John U. Bacon

It’s been five days since the Super Bowl, just enough time to give us a little perspective on the whole thing. Was it a football game? A concert? A competition for the Clio Award? Or some bizarrely American combination of all three?

Let’s start with the least important: The football game. You might have caught bits of it, squeezed between the ads and the show. How could you tell when the game was on? Those were the people who ran really fast, and wore clothes.

For the Super Bowl’s first 30 years, most of the games were boring blowouts. I suspect even the players can’t recall the scores of those snoozers.

But the ads and the halftime shows were hard to forget, and often featured a member of the Jackson family having his hair ignited or her wardrobe mysteriously malfunction.

But lately, it’s been the other way around. Ten of the past 16 games have been barn burners – and the rest of the stuff is putting us to sleep.

This year’s Super Sunday delivered another exciting game, showcasing two big-time quarterbacks battling to the last second. The game even featured a first: one team scored a touchdown against its will. The New York Giants had the ball on New England’s 6-yard line, but they wanted to kill more time off the clock before they scored, so New England wouldn’t have any time left to mount a comeback.

But the Patriots didn’t want the Giants to do that, so they got out of the way like matadors avoiding a raging bull, and let Ahmad Bradshaw run into the endzone untouched. But he didn’t want to score, so he stopped on the one yard line, turned around, all but begging the Patriots to tackle him, and fell backwards into the endzone like Jacques Cousteau flipping into the ocean.

It was almost as strange as the halftime show, when Madonna put forth even less effort.

As a commentator, one of my favorite subjects to address is anything but Madonna. I’ve always considered her a mediocre singer and songwriter, whose main talent is somehow becoming rich and famous with less actual talent than the karaoke singers at your local bowling alley.

So it’s given me great pleasure to ignore her. But this time, I just can’t.

I used to think the worst Super Bowl halftime show had to be the one in 1989, when an Elvis impersonator and magician named Elvis Presto – get it? – managed to both befuddle and bore the crowd at the same time. Which, it now occurs to me, is actually a pretty difficult trick.

But no, Elvis Presto’s musical magic show was positively scintillating compared to Madonna’s performance. I discovered something worse than Madonna singing, and that’s Madonna lip syncing her way through her worn out repertoire and dull dancing. Let us never speak of it again.

The most authentic element of this year’s Super Sunday extravaganza – when the team with the ball did not want to score and the team that didn’t have the ball did not want to stop them, and the women paid millions to sing didn’t sing at all – was an advertisement, of all things, that they’d filmed weeks earlier.

Once again, Chrysler came through with the best two minutes of the entire event, this time thanks to Clint Eastwood.

When Eastwood said, “People are out of work and they’re hurting, and they’re all wondering what they’re gonna do to make a comeback. People of Detroit…almost lost everything,” he delivered the most honest line of the day – then followed that up with an equally convincing declaration: “We find a way through tough times. And if we can’t find a way, then we’ll make one…. This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and, when we do, the world is gonna hear the roar of our engines.”

When he finished, I was so riveted I was ready to do some actual riveting.

So, a year from now, if you want to see a heartfelt performance, you’ll have to skip the game and the halftime show, and wait for the Chrysler ad.

For the second year in a row, no one did it better.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” 

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Once in a while something happens that is so unusual, even those who don’t normally pay attention have to stop and take notice.

Halley’s Comet, for example, only comes along once every 75 years. Man has landed on the moon just six times in the entire history of the universe. And Lindsay Lohan goes to jail – no, wait, that happens almost every week.

Well, this week, Detroit sports fans got Halley’s Comet, a moon landing, and a clean and sober Lindsay Lohan all wrapped up into one: The Tigers clinched the American League Central Division, and even more shockingly, the Lions won their first three games.

That’s right: It’s September 30, and both the Tigers and the Lions are in first place. Go find a newspaper – if your town still has one – pull out the standings, and get them laminated. This might not happen again in our lifetimes.

That’s no exaggeration. By 1934, Detroit’s three big league teams – the Lions, the Tigers and the Red Wings – had never won a championship in their combined 45 attempts. But that year, the red-hot Tigers won 101 games, and faced the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series.

When the Cardinals’ star pitcher, Dizzy Dean, heard the Tigers manager say, “We think we can win,” he replied, “If they thinkin’, they already licked.” Apparently so. Dizzy Dean’s team won in seven games.

The next year, 1935, marked the nadir of the Depression, with the world slipping toward war. The Motor City needed a distraction, and the Tigers provided a great one when they won their first World Series. A couple months later, the Lions won their first NFL title. And just four months after that, the Red Wings won their first Stanley Cup. They called Detroit – hang on to your hats here – the City of Champions.

No city has pulled the trifecta since – and Detroit hasn’t come close. In the ’70s, no Detroit team won a single title, a glorious 0-for-40 stretch. No more “City of Champions.” People started calling the Lions the Lie-downs, the Red Wings the Dead Things, and the Tigers – well, everyone pretty much agreed just calling them the Tigers was bad enough. Hard times were these.

The Tigers were even worse in the nineties, but topped it in 2003 by losing 119 games, an American League record. But manager Jim Leyland, an old salty dog with a gray mustache yellowed from years of chain-smoking, led them back to the World Series in 2006, and he could do it again this year.

The Tigers’ resurgence is surprising. The Lions return to respectability is positively shocking. The Lions are one of only two NFL teams who have failed to make it to every Super Bowl, and the only team in NFL history to lose all 16 games – a perfect mark that no one, by definition, can ever break.

What makes this story better are the long-suffering fans that have stuck with their teams during those down… decades – and the dynasties who own them.

The Ford family owns the Lions, and a large part of a certain car company. The Ilitches founded Little Caesar’s Pizza, and now own the Tigers and the Red Wings, too. Both families have invested heavily in the city, they have never threatened to move their teams to Nashville, and they desperately want their teams to win – though their teams haven’t always cooperated.

But this might be the year. Okay, the Pistons are almost as non-existent now as they were in 1935, but the Red Wings are as good as always, the Tigers have a real chance with the American League’s top pitcher, and the Lions – well, the Lions are undefeated. I can’t recall saying that in October – and tomorrow, you can.

No, these teams don’t solve Detroit’s problems. But they make people feel better, and they bring us together.

And if it all goes right, then maybe – just maybe – Detroit fans will party like it’s 1935.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the upcoming “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football,” due out Oct. 25. You can pre-order the book from Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor or on Amazon.com.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

Audio tape recording of the Feb. 17, 2009 Ann Arbor city council meeting – even though the Community Television Network video has gone missing, it's still possible to review what was said at the meeting. The Ann Arbor city clerk's office makes audio recordings of council meetings to ensure the accuracy of minutes. (Photo illustration by The Chronicle.)

For its proceedings, the Ann Arbor city council does not have a video replay rule.

But if it did, here’s the kind of play that might be reviewable: Did a city council-appointed board receive advice from the city’s financial quarterback in a way that, under ordinary rules of plain American English discourse, constitutes a recommendation that should be carried forward in a future board policy?

At issue is whether two seasons ago, back in February 2009, city of Ann Arbor CFO Tom Crawford recommended to the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority that the DDA have a policy to maintain a minimum fund balance as a reserve, and specifically, whether a minimum reserve amount was specified.

The question was important over the last two years in the course of negotiations between the DDA and the city about the contract under which the DDA manages Ann Arbor’s public parking system.

The remarks made by Crawford – which everyone seems to recall (albeit differently) – took place in plain view on the public field of play, at the Feb. 17, 2009 city council meeting.

What made the public conversation remarkable in the waning stages of contract negotiations, was that it was based on what the different players (including Crawford) recalled Crawford saying. Why not just take an approach familiar to the Big Ten college football conference, and review the tape to find out exactly what Crawford said?

That’s the approach The Chronicle took – even though we’d previously reported Crawford’s remarks from the Feb. 17, 2009 council meeting in paraphrase form, and our paraphrase was consistent with the recollection of DDA board members.

In April 2011, we learned that the video recording of the meeting, which originally aired on Community Television Network (CTN), no longer exists. [For a broader look at CTN, see "CTN: What's Our Vision for Local Television?"]

However, we were able eventually to follow up with a request made to the city under the Freedom of Information Act and obtain an audio recording of the meeting made by the city clerk’s office.

If I were asked as a head official to review the play, then in the parlance of the Big Ten, I think there’s indisputable audio evidence that in his remarks, Crawford passed a recommendation along to the DDA to implement at least a 15% minimum fund balance reserve policy.

I am not, of course, a head official.

Nevertheless, it’s worth laying out exactly what Crawford did say at that 2009 meeting just for the historical record. First, a bit of pre-game coverage in the form of some additional context.

Context for Caring About Fund Balances

The most recent context for the DDA’s concerns over its fund balances involved negotiations with the city of Ann Arbor about the contract under which the DDA manages the city’s public parking system. In May 2011, after two years of negotiating, the city and the DDA struck an 11-year deal, with an 11-year renewal option, under which the city would receive a 17% cut of gross revenues from the public parking system.

The DDA’s position during contract negotiations was essentially this: We would love to accommodate the city’s desire to receive as high a percentage of gross public parking revenue as possible; however, we can’t manage it, because our fund balance would fall too far below the level recommended by the city’s own chief financial officer.

DDA board members were relying on their recollection that CFO Tom Crawford had recommended, in February 2009, that the DDA enact a financial policy under which the DDA would maintain at least 15% of operating expenses (or perhaps more) in its fund balance as a reserve amount. The context of Crawford’s remarks on the evening of Feb. 17, 2009 was a city council decision on the issuance of bonds to build the Fifth Avenue underground parking structure.

The original site plan for the project, which the DDA is managing, included extending the deck under Fifth Avenue down to William Street. The idea was that an underground connection to any future development on the former YMCA lot – at the northwest corner of Fifth and William – would be a benefit. But at their Feb. 17, 2009 meeting, city councilmembers followed Crawford’s advice and voted to eliminate the extension of the garage down to Fifth Avenue.

Just as a side note, it’s possible to imagine that the city council might eventually decide, after construction of the underground garage is complete, that it’s still worth creating an underground connection from the garage to the west side of Fifth Avenue. That decision would not need to be based on speculation about future development on the former Y lot, which is now owned by the city. Rather, such a decision could instead be driven by the fact that the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority is planning to move its Blake Transit Center from the Fourth Avenue side to the Fifth Avenue side of the lot. It could make sense to eventually connect a newly situated BTC to the underground parking structure.

If that happens, I hope councilmember Carsten Hohnke – who currently represents Ward 5, where Jerusalem Garden restaurant owner Ali Ramlawi lives – delivers that news to Ramlawi: The business, located near the corner of Liberty and Fifth, would enjoy several more months of disruption as Fifth Avenue is broken up again.

Verbatim Quotation from Feb. 17, 2009

It would be fitting for Hohnke to deliver that news, because it was Hohnke who provided the prompt for Crawford’s remarks that led to the downsizing of the project.

Carsten Hohnke: … Mr. Crawford to speak to us, in particular I’d like to ask, from your extensive review of the 10-year plan for the DDA, if we look at the site plan as currently proposed, extending down to underneath Fifth Ave. to William Street, what is your assessment of the financial impact on the DDA, together with the other projects that are in its pipeline?

Mayor John Hieftje: Everyone may not be aware that Mr. Crawford is the city’s chief financial officer.

Tom Crawford: Thanks. I spent some time with the DDA and reviewed their financial projections and you know one of the things I noticed was that they don’t have a target or minimum reserve policy.  So, as I looked at it, I use a minimum reserve of 15 to 20 percent, and as I looked at this project and everything else on their plate, I don’t, in my view, the project as proposed is not affordable, with the plans that they have. So I think that there are alternatives that are more affordable, but as proposed, I did not find it to be affordable. [.mp3 file of 90-minute chunk of the Feb. 17, 2009 city council meeting. The audio cassette tape was converted to digital format by Russell Video.]

Was That a Completed Forward Pass?

Based on the exact words uttered by Crawford and the context in which they were uttered, I think it’s both reasonable and correct for the members of the DDA staff and the board to have received Crawford’s comments as (1) a recommendation that they should have a minimum reserve fund balance policy, and that (2) the level of that minimum reserve should be 15-20%.

It’s true that Crawford did not say, “Tonight here before you in front of everyone on live TV, I am hereby recommending that the DDA establish a minimum reserve policy at a level of 15% of operating expenses.”

However, when the city’s chief financial officer highlights the absence of a minimum reserve policy at a public meeting, I think it’s impossible for the DDA not to take that as a recommendation to establish such a policy. Further, when the chief financial officer specifically calls out a 15-20% minimum reserve level as the metric used for concluding that a planned expenditure was “unaffordable,” then it’s also difficult for the DDA to establish some minimum reserve level lower than 15%.

Based on the actual text of Crawford’s remarks, I think it’s clear enough that the DDA’s understanding here was correct. In a mathematics textbook, this is the point where the author would write, “The proof is left to the reader.”

But if this were football, not math, then we would need to add the extra point. So consider a different scenario, which I contend is perfectly analogous: A wide-receiver asks the strength and conditioning coach to evaluate his training plan.

Suppose the coach says: “One of the things I noticed in reviewing your training plan was that you don’t have minimum target heart rates for any of these training activities. To get a target heart rate, I take an athlete’s resting heart rate and add 15-20% to it, and based on your current resting heart rate, I don’t think you have the cardiovascular fitness to complete all these training miles. If you reduced the miles you’re running by eliminating this extra loop down Fifth Avenue, your training plan would be more achievable.”

I think it’s difficult for the football player not to understand those remarks as a recommendation to establish a minimum target heart rate for training exercise – by adding 15-20% to his resting heart rate and monitoring his own performance in that way.

Recollections Versus Replay

What was frustrating to me as I watched the conversation between the city and the DDA unfold earlier this year was not so much the fact of the “completed forward pass,” which I already knew to be true based on The Chronicle’s reporting.

What I found frustrating was the lack of willingness on the part of any public official to insist that the conversation be based on fact, and not on someone’s recollection.

I first noticed this reliance on recollection during a meeting between the city council and the DDA’s mutually beneficial committees, when public services area administrator Sue McCormick reported that Crawford’s recollection of his remarks was different from the DDA’s.

At the council’s April 19 meeting, when pressed by councilmember Sandi Smith (Ward 1), who’s also a DDA board member, Crawford himself stated his recollection was different:

Smith also asked Crawford to reconcile his statements made around the time the city council was authorizing bonds for the DDA to build the South Fifth Avenue underground parking garage (now under construction) – statements to the effect that a fund balance of 12-15% or perhaps 15-18% would be appropriate. She asked him point blank what the difference was between then and now: What has changed?

Crawford began by saying that he didn’t recall giving the DDA a minimum fund balance that they needed to have.

Note that Smith’s recollection here is also not perfect. Mayor John Hieftje contributed to the murkiness of the conversation at a special DDA board meeting held on May 20, 2011, which The Chronicle reported this way: “[Hieftje] contended that Crawford remembered his remarks about fund balances a little differently from what [Sandi] Smith had portrayed.”

Then at the council’s June 20 meeting, Crawford – in an exchange with Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) – said that he did recall a conversation with the DDA in which he suggested that some kind of minimum fund balance policy should be adopted: “Crawford said he did recall suggesting the DDA adopt a fund balance policy around the time when the underground parking garage was being discussed.” In that exchange with Kunselman, Crawford did not address the issue of whether he’d recommended a level to set the minimum fund balance.

It’s fine to have a different or an incomplete recollection. But there’s no need for our elected and appointed leaders to rely on recollection when a replay is available. Certainly the folks who play football in Michigan Stadium understand as much.

In closing, here’s a transcription from a speech given in Michigan Stadium a couple of years ago, not about football [emphasis added]:

But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and our beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from. Now this requires us to agree on a certain set of facts to debate from. That’s why we need a vibrant and thriving news business that is separate from opinion makers and the talking heads. [applause ~5 seconds] That’s why we need an educated citizenry that values hard evidence and not just assertion. [applause ~5 seconds] As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” [audience laughter]

Yes, President Barack Obama got a laugh from the commencement crowd that year. But when we can’t consistently get this right, even on a local level, it’s really not all that funny.

About the writer: Dave Askins is editor and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle. The Chronicle could not survive without regular voluntary subscriptions to support our coverage of local government and civic affairs. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Forty-five years ago, the Super Bowl … wasn’t even the Super Bowl. They called it the NFL-AFL Championship Game, until one of the founders renamed it after watching his grandson play with a “High Bouncing Ball” – a super ball. Super ball – Super Bowl. Get it? And thus, an artificial event was born.

Tickets were just fifteen bucks for that first game – and they barely sold half of those, leaving some 40,000 empty seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum.

A 30-second ad cost only $42,000 – and they weren’t any different than the ads they showed the previous weekend. The half-time show featured three college marching bands – including one you might have seen from the University of Michigan.

Over the next couple decades, of course, the event became a veritable national holiday. Tickets now sell for thousands of dollars, and ads for millions. The game attracts more than 100 million viewers in the U.S. alone.

The hoopla surrounding the game has exploded, too. Instead of sticking to college marching bands for halftime, they branched out into other forms of entertainment. For reasons I’ll never understand, that included four appearances by a group called “Up With People!” Or, as the Simpsons called them, “those clean-cut young go-getters, Hooray for Everything!’”

“Up with People!”? As opposed to what, exactly? “Down With Humans!”? Besides, I don’t think we can afford to be that conclusive. “Up With People” sounds great – so long as we’re not talking all people.

One year they devoted the show to America’s 200th anniversary, followed by the 100th anniversary of Hollywood, the 40th anniversary of the Peanuts’ comic strip, then the 25th anniversary of … the Super Bowl itself. You kind of got the feeling they were running out of ideas.

That all changed in 1993, when Michael Jackson performed the half-time show, and his hair caught on fire, or his sister suffered a ‘”wardrobe malfunction” or maybe they conducted the OJ trial live on the 50-yard line – I’m sorry, but these events have started to blur for me.

The point is, the half-time show became a big deal. Such a big deal, in fact, that the ratings were higher for the show, than for the game. A survey showed most fans said they would rather miss a play than an ad. Style had officially triumphed over substance.

That might have been a good thing, because the game itself usually stunk. Of the first 30 Super Bowls, only seven – less than a quarter – were within a touchdown. But more than half the past 15 Super Bowls have been that close.

And that’s good, too, because now all the stuff around the game itself – the national anthem, the half-time shows, the ads – have become almost unwatchable.

On Sunday we heard Christina Aguilera butcher the Star Spangled Banner, which was bad enough. But then we heard the Black Eyed Peas butcher their own songs, which was even worse.

The only thing that matched the quality of the game – which was great, once again – was the now-famous Chrysler ad. It was as much about their car as it was about the city that spawned it. It certainly beat piling on the poor city, which every hack out there has already done. And it was better than the dopey old campaign, “Say Nice Things About Detroit.” Yes, and “Up With People!” too, while you’re at it.

No, the ad was authentic, it was serious, it was sincere. It was real.

When you look back at the checkered history of over-hyped Super Bowl games and shows, that understated ad stands out as something truly super.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN Magazine, among others. He is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” due out this fall through FSG. Bacon teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

The evolution of Green Bay Packers fan Zach London from 1997 to 2011.

Nicholas Dodman is an animal psychologist who wrote a book entitled, “The Dog Who Loved Too Much.” I haven’t read it, but the first chapter was described to me as follows: The author has a patient, a dog, who loves her owner too much. When the owner leaves the house each morning, she becomes so worried that he won’t return that she loses control of her bladder.

She paces around the house peeing on everything. When he finally comes home at 5 p.m., she is so overjoyed to see him that she throws up. The joy is so pervasive that she vomits constantly until he leaves again the next morning, at which point the bladder problem kicks in again.

That is how I feel about the Green Bay Packers.

It is a special kind of staggering love that only emotionally disturbed dogs and true sports devotees can experience. We soar, we suffer, and we soar again, and all of it is unhealthy.

Unlike most fanatics, I was not born into it.

For the first two decades of my life, I shared my family’s lack of interest in spectator sports. In fact, one of the first football games I ever watched was Super Bowl XXXI, when the Packers beat the New England Patriots. It was 1997, and I was the only Wisconsin kid I knew living in Providence, about 20 miles from Foxboro Stadium, where the Patriots play their home games. I thought it would be funny to pretend that I was a lifelong Packer backer, stranded deep within enemy territory.

Two weeks before the game, I ordered myself a Cheesehead hat. I drew a large sign for my door that read, “Brett Favre is Good at Football.” Then I called a few high school friends and asked them to help me out with some talking points. What are the back stories of our star players? Who’s in a contract year? What is the difference between a punt and a kickoff again?

The Patriots fans who watched the game with me were clearly irritated by the Cheesehead and the sign, but it was the talking points that really paid huge dividends.

Me: Did you know Green Bay’s Marco Rivera is the only active NFL player of Puerto Rican descent?
Pats fans: That’s great. I don’t care.
Me: I’ve always said that Dorsey Levens, our rushing back, gets stronger as the game goes on. Don’t you agree?
Pats fans: (Gritting teeth and trying to avoid eye contact.)
Me: Brett Favre sure came out like gangbusters tonight. Do you know that he spent 46 days in rehab last summer to get over his Vicodin addiction? He must have hated missing so much training camp.
Pats fans: Please shut up. Please please shut up.

As Favre took a knee to run out the clock in the fourth quarter, I looked around at all of the dejected faces in the room, and I felt absolutely great! I was 20 years old, and I finally discovered the delicious schadenfreude that drives so many sports fans. It was the closest thing I had ever experienced to being born again.

I haven’t missed a Packers game since then. That old Cheesehead hat is now brown and crumbly from being squeezed mightily every time a big play is needed. My wife Lauren and I do sit-ups whenever the Packers score any points, and if it’s a touchdown, we skip around in circles with our index fingers pointed at the ceiling and sing, “I Don’t Want to Work.” We have to do these things, you see, or they won’t score any more points. The only obscene language our children ever hear from their parents comes in the form of very loud interjections, often repeated several times in rapid succession, and only on Sundays between 1-4 p.m. EST.

A few days from now, the Packers will play in Super Bowl XLV. Part of their success, no doubt, is due to my years of diligent Cheesehead-squeezing. For 60 football minutes, I will turn into The Dog Who Loved Too Much. When things are going badly, I will be tormented and incontinent. When they are going well, I will be dry-heaving in ecstasy. Hopefully, it will end on a high note, and I will continue to dry heave for many more months until the next time the Packers lose.

About the author: In his professional life, Zach London MD wields a Tromner hammer for the University of Michigan Health System. His creative and cultural life, besides the Hard Taco project, includes the Penny Seats Theater Company.

John U. Bacon

If it seems like the Detroit Lions have played on Thanksgiving since it became a national holiday, it’s because they actually started seven years earlier.

True, the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving in October of 1621, but the custom faded, resurfacing only when George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt promoted the idea as a national tonic in troubled times. FDR tried to move the unofficial holiday back a week to expand the shopping season, but Congress put an end to all the feast-fiddling in 1941, when it fixed Thanksgiving’s date forever and declared it a national holiday.

George Richards was way ahead of them. In 1934 Richards bought the Portsmouth, Ohio, Spartans, for $7,952.08, moved them to Detroit, and renamed them the Lions. Incredibly, they won their first 10 contests to tie the Chicago Bears for first place with three games left. The bad news: only about 12,000 people seemed to care. If the Lions couldn’t catch on at 10-0, Richards knew, their days in Detroit were numbered.

Richards needed a hook – and fast – so he invited the Bears to play on FDR’s unofficial Thanksgiving Day, and drew an overflow crowd of 26,000. The Bears may have won the game, 19-16, but the Lions won the war.

They had started a tradition that’s now older than 22 of the NFL’s 32 current teams. They rewarded their fans the next season by beating the Bears 14-2, on Thanksgiving, en route to their first league championship, the same year the Tigers, Red Wings and Detroit native Joe Louis all won titles, earning Detroit the nickname, “City of Champions.” (If this sounds unbelievable, we understand.)

The Dallas Cowboys started the second half of this holiday biathlon in 1966, when they stuck the powerful Cleveland Browns with a 26-14 Thanksgiving turkey. The Cowboys have played every year since, having successfully fought to keep their tradition protected by the NFL, too.

The annual tradition invariably inspires the Lions’ best effort. “I don’t know what it is about the Thanksgiving game,” says former All-Pro lineman Keith Dorney. “Maybe it’s the holiday or the national television, but there’s magic in the air for the Lions.”

Call it magic, motivation, or Full-Moon Football, on Thanksgiving the Lions have traditionally been over-achievers, and never more so than in 1962, against Vince Lombardi’s undefeated Green Bay Packers. The Lions jumped out to a shocking 26-0 lead, to give the Packers their only loss that year – one “so distasteful in Green Bay,” writes Lombardi biographer David Maraniss, “that not even the championship win over the [New York] Giants completely erased it.”

There hasn’t been much magic for the Lions the last six seasons, when they’ve lost every Thanksgiving Day game. But these days, they’re usually on national TV just once a year – and that’s something the whole country can be thankful for.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism; and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

John U. Bacon

It’s hard to think of too many endeavors that receive more overblown attention than do sports. And within sports, nothing’s more overblown than the Super Bowl.

This time around, we’re getting endless stories about President Obama picking the New Orleans Saints – because … that matters? – a preview of the ads scheduled to run during the game, and several hundred articles analyzing the recuperation of Dwight Freeney’s sprained right ankle, and how that might affect national security. Or some such.

But in the midst of this morass are two stories worth telling.

The first is Kurt Warner. After graduating from Northern Iowa in 1994, not one NFL team drafted him. In other words, the NFL determined there were at least 222 players better than Kurt Warner that year alone.

Warner was tempted to pack it in. Instead, he started packing groceries in Cedar Falls, Iowa, while living in his girlfriend’s parents’ basement, serving as a graduate assistant coach for his alma mater, and working out in the hopes of getting another chance. He had to settle for the Iowa Barnstormers, a team that played in the doomed Arena Football League. But, what should have been a dead end proved to be a launch pad.

Arena Football’s funny rules required Warner to speed up his decision-making and his delivery – skills you need to succeed in the NFL. Three years later, one of the NFL’s worst teams, the St. Louis Rams, hired him as a backup. The next season, incredibly, the Rams won their first Super Bowl, and Kurt Warner won the league’s MVP – his first of three.

Last week, Warner retired with a pile of records, a pile of money, and a well-earned reputation for playing his best in the biggest games. He said he didn’t want to be known for being a clutch player, but a hard worker. He’ll have to settle for both.

Warner left the stage with quiet dignity – two qualities not often associated with NFL players – just as a younger quarterback was taking his place.

Drew Brees was one of the most celebrated high school quarterbacks in Texas, a state that celebrates high school quarterbacks more than it does Supreme Court justices. But Brees blew off the hometown Texas Longhorns to head north to Purdue, where he set just about every school record for passing. He took the Boilermakers to their first Rose Bowl in over three decades, and was named not just an Academic All-American, but the Academic All-American of the Year.

But in the NFL, Brees struggled his first three seasons. Soon after he finally found his rhythm, he also found a new city to play in: New Orleans, which had been ravished by Hurricane Katrina the year before. The Saints’ home, the Superdome, had become the very symbol of the disaster, and the owners were considering moving the team for good.

Enter Drew Brees, who not only led the historically pathetic Saints to the playoffs, he spent his money and his time creating his own foundation, which restores schools, parks and playgrounds, in a city desperate for all three. A recent Sports Illustrated cover story said Brees was “as adored and appreciated as any [athlete] in an American city today.”

It’s hard to argue with that, and even harder to root against Drew Brees.

So, if you missed Kurt Warner, enjoy Drew Brees while you can. Players like this don’t come along very often.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami of Ohio, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

John U. Bacon

The Michigan Wolverines might have the most wins in college football history, and the highest winning percentage, but the Wolverines have never captured the nation’s imagination like the Fightin’ Irish of Notre Dame.

Notre Dame’s success is partly the Wolverines’ fault. Knute Rockne wanted to get his Fightin’ Irish into the Big Ten in the worst way – but Michigan’s Fielding Yost wanted to keep them out even…worser.

Yost probably expected Rockne to take his team and go home – but Rockne had other ideas. He took his team to Chicago and Boston, which had large Catholic populations, and built a following. He also scheduled games in Yankee Stadium – in front of the national media – and in Los Angeles, in front of Hollywood hot-shots.

And that’s why Notre Dame didn’t shrink without the Big Ten, but grew into the only college team with a national following. The sports writers told tales of The Four Horseman, while the movie makers immortalized the Irish with films from “Knute Rockne: All American” – starring young Ronald Reagan as the Gipper – to “Rudy.”

It took Father Ted Hesburgh, Notre Dame’s president from 1952 to 1987, to figure out how to leverage Notre Dame’s success in football to success in academia. What started out as a Podunk private school that would accept live cattle for tuition – I am not making that up – is now among the most respected universities in the world.

But, while Notre Dame’s academic reputation has been steadily rising, the reputation of its football team – which made it all possible – has been steadily falling. The Irish earned at least one national title every decade from the ’20s to the ’80s – 11 total – but haven’t won another since 1988. Worse, Notre Dame has fired three head coaches in the last eight years – including Charlie Weis, just last week.

Part of the problem is Notre Dame’s tradition – which makes them think they can hire just about anyone and he’ll succeed, because it’s Notre Dame. How else can you explain the hiring of Gerry Faust in 1981 from Cincinnati – Moeller High School in Cincinnati, that is? Faust had not coached a single college game, and it showed. He flamed out in five years.

Faust’s successor, Lou Holtz, left the Notre Dame Fightin’ Irish for the South Carolina Gamecocks, under a cloud of suspicion.

After firing two more coaches, Notre Dame had to go searching again in 2005. But, to their surprise, the coach they really wanted, Urban Meyer – who was named after Pope Urban, fer cryin’ out loud – didn’t really want to work for a school that fired its last coach after just three seasons.

Michigan fans, take note.

So, they hired Charlie Weis, a Notre Dame alum whose reputation was built more on hope and hype than any actual accomplishments – a man who had never played or coached a down of college football. His greatest victory at Notre Dame, the joke goes, was a loss to top-ranked Southern Cal by just three points. The Irish were so impressed by this close call, they signed Weis that month, in the middle of his first season, to a 10-year extension worth tens of millions, to make sure he couldn’t go anywhere else. Well, be careful what you wish for.

But there is good news for Notre Dame: U.S. News and World Report just ranked Notre Dame the 18th best university in the country – a higher ranking than the football team has enjoyed in years.

Coach Rockne must be spinning – but Father Ted must be thrilled.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami of Ohio, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

This is not Martavious Odoms of the University of Michigan football team preparing to catch a winning touchdown pass from Tate Forcier. It's Alexi Ernstoff, who's preparing to "take the snap" from an UM alum who's got a plate piled with refuse headed her direction. (Photo by the writer.)

In Ann Arbor on Saturday, the visiting Hoosiers came up three points shy in a homecoming game against the University of Michigan football team. Final score: 36-33.

And at a pre-game tailgate hosted by the UM Alumni Association, a team of  Student Sustainability Initiative (SSI) volunteers came up at least three coffee creamer containers shy of their goal: a “zero waste” tailgate.

Those three coffee creamer containers came from Edward J. Vander Velde – from the 50th reunion class of 1959 – who kidded the volunteers who were staffing one of the waste stations inside Oosterbaan Fieldhouse, saying, “We’re still short of perfect!”

The coffee creamers weren’t the only items that still wound up in the trash instead of the compost bins, or the paper containers, or the bottle receptacles.

But according to SSI board member Greg Buzzell, who’s studying at UM’s Erb Institute, early post-tailgate estimates are that the zero-waste effort diverted about 500 pounds of material from the landfill to the compost pile, and that the tailgate generated “really very minimal” trash.

Left is Alex, who staffed one of the waste stations. Right is Edward J. Vander Velde, who attended the tailgate as a part of the 50th Reunion Class. He holds a bachelor's degree in history and political science, a master's in geography, and a doctorate in geography, all from UM. He currently resides in Grand Rapids. (Photo by the writer.)

What Goes Where?

From the interactions The Chronicle observed between SSI volunteers, who staffed the waste stations, and the attendees of the tailgate, alums were on board with the concept of segregating their “trash” into the right slots. They just needed a little coaching, and they were eager to get it right. As one alum approached, he asked, “Okay, what goes where?”

On a few occasions, the rush of people, their plates piled with refuse, overwhelmed the opportunity for an educational moment. SSI volunteers picked up the blitz by accepting a hand-off of the whole pile, and separating it themselves.

When there was an opportunity for a teaching moment – which seemed like almost always – one of the more frequent focuses was the plates and the tableware. Recycleable? Nope. Trash? Nope. Compostable. Yep. So plastic-looking plates, knives, forks and spoons went into the same bin as food scraps.

The compostable material is being accepted at a facility near Brighton called Tuthill Farms. That bill is being footed by the UM Alumni Association, according to Cat Niekro, who’s vice president for marketing and communications for the association. It will come to around $2,000 out of a total budget of $100,000 allocated for the homecoming event, she told The Chronicle. [The UM Almuni Association is a separate nonprofit entity from the university.]

Audra McKinzie, Amy Legg and Kyle Fellerhoff, all '04 graduates of Indiana University, Bloomington. McKinzie is currently a graduate student at UM. From the Small World file: Fellerhoff hails from Columbus, Indiana, the same hometown as Dave Askins, editor of The Chronicle. They have a high school English teacher in common: Shirley Lyster. (Photo by the writer.)

How Forks Are Compostable, and the Hoosier Connection

What makes forks compostable? Well, they’re made from corn. That’s another homecoming connection to Indiana, besides the fact that the Hoosiers were the scheduled opponent on the football field: Indiana ranks fourth – behind Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska – among states in corn production.

The Chronicle asked three Hoosiers, whose crimson colors were easy to spot in the throng at the UM homecoming tailgate, about the quality of the cutlery. We were curious to know if there were any performance sacrifices that had to be accepted to get the benefit of their compostability.

From Audra McKinzie, Amy Legg and  Kyle Fellerhoff, who are all ’04 graduates of IU Bloomington – the answer was that the corn-based cutlery was indistinguishable from regular plasticware. They’d enjoyed their tailgate food unaware there was anything special about the cutlery.

Among the food on offer that needed cutlery to consume was an egg dish called Scrambled “Hoosiers.”

On display at Oosterbaan Fieldhouse for alums to admire was the MRacing vehicle, which was fresh off a fifth-place finish in a field of 78 entries in Formula Student Germany (FSG) competition, which was held Aug. 5-9, 2009 in Germany. The tires sported the word “Hoosier” – they were sourced from Hoosier Racing Tire Corp. in Indiana.

For the football game, there was one potential conflict in loyalties among the Student Sustainability Initiative volunteers that proved unfounded. While Julia Koslow grew up in Indianapolis, she didn’t go to school at Indiana University. It was the previous week when her loyalty had been tested – she’s a Notre Dame grad.

Who Are the Students in SSI?

If The Chronicle couldn’t expose Koslow as a Hoosier fan, could we perhaps challenge her composting credentials? We asked her if she composted at home. Yes. In her apartment. How do you compost if you don’t have a backyard? You do it with worms. She explained that she’d inherited the composting bin, with its separate chamber for the worms, from a student who’d already  graduated. Finding a place to put the castings [worm crud] was a challenge, she reported, but they can be tossed pretty much anywhere outside.

Standing are Mark Ellis and Julia Koslow. Kneeling, writing the word "Trash" on the yellow box, is Elizabeth Senecal. (Photo by the writer.)

Staffing the same station as Koslow was Elizabeth Senecal. Senecal served two years in the Peace Corps before embarking on her studies at UM. Part of her work in sustainable agriculture – living in a Senegalese village of 900 people with no electricity or running water – was to convert a “dead fencing” system to a live one. The fence in question runs about one kilometer around a garden plot tended by the village’s women. Its function is to keep the animals out of the garden.

Historically, women have gathered dead branches, corn stalks, and other materials to build the “dead fence” anew after rainstorms wash it away. The vertical elements of the live fence are made up of trees that are planted an appropriate distance apart. The spaces between the trees can be filled in with material taken from the trees themselves – which saves the effort of scavenging over vast distances.

Phillip and Alex, who staffed a waste station on the opposite side of Oosterbaan Fieldhouse from Elizabeth and Julia, are two guys with no particular background as artists, but who are undaunted by their adopted project of creating art out of some of the plastic cups they were accumulating.

The art project was more or less an “audible called at the line of scrimmage” when some orange juice cups they thought would be accepted nicely into the plastics recycling bin failed on grounds of their shape. They need to have a neck to be accepted – it’s not clear why.

Tom Brokaw

Tom Brokaw, when spotted in the wild at Oosterbaan Fieldhouse, was not immediately recognizable as Tom Brokaw. Once people began to ask, “Is that guy Tom Brokaw?” the resemblance was easier to spot. He was taping material for an upcoming MSNBC documentary on baby boomers.

Tom Brokaw interviewing baby boomers for an upcoming MSNBC documentary about the impact of the poor economy on baby boomers. (Photo by the writer.)

Tom Brokaw interviewing Jesse Rawls, Sr. a 1971 graduate of UM. Rawls' two sons graduated UM in '96 and '01. His daughter graduated in '95. (Photo by the writer.)

Tom Brokaw was not saying, "You've got some scrambled eggs stuck on your upper lip ... no, a little to the left ... more ... okay, you got it." (Photo by the writer.)

Pure University of Michigan

The UM Alumni Association Tailgate at Oosterbaan was pure University of Michigan, with all the trimmings.

University of Michigan Marching Band (Photo by the writer.)

University of Michigan Dance Team (Photo by the writer.)

University of Michigan Glee Club (Photo by the writer.)

Maize and blue balloon bouquets adorned the tables, along with the Zero Waste table tents. (Photo by the writer.)

Refuse Items

SSI students contended with a range of refuse. Here’s a sampling:

The whole pile can go right into the compost bin. The muffin wrapper in the top of the frame goes into the trash, because of its wax coating. (Photo by the writer.)

The three creamer cups contributed by Edward J. Vander Velde. (Photo by the writer.)

These are the cups destined to become an art project. (Photo by the writer.)

Splenda packets like this could go into the paper bin, but sugar packets could not – they're coated with wax on the inside. (Photo by the writer.)

Pedestrian traffic control cone, movie-set style.

The movie “Betty Anne Waters” has widely been reported to tell the true story of a woman who puts herself through law school to prove the innocence of her brother, who’s been wrongly convicted of murder – hence the name of the local company formed to produce the move, Innocence Productions.

But based on the one scene The Chronicle saw filmed Thursday morning, this movie might just be about football. The evidence, which I humbly submit for our readers’ consideration, is a shot in which a young boy stands in the front yard of a house, waves towards it and says, “Mom, let’s go, we’re going to miss the kickoff!” That suggests, but does not entail, that the kid is talking about football –  technically, “kickoff” could apply to the start of any event. But then, a football comes flying from somewhere and seems to get fumbled. Whether that’s a part of the script was not clear. At any rate, there’s a football in this movie.

Ladies and gentlemen of the reading jury, I thus offer an alternate version of events: “Betty Anne Waters” could be a movie about football. We have not been able to confirm that the movie’s complete name, including the tag line, is “Betty Anne Waters – The defense rests its case.” But that would sure make it sound a little bit more like a football movie, if it were true.

The ladder and light behind the pedestrian traffic control cone were a part of the setup for the movie scene.

We were first alerted to something out of the ordinary around Fifth & Madison streets in a email sent early Thursday morning from a reader who entertained suspicions that the shiny new semi-tractor trailers were connected to a Men-in-Black type operation.

Having stopped by the area while out and about later that morning, we returned to Chronicle Central to see that a Stopped.Watched. correspondent had confirmed the filming as well.

Folks who live in the neighborhood seemed to be taking the filming in stride. Sunny Sedgwick, a name that has a certain movie-star sound to it, is actually a puppy in the shape of a full-grown dog, who was getting walked by Martha Kinney-Sedgwick. The route past the movie location is one of a few different standard walks, she said, but when cross-examined, she allowed that the choice that morning was due in part to some curiosity about what was going on.

One nearby homeowner was waiting for a city building inspector, who appeared and did his inspection of the three-unit dwelling saying, “This is a nice old house and we want to keep it that way!”

Ward 5 councilmember Mike Anglin walked past. He had a clipboard and papers, which suggested to me he might be collecting signatures for his nomination petitions for re-election.

But he said that he was just going to meet with some neighbors who live in a house on the same block as the movie location. In the brief conversation with some of the set workers that we were having, one of them suggested that the paint job on the house might have been “set-decked” i.e., altered by the set decoration crew. Anglin (who lives just down the street) said, “No, it’s always looked like that.”

Mike Anglin walks past the movie set near Madison & Fifth streets.

Anglin also put in a plug for Knight’s Restaurant, encouraging the workers to try it before leaving town.

There’s still filming to be done, at least in the surrounding area. According to the minutes of the Livingston County Board of Commissioners, there’ll be a shoot up by the Livingston County “historical courthouse and its interior doorways” in early April.

The movie includes Hilary Swank in its cast. The mission of determining what flavor of cake is Hilary Swank’s favorite was not completed Thursday morning, however. When I checked in at the nearby Jefferson Market & Cakery to see if owner Mary Rasmussen had waited on any movie stars, she said, “I don’t really know – they look just like us!”