meyer scanned his depth chart at linebacker and saw gaping holes. Starters Storm Klein and Ryan Shazier were also hurt, as was Shazier’s backup, Cam Williams. It wasn’t clear how they could run practice, let alone field a defense against Indiana and Purdue.

  During a break in Meyer’s weekly show with Jim Lachey—a former Ohio State tight end and Pro Bowler turned radio host—the coach bemoaned the state of his surviving defensive backfield.

  “Hey,” said Lachey, “last year when we had three or four guys out, [fullback] Zach Boren wanted to switch to linebacker. He’s a natural.”

  Meyer looked pained and growled, “I hope we’re never that desperate.”

  But at the Tuesday practice after Nebraska, Meyer was realizing they were exactly that desperate. His gaze settled on none other than Zach Boren.

  “Go to defense,” Meyer said.

  Boren didn’t have a clue what the defense was doing, but he traded a red jersey for a gray one without complaint and jumped in.

  A couple plays later, Meyer had second thoughts. He went to Boren with an expression that said, “I must have been crazy,” and told him, “Go back to offense.”

  Then, with Boren out, the coach watched the defense’s intensity deflate like a leaky balloon. He walked over to Tom Herman, the offensive coordinator, and said, “You don’t have Boren anymore.”

  Herman was none too pleased, but there was no alternative.

  “Within ten minutes of the switch,” Meyer recalled later, “Zach Boren is a starting linebacker at Ohio State—and this is Ohio State. Even with injuries, we have linebackers here. Very few people could have done that. The more I think about it, the more I think no one else could have done that.

  “In my entire coaching career, this will go down as one of the top five moments of truth, one of the biggest decisions I’ve made.”

  Or, if it didn’t work, one of the dumbest. But that’s the nature of big decisions.

  • • •

  Against Indiana, with two minutes left, the Buckeyes had held a comfortable 52–34 lead, but Indiana put up 15 points in thirty-five seconds. With just 1:05 left, the Hoosiers’ onside kick rolled around Ohio State territory before the Buckeyes smothered it for the win.

  Afterward, Meyer had some direct words with his defensive coaches.

  “We were guilty of poor tackling and loss of leverage—fundamentals,” Meyer told me. “Indiana was cutting back on us, getting outside of us, and that’s bad coaching. So from that point, we put in five to ten minutes every practice focusing on tackling and leverage.

  “You don’t like something, you don’t just go into the coaches’ room or the team room and complain about it. You fix it. You put in an action plan and you execute that plan. We built practices around that action plan.”

  The next weekend, it was the offense’s turn to be tested. In the Horseshoe, with the clock ticking down, the 3-3 Boilermakers led the Buckeyes, 22–14. Things got worse when quarterback Braxton Miller took a bone-rattling hit. With Miller en route to the hospital, Urban Meyer turned to his backup quarterback, Kenny Guiton.

  In the off-season, the coach had almost sent Guiton home to Houston. But Guiton stayed, and turned his fate around.

  “We have a mantra: ‘Competitive excellence,’ ” Meyer told me. “And that means when your number’s called, you’re ready. There are only two ways to get ready: mental reps, and game reps, and backups don’t get enough game reps. So we tell all our backups to be right behind the starters on the practice field and watch your man. It might be you next.”

  So whenever Braxton Miller was running plays during practice, Kenny Guiton was standing ten yards behind him, throwing an air ball when Miller threw the actual ball. When Meyer looked over near the end of the Purdue game, he saw Guiton already snapping his helmet. He was ready.

  The Buckeyes were down by 8 with forty seconds left and 76 yards to go. Their start
ing quarterback and their best wide receiver were out. But Kenny Guiton marched the offense down to the end zone, and then got the conversion to tie the game. In overtime, the Buckeyes won.

  “That’s it, right there,” Meyer said later. “Competitive excellence.”

  • • •

  Northwestern didn’t fare so well. After righting the ship post–Penn State against Minnesota to get to 6-1, and all but guarantee another bowl invitation—and another chance to do that stuffed monkey bodily harm—the Wildcats returned to Ryan Field to face the 4-2 Huskers. Northwestern held a lead at the end of the first, second, and third quarters—then lost, 29–28. If the defeat at Penn State had been tough, this one was brutal.

  After the thriller over Northwestern, Penn State’s record stood at a respectable 4-2. It gave the coaches and the players something fans don’t often consider: the ability to enjoy their bye week in peace, savoring what they’d just accomplished, instead of replaying a painful loss in their minds—and on the screens—for two solid weeks.

  But trouble loomed. The Iowa Hawkeyes had beaten Penn State eight of their last ten meetings, half of those by 3 points or less. Penn State’s losing streak in Iowa City included a classic contest in 2008, when the second-ranked Nittany Lions arrived with a 9-0 record and left with a 24–23 loss, their hopes for a national title shattered. Every fifth-year senior remembered that game bitterly.

  Adding a little pregame spice, one Iowa player bragged to the press that the Hawkeyes were known as the bullies of the Big Ten.

  “O-B got it right,” Zordich recalled, “when he said, ‘What happens to the bully when he gets punched in the mouth? He can’t take it! He’s not the bully anymore!’ So that was our plan.”

  The jacked-up Lions scored on their second drive, and their third, their fifth, their sixth, and their eighth, to go up 31–0 just twenty-seven seconds into the second half. When the game ended, 38–14, the Big Ten playground was looking for a new bully.