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

by Bacon, John U.

  “Sitting there, you’re in a state of just complete—I don’t want to say vulnerability—but you’re just completely broken,” Mauti remembered. “Defenseless. All your walls, emotionally, physically, spiritually—they’re gone.

  “I knew inevitably I was going to have to look Coach O’Brien in the eye. I knew that was going to be hard to do.”

  When O’Brien walked in, then stuck his hand out, Mauti saw his coach’s hand was shaking. O’Brien opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out, and tears started coming down.

  “I was relatively composed until that point,” Mauti said. “I don’t remember the exact way he put it—but his voice was shaking, and he said, ‘I’ve been around some special players, and you’re one of the best I’ve ever coached.’ We hugged. He was about to say something else, but he couldn’t take any more, and he walked out.

  “He left and I’m thinking, ‘That’s my head coach—and he’s crying.’

  “I was thinking about the last eight months, and how far we’ve come, from talking to him on the phone in January [after O’Brien had been named Paterno’s successor], to this. If you told me we’d be crying in each other’s arms in November, I’d have said . . . ”

  Mauti looked away, shaking his head, unable to finish the sentence.

  • • •

  While I was driving back down I-96 and toward US 23 from East Lansing as dusk approached, I turned on the radio to catch some scores around the country. But instead of scores, I heard this: sources indicated that on Monday the Big Ten would announce the addition of both Maryland and Rutgers to the league.

  No matter what line of work you’re in, you probably hear plenty of rumors every week, usually false. Sports writing seems to generate more than most, so any experienced reporter has to develop a healthy skepticism. Most of what you hear on sports-talk radio and TV shows barely raises an eyebrow. We become hard to surprise, and harder still to shock.

  But hearing this, I actually shook my head. I turned up the volume, leaned forward, and locked my focus onto the announcer. I could not have heard that correctly.

  Once I realized I had, I concluded, No way that’s true.

  My brain ticked off all the reasons why. The Big Ten is defined by the Great Lakes states—even Pennsylvania touches Lake Erie, and State College feels Midwestern—and to an extent, the Great Lakes states are defined by the Big Ten. The conference is the oldest and most stable by far, and conservative in almost every respect.

  When it’s added schools—Michigan State, Penn State, Nebraska—it has looked for a good fit, first and foremost. A league that could go almost two decades before adding a twelfth team was not a league that rushed itself into desperate decisions.

  Just three months earlier, Jim Delany himself had told me, “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.”

  If the league was going to add more teams, which didn’t seem out of the question, Missouri and Notre Dame were most often mentioned. But Maryland—a charter member of the ACC in 1953, the 2002 NCAA basketball champion, and longtime rival of Virginia, Duke, and North Carolina? The Terrapins’ football team was occasionally decent—but only occasionally. They were an ACC school, to the core.

  As for Rutgers, a Big East member since 1991, that made even less sense, on every level—except one: the New York TV market.

  It was even stranger that none of us in the press box had heard a thing—which was exceedingly rare for big news like that.

  But because it came from a major outlet, I couldn’t simply dismiss it.

  By Sunday, of course, everyone knew it was true.

  • • •

  The next day, Monday, November 19, 2012, Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany held a press conference in College Park, Maryland, to announce that the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors had unanimously voted to admit Maryland into the Big Ten, effective July 1, 2014. The following day, Delany would make the same announcement at Rutgers.

  University of Maryland president Wallace Loh opened with a statement that was refreshingly frank for a contemporary college leader:

  “Membership in the Big Ten enables us to truly guarantee the financial stability of Maryland athletics for a long, long time. It’s never just about the money, but somebody has to pay the bills. And the issue at hand is the long-term viability of Maryland athletics.”

  Although Loh knew the decision would likely be unpopular with Maryland’s faculty, alumni, and students—which is one reason why the school’s leaders ignored the Open Meetings Act and met privately when discussing their decision, for which they were later sued—from his position, it was not hard to see the move as rational, even necessary.

  “I came to this university two years ago and discovered there were deficits going on for several years, and nobody told me about it, and I was left with the job of having to cut teams because we’re required to balance our budget, and I swore this would never happen again,” Loh told the student newspaper. “Not to me, not to my successor. It was the most painful experience and I still get nightmares. . . . It put at risk the entire enterprise of Maryland athletics.

  “I did it to guarantee the long-term future of Maryland athletics.”

  What was less clear was why the Big Ten wanted Maryland, whose athletic department was running a deficit that stood at $7.8 million a year and was growing fast, and whose average football attendance had fallen from fifty-two thousand to thirty-six thousand in 2012. (According to the Newark Star-Ledger, Rutgers athletics was in even worse shape, running a $26.8 million deficit in 2010–11 alone.)

  The Big Ten, Loh said, was expanding to protect itself against a national phenomenon. “Attendance [at games] among college-aged students is dropping. The reason is because this generation is completely wired, and they are getting their education and entertainment on tablets and mobile devices. Everyone thinks you make your money in seats. You make it on eyeballs on a screen.”

  In other words, if ticket sales went down, TV ratings would make up for it. This equation had a lot of assumptions baked into it—from why attendance among college-aged students was dropping, to how the colleges could make up for it—but President Loh was surely correct in assessing why the Big Ten wanted to add Maryland and Rutgers: TV money.

  Celebrated columnist Dave Kindred, writing in the Washington Post, sized it up this way: “Some universities had played for most of a century in leagues dictated by geography and shared values. They abandoned those alliances for bloated groupings designed to produce football revenue in multiples of anything basketball can do.”

  If there was another motive, no one mentioned it.

  If the Big Ten truly was just a business, and its fans mere shareholders, the fans would have been content with that explanation and possibly thrilled. Business was booming.

  But they’re not shareholders, they’re fans—and they proved it with their swift, severe, and virtually unanimous reaction.

  Jonathan Chait, a Michigan alum who still writes occasionally on Big Ten sports from his perch as a political writer for New York magazine, didn’t mince words:

  “College football expansion is all about money. On this everybody agrees, and so the Big Ten’s additions of Maryland and Rutgers are being met mainly with angry denunciations of their greed, along with a sprinkling of cynical congratulations for their financial savvy.”

  Chait didn’t bother addressing the greed—it spoke for itself—and quickly set aside the not-insignificant fact that college athletic departments are legally nonprofit organizations, which don’t pay taxes or shareholders, to disassemble the surprisingly weak business rationale:

  “Money is obviously vital to college athletics as a threshold question. If you’re running an athletic department, you need to bring in enough revenue to fund your operations. But beyon
d that threshold, you don’t need more money. Universities are nonprofit institutions. There are no stockholders. At some point, more revenue simply means that athletic directors need to find more things to spend their windfall on.”

  They will tell you it’s the cost of doing business—but what’s the business, exactly? When 60 Minutes interviewed Dave Brandon that fall, he said the “business model is broken.” What he failed to grasp was that it is not supposed to be a business in the first place. After all, what business doesn’t have to pay shareholders, partners, owners, taxes, or the star attractions, the players and the band?

  This mind-set seems particularly true of the contemporary CEOs-as-athletic directors, for whom no amount is enough.

  “As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, almost two hundred years ago, “one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”

  More recently, Homer Simpson told his boss, Monty Burns, “You’re the richest man I know.”

  “Yes,” Burns replied. “But you know, I’d trade it all for just a little more.”

  And that’s the problem. Like Asian carp invading your freshwater paradise, once the money-grubbers take over, their appetites are insatiable, and they are impossible to remove. The corporate approach has proven to be quite appropriate for running corporations, but less so for running our schools, our museums, and our national parks. If our only counter is “You can’t stop progress,” then we should sell our museums to mall developers, open up our national parks to the highest bidders—be they billionaires looking to build vacation homes or oil companies looking to drill—and turn Gettysburg over to Disney, so they can “maximize the brand” and give all visitors a “wow” experience.

  Chait’s more damning argument was that even the promised profits for which these acrobatics were being performed, might not be realized at all. The motive behind the expansion was strictly financial, with the rewards to come almost entirely from cable television. Maryland’s and Rutgers’s media markets—DC and New York—would greatly increase the number of households that could be forced to pay their cable companies a little extra to carry the Big Ten Network. Not fans, mind you, or even viewers, but involuntary subscribers who don’t give a damn about the BTN or the league it covers—most of whom will not even be aware they’re paying for it.

  Cynical, sure. But, more surprisingly, potentially stupid.

  “Bundled cable television pricing is not going to last forever,” Chait wrote, “and possibly not very long at all. There is already a revolution in video content under way that is going to render the cable television bundle model obsolete. When that revolution has finished, the Big Ten will realize it pulled apart its entire identity to grab a profit stream that has disappeared.”

  Chait then addressed the fans on their terms: “You can’t manufacture tradition, and tradition is the only thing college football has to offer. Without tradition, college football is just an NFL minor league. Big Ten football mainly consists on a week-to-week basis of games like Michigan versus Minnesota and Illinois versus Wisconsin.

  “Those games have meaning to the fans in ways outsiders can’t grasp. The series have gone on for a century. They often have funny old trophies. Every game is lodged into a long historical narrative of cherished (or cursed) memory. Replacing those games with some other equally good (or, as the case may be, not good) program is like snuffing out your family dog and replacing it with some slightly better-trained breed. It is not the same thing.”

  If Chait was critical, he looked like Mr. Congeniality compared to MGoBlog founder Brian Cook, whose interview with Spencer Hall on the popular national website Every Day Should Be Saturday was titled “The Big Ten Expands: A Q&A with Angerbrian Ragecook.”

  “I guess it’s a play for television sets, as everyone who thinks more money automatically justifies any activity keeps telling me,” Cook said. “As if I should care about television sets in Maryland funding even more unnecessary spending. . . . At some point the money went from nice to destructive, and this is the point at which money bursts through your chest.”

  Hall replied, “There is literally nothing in my heart but despair when I imagine Maryland/Iowa playing a football game.”

  “The inevitable sixteen-team end game isn’t even a conference anymore,” Cook added. “You get one game against the other division. One!”

  “I just don’t understand the choices,” Hall piled on. The DC and New York markets, he wrote, “literally WILL NEVER CARE ABOUT COLLEGE FOOTBALL.”

  “They don’t have to care,” Cook pointed out. “They just have to not watch the BTN they’re paying for. For some reason. I would love to see New Jersey cable operators flat out refuse to carry the BTN.”

  “That’s what I don’t get,” Hall agreed. “You’re paying to ship food that will just rot in the warehouses.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW, THIS IS WHAT WE’LL BE TALKING ABOUT”

  Coach O’Brien called the Mautis on Sunday after the Indiana game to let them know that no one expected them to bring the food Sunday night for the staff’s weekly family dinner—or even show up. But the Mautis wouldn’t hear it.

  After the Cajun cuisine was served to great acclaim, “Rich thanked us for making it a great season,” strength coach Craig Fitzgerald recalled. “Bill said, ‘No no no. We thank you for your son. Without him, we never would have gotten here.’ ”

  Throughout the weekend, hours after the Indiana game, Mike Mauti’s phone blew up with calls and texts from teammates, former players—including Penn State legends like Paul Posluszny and Franco Harris for a half-hour talk—and even Peyton Manning, whose father, Archie, had played with Rich Mauti in New Orleans and remains a family friend.

  After the senior Manning called Mike Mauti on Sunday, he texted him Monday morning: “Life’s a big shit sandwich. You either take a bite, or you starve. You’ve had some bad breaks, but life will be good. Keep the faith.”

  “Couldn’t have said it any better,” Mauti said.

  Zordich nodded. “That’s what we’ve all been doing, all year.”

  But Mauti knew he had probably just played his last football game.

  At four thirty on a cold Tuesday morning, three hours before sunrise, the two Mauti men—father and son—headed out for the four-hour drive to Pittsburgh to find out. Because Mike had been surrounded by people nonstop since he tore his ACL, “I was looking forward to that drive so much,” he told me. “I so badly needed to be alone with my dad. One-on-one time with him is very precious. The older I get, the more I appreciate it.”

  Despite playing lacrosse and football at Penn State and special teams for the Saints, Rich Mauti never blew a knee. Yet, Mike knew, no one would understand what he was going through better than his dad.

  “By the time I got in the car that morning,” Mike said, “I’d already come to grips with the fact that I may not play again, ever. That’s when I started to look at what the future would look like without football. Football is all I’ve known. That was sobering.

  “My dad was as spent as I was. And I think what killed him is the idea that this was the way it was going to end. At four thirty in the morning, driving in pitch dark, there wasn’t a dull moment in that car, and not a dry eye for two and a half hours. And that’s really when I just let out all my thoughts.”

  Mike told his father, “I’m okay with not playing again. I’ve done everything that I could.” Mike was not thinking just about football, but everything his team had done for the program and Penn State itself. They had given everything they had.

  “Since last November,” he told his dad, “I made up my mind, this is what I wanted, this is what I was committing to, all year. I was so proud to be a part of it, and the people I did it with. The friendships that I’ve made—the seniors, the coaches—that’s what made it worth it.”

  “Your r
elationship with Z,” Rich said, “makes the last five years worth it.”

  “That really kinda hit me,” Mike told me. “That is what it’s all about. That’s what lasts a lot longer than a title: the relationships.”

  When the Penn State players had the bells and whistles of big-time college football stripped away by the NCAA sanctions, they discovered something better: they believed deeply in the ideals of the student-athlete experience that the NCAA had always espoused—and by the end of the season, they had proven that they believed in them more than the NCAA itself.

  When Mike Mauti, a likely second-round NFL draft pick, blew out a knee for the third time and faced a future without football, that’s when he fully realized the student-athlete experience was enough by itself. He did not need an NFL contract to justify his effort and experience.

  “That’s when I got peace, is what I’d call it, when I finally got one-on-one time with my dad. I’ll never forget that car ride for the rest of my life.”

  By the time they arrived in Pittsburgh, Mike said, “Basically, I had hung my helmet up before I even walked into Dr. Bradley’s office. I think both of us did. But my hand was still hanging on to the mask, just in case.”

  While they waited for Dr. Bradley to come back with the MRI, the Mautis had already accepted that Mike’s football career might be over. But then Dr. Bradley came back and told them, “The MCL does not need to be operated on. It will heal itself, and the ACL is a standard reconstruction, with a cadaver’s ligament.”

  Mike and his dad just looked at each other, stunned.

  “I said, ‘Whoa!’ ” Mike recalled. “With that news, I took my helmet off the hook and brought it back with me. I wasn’t done.

  “That’s all I really needed to hear. ACL rehab is a bitch—and I know exactly what it is. It’s just tedious. It takes time. Your whole quad shuts down and atrophies immediately. Your leg is literally like Jell-O. But, hey, the third time’s the charm. In a sick way, I’ve mastered this.”