“There are a lot of good, smart, young coaches in the Big Ten. Urban Meyer is one. They’re going to be a dominant force at Ohio State for years to come—and Dave’s going back to the Domino’s days, as Stephen Colbert said, of putting ketchup on cardboard and selling it as pizza. Branding will not fool the fans forever. No matter how much you build the brand, if you don’t have the product, sooner or later it gets you.”
Even if it does, the expense of it all has stunned Brandon’s predecessor, too.
While Bill Martin has steadfastly kept his silence after leaving office in 2010, Brandon has spoken critically, publicly, and frequently of the previous administration.
Soon after Brandon was hired, he often boasted to audiences that he planned to let a third of the 275 employees he inherited go, and within a year and a half he had accomplished his goal. Because almost all of them had signed “nondisparagement” clauses in their buyouts, Brandon knew if he stopped short of mentioning names, he could speak freely without being challenged from those he was disparaging.
Of the eighty-five employees who were no longer with the department, “some of them have been natural retirements,” Brandon said to an audience in June of 2012. “Some of them have self-selected to other places because maybe they resist change. That’s not good. We had other people that couldn’t perform at the level we needed. The skill level was not there to be able to carry out the change and the aspirations and expectations of our department.”
He replaced the eighty-five employees he let go, then hired an additional thirty-three, expanding his marketing department from three people to more than a dozen, and his development team from nine to twenty-eight full-time staffers, to create a total workforce of 308 employees.
“We’ve gone through a period of change that certainly results in a completely different organizational structure,” he told his audience. “We are much stronger.”
Why was the previous administration so weak, in his opinion? Because their attitude, he said, was simply that “We’re Michigan. We didn’t want to change. We were stuck in ‘This is the way we do things at Michigan.’ If we didn’t like the way things were going, we would just sing the fight song.”
This got a laugh, so Brandon repeated it often, but it also got back to those employees who had left, for various reasons. I have talked with more than a dozen of them, and several people still in the department, who predictably feel unappreciated each time Brandon’s public comments about the previous administration show up in the press.
(Both those who have already left and those who are still working in the department insisted on anonymity. Brandon himself declined my request for an interview, and did not allow anyone else in the department to speak to me, including staffers, coaches, and players.)
The former staffers often prefaced their comments by stressing that they were not targeting Brandon, but defending the record of the Martin administration, and their main concern was the future of the department.
To those ends, they almost uniformly pointed out that their team left Brandon some $400 million in capital improvements—in the form of fourteen state-of-the-art buildings, both new and renovated, including the Big House—plus about $10 million in annual operating surpluses and over $50 million in the reserve fund. Further, they generated the plans and the funds for the renovations to the basketball and hockey venues, which were completed after they left.
“From my perspective,” said one, who is not given to bold statements, “it’s hard to appreciate how positive the situation was that Dave inherited. In the history of intercollegiate athletics, has there ever been an AD who received the keys to a department that had all that?”
Another said, “Dave confuses disagreeing with being unwilling to change. If you’re not a yes-man, you better get your résumé ready. He has gotten rid of anyone who disagreed, and since he leads by fear and intimidation, there is no one there who is challenging any of his ideas. That can be very dangerous for the future of any organization.”
“For the record,” another added sardonically, “I cannot recall one person ever singing ‘The Victors’ as an administrative exercise.”
Thus, by the time I met with Bill Martin in early 2013, three years after he had stepped down, he was willing to make at least a few observations he had previously kept to himself.
“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.”
And that means keeping unnecessary expenses down—like marketing, and just about everything else that isn’t directly connected to the field.
“For all the talk of ‘return on investment,’ it isn’t that complicated,” said Martin, who has made many millions himself as one of Washtenaw County’s biggest real estate developers. “When you invest in the student-athletes, the facilities, in coaching, you see a return. The rest is for show.”
So why do it? Duderstadt has a theory:
“Brandon comes out of a CEO world—and even a million-dollar salary is chump change for those guys. So it has to be a personal payoff to be out in front of a crowd of one hundred thousand, cheering for you. You don’t get that as a CEO.”
You also don’t get to stand on the sidelines, chest-bump the players when they come off the field, and sign autographs standing next to Denard Robinson after the games.
“Brandon always says he’s ‘building the brand,’ ” Duderstadt says. But of what? Dave Brandon. That’s the brand he’s building.”
• • •
In the third quarter, the Gophers threatened to tie it up before Gardner hit Jeremy Gallon in the end zone to take a 21–7 lead. The Wolverines never looked back, finishing the job 35–13, to retain the Brown Jug.
The cameras focused on longtime equipment manager Jon Falk hauling an old-timey-looking trunk onto a table, and unlatching two locks to let the linemen pull out the 109-year-old trophy.
Brown Jugologist Greg Dooley provided a “very conservative” estimate that the Little Brown Jug would fetch anywhere between $15,000 to $25,000 on eBay—or roughly eighty thousand times the thirty cents Yost’s manager Thomas B. Roberts plunked down at the Minnesota dry-goods store in 1903. The value has multiplied so many times for one simple reason, and it’s not the Jug’s age, or its quality. It’s because a lot of people have cared a lot about the Little Brown Jug, for a very long time.
Judging by the smiles on the players passing the Jug around and hoisting it over their heads, however, they were not looking to sell it at any price.
CHAPTER 19
THE MUDBOWL AND THE BIG HOUSE
Friday, November 9, 2012: The Wolverines returned to Ann Arbor with the Little Brown Jug on board, a bowl-eligible 6-3 record, a 4-1 mark in the Big Ten, and a decent shot at winning the Legends Division. They had lost to Nebraska, but Nebraska had already lost to Ohio State. One more loss for the Huskers—who had to come from behind to beat Michigan State, 28–24, the previous week and were hosting an improving Penn State squad that weekend—and Michigan would take the division lead with only two games left.
But Michigan’s next game was against a resurgent Northwestern squad, one that came to the game with a 7-2 record, its only blemishes being late losses to Penn State and Nebraska. If the Wildcats could beat the Wolverines this weekend, they’d also have a crack at the division crown. The loser of this game would, however, effectively be out of the running.
In the old days, this wasn’t a contest. In Schembechler’s twenty-one years as Michigan’s head coach, he lost to every Big Ten team at
least once, except one: Northwestern. But the Wildcats had beaten Michigan four times in their last thirteen games, almost a third. With Pat Fitzgerald in his seventh year, the Wildcats had the kind of stability that Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State could only envy.
• • •
That Friday I walked down State Street to see my two favorite barbers, Jerry Erickson at Coach & Four, and Red Stolberg at State Street Barber Shop. Both shops always do good business before a home game, but they seemed unusually busy.
Erickson clued me in: “Mom and dad are coming!” he said. “Parents Weekend! Gotta get cleaned up, especially if they want to get taken out to the big steak house and get wined and dined!” The students filling his seats nodded and grinned.
And how did Erickson’s customers feel after their team had kept the Jug? “Everybody’s happy!” Jerry said. “Northwestern’s not bad, but we’ve got the home-field advantage. Not gonna let the home crowd down. Not on Parents Weekend!”
“They got a little confidence now, and a little momentum—and they’ll do it. Go Blue!”
I walked a few doors down the street to see his cousin Red Stolberg, whose outlook tends to be more circumspect. But like everyone else, he was happy to have the Jug in town, along with the parents.
“Opening Day, Homecoming, Parents Weekend, a good rivalry game—it all makes a difference,” he said, pointing to the young men waiting for their haircuts. “I see business go up because mom’s coming up for the game! Got to get a trim. Got a lot of guys coming up the past few days for that.”
Ann Arbor’s Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates that a good football weekend pumps $10 million into the local ecomony—and that doesn’t include Michigan’s take, which approaches that figure from stadium revenue alone.
The buzz Stolberg was hearing, however, was not about the football team, but the men’s basketball team, which had just been ranked fifth in the preseason polls.
“Fans are kind of excited about the team,” he said, “but they’ve also got more people complaining about the basketball seats—tickets cost more, you get moved if you don’t donate enough, all that. A lot of the old guard, folks who’ve been going to the games for years, rain or shine, they’re getting moved by the big-money folks, the corporations. I know a lot of guys turned in their tickets. They ain’t happy!”
If the situation for season-ticket holders at the Big House was getting tighter—with higher ticket prices, seat licenses, and the like—it was nothing compared to what the basketball regulars were dealing with.
One of them is my accountant, Gary Rogow, who earned his bachelor’s degree from Michigan and had purchased basketball season tickets for three decades—including a lot of lean years, when attendance was down because of poor coaching, NCAA sanctions, and the economy, when only the hard-core fans kept coming. Rogow is a pretty calm, studied individual—an accountant, in other words—and I’d never seen him worked up about anything until I asked him about his basketball tickets.
In football, he pointed out, so long as you’re willing to pay more for your tickets, you can keep them. “Your money was as good as the next guy’s money,” he said. “Just because someone was a bigger donor didn’t mean he could take your seats. You had the right of first refusal. Loyalty was rewarded.”
In basketball, the opposite was suddenly true. Your choice of seats was entirely dependent on Michigan’s new “priority points” system, which gives 20 points for a U-M degree, 40 points for a varsity letter, and 1 point for every year you’ve bought season tickets. That sounds pretty good, until you learn they also give 1 point for every $100 you “donate.” Thus, if you graduated from Michigan, earned a varsity letter, and bought your season tickets for twenty years, you could still be surpassed in the priority-point pecking order by someone who never went to U-M or earned a letter or attended a game, once they donate more than $8,000. Many were willing to spend that much—and much, much more.
“Donors are far more important than you,” Rogow said. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve been buying season tickets for twenty years, even when the team was horrible and Crisler was empty, and they have never been to a U of M basketball game in their entire lives. A two-thousand-dollar donation to the athletic department gets you as many priority points as twenty consecutive years of buying season basketball tickets. They can buy eight seats—including yours. Who says you can’t put a price on loyalty?”
At the Michigan athletic department, they’ve calculated the exchange down to the dollar.
“The athletic department’s attitude is ‘We don’t care how many years you sat there. But thanks for sticking with us until now. Good-bye!’
“I could go on,” Rogow concluded, “but what’s the point?”
There are a few points, actually. The first: Rogow is far from alone, but many other loyal fans cannot afford to keep their tickets or have chosen not to.
“Just because you can charge them more,” Bill Martin told me, “doesn’t mean you should.
“What you want to do—and we said this from my first day—is graduate your student-athletes, make sure everyone is representing the university in a highly ethical manner, run winning programs—because that’s part of our DNA—and pay our own way.
“How you do that,” he added, paraphrasing the philosophy that Michigan’s athletic department had followed for over a century, “is pay all your bills, invest in first-class facilities and coaches, endow scholarships, have a little reserve to protect the future, and never be a burden on the institution, so the cash can flow uphill” (to the university’s central administration for need-based scholarships).
“You’re not there to ring up the cash to the nth degree. It’s a nonprofit model!”
That’s why, 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 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.
• • •
If you’re running a Fortune 500 company, virtually every expense and every decision can be justified by your company’s profitability.
Brandon requires reporters who cover Michigan athletics to get approval from his office before contacting players’ parents and their high school coaches, who have no affiliation with the university, or the reporters will get their press passes pulled. Under Brandon, the staff frequently calls reporters to chastise them for printing what they perceive to be negative stories, or simply unflattering statistics. And the staff delays Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as long as possible, charge far more than their peer institutions for each request, an
d then provide as little information as possible—including basic data like coaches’ contracts. (In fairness to the athletic department, The Michigan Daily’s Stephanie Steinberg’s in-depth investigation revealed that Michigan’s central administration ranked last of the five Big Ten institutions she studied on all those counts.)
“Every interview and press conference the [athletic] department sets up is presented as a huge favor, not just them doing their jobs,” one beat writer told me, echoing the sentiments of his peers. “They show amazing contempt for the media—and really free speech itself.”
When Brandon’s staff makes Indiana basketball fans wearing red shirts leave the Michigan student section; when he charges tens of thousands of dollars for archived footage available in U-M’s libraries for virtually nothing; and when he regularly attends Executive Officer meetings to which he is not invited, he is merely making sound marketing decisions—for a corporation.
Controlling the message, protecting the brand, and accessing power are pillars of the successful American executive. It’s less clear that those practices reflect the values of a public university.
But when he seems to go out of his way to alienate the football lettermen by eliminating the fifty to one hundred tickets the department always kept on hand for former players to purchase at full price for individual games; or when he takes over their annual Chili and Cornbread pregame tailgate and moves it from the Big House plaza to the indoor football building; or when he tries to usurp “Victors Night” from the lettermen, which they quietly underwrite without asking for anything in return—it’s not clear why even a corporate executive would do those things.
But it does establish that he, and he alone, is in charge—and there’s surely managerial merit in that.
Of course, the fans can rightly say those are the problems of the press and the former players. None of those things directly affect the fans’ experience. But ticket prices do.
Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football Page 34
