John U. Bacon

At the dedication game of Michigan’s new 84,401-seat stadium in 1927, the Wolverines sent new rival Ohio State home with a 21-0 thumping. In that informal era, it was perfectly natural for athletic director Fielding Yost to walk back to campus with the game’s star, Bennie Oosterbaan.

“Mr. Yost was feeling pretty good,” Oosterbaan told author Al Slote. “We’d won, and the stadium was completely filled. He turned to me and said, ‘Bennie, do you know what the best thing about that new stadium is? Eighty-five thousand people paid five dollars apiece for their seats – and Bennie, they had to leave the seats there!‘”

While no one can be certain what Yost would think of the luxury boxes that are going up right now (and no matter what the university is calling them, that’s clearly what they are), the record suggests he would approve it – and for the very reasons he pushed to build the Big House in the first place.

As Michigan’s athletic director from 1921 to 1941, Fielding Yost worked tirelessly to elevate the profile of Michigan athletics – and along with it, his own. When someone asked famed sportswriter Ring Lardner if he ever talked to Mr. Yost, Lardner replied, “No, my mother taught me never to interrupt.”

Given Yost’s massive ego, it’s no surprise he was obsessed with massive stadiums. It galled him that Ohio State, Illinois, and other rivals built theirs before Michigan got around to it. After years of lobbying, Yost finally overcame the objections of the faculty, the students, The Michigan Daily and the regents – who twice vetoed the plan before passing it – to build his Big House.

Michigan Stadium originally boasted a permanent capacity of 72,000 – including hundreds of pricier box seats – plus 12,401 temporary bleachers. All this, to serve a city of just 35,000 people. It’s hard to argue Yost was anything but a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist who fully intended to maximize the profitability of his football team.

Yost also installed footings for a balcony of some 70,000 seats – which strikes me as a pretty clear invitation to future generations that Michigan Stadium was not to be regarded as a sacred mausoleum, but an organic building designed to meet the changing needs of the athletic department and its fans. As proof, Michigan Stadium has undergone 21 major renovations, expansions and improvements, starting in the building’s second year, when Yost added 13,753 permanent seats.

The Big House helped pay for Yost Field House, the baseball stadium, and – for all students – the golf course, the Intramural Building and the Waterman Gym, arguably the best women’s facility of its time.

Fielding Yost invented the linebacker, the no-huddle offense, and the quick kick. But his most important innovation, by far, was the financially self-sufficient athletic department – a tradition worth protecting.

While it’s undeniably true that the arms race in college sports – for bigger and better practice facilities, weight rooms, arenas and coaches’ salaries – seems almost completely out of control, it’s an arms race that seems impossible to stop unilaterally.

When Michigan opens its luxury boxes in the fall of 2010, the only Big Ten schools without them will be Indiana and Northwestern – hardly Michigan’s football peers. Michigan’s proposed luxury boxes won’t require anything from the university’s general fund nor its students, which is how most schools’ pay for a healthy portion of their athletic departments’ budgets.

The luxury boxes will help fund 25 varsity teams – 13 of them women’s – all but three of which cost millions every year. And, it must be said, they are infinitely more tasteful than the abomination that was the “Maize Halo” a decade ago.

The luxury boxes will also keep ticket prices down for the average fan. In the early ’70s, the average tickets cost $120 per season. Those exact same seats now cost $1,266, an increase of over 1,000-percent. The luxury boxes will serve as a progressive tax on the wealthiest Michigan boosters, effectively subsidizing both non-revenue sports and tickets for the average fan – the very traditions Yost established in 1927.

The athletic department needs more money to fund its teams, and if I have to make a choice between extracting more from starving students or corporate fat cats, I’ll take the fat cats, every time.

And the best part is, when the game is over, they’ll have to leave the luxury boxes there.

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.