John U. Bacon

Last week, in a surprising decision, the National Labor Relations Board granted the Northwestern University football players the right to unionize, if they want.

But what does that mean? What doesn’t it mean? And how might this change the future of college football?

The NLRB’s ruling made a big splash, but it’s actually very narrow. The decision applies only to private schools. There are only a handful or two that play big time college football – usually about one per major conference – a short list that includes universities like Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Stanford and USC. Further, the Northwestern players still have to vote to unionize – not a given – and no matter how they vote, the university is going to appeal the NLRB’s decision.

But the Wildcat players have been very shrewd, and will be hard to dismiss. That starts with their leader, senior quarterback Kain Colter. I got to know him pretty well while researching my latest book, “Fourth and Long,” and I can tell you he’s one of the more impressive young men to play the game today.

Colter is a pre-med major who often had to miss summer workouts to attend afternoon labs. The group he’s formed – the somewhat redundant College Athletes Players Association (CAPA) – is also wisely not asking for money, but post-graduate health care for injuries suffered while playing. Seems to me it’s pretty hard for any university – created to improve the lives of its students, after all – to argue against that.

Because he’s a graduating senior, Colter is not acting out of self-interest, either. He’s working for those who will come after him – while potentially jeopardizing his appeal to the NFL teams who might draft him this spring. He’s also made it clear that Northwestern has been very good to him, from President Schapiro to athletic director Jim Phillips to his coach, Pat Fitzgerald. Having studied the program throughout 2012, I can tell you unequivocally that Northwestern is a model of how college athletics should be done.

So what’s going to happen next? Anybody who claims they really know is either stupid or silly or both. We have never been here before. But we do know a few things already.

First, what the Northwestern players are asking for is exactly what the NCAA, the leagues and the schools should have been providing for decades anyway: health care for injuries sustained while playing for their schools. In other words, the same protection the universities give their employees who are injured on the job – and few jobs are more dangerous than football.

While they’re at it, the NCAA should end the very cynical policy of providing one-year scholarships. That’s right: when an athlete gets a scholarship, it’s not a four- or five-year deal, but a year-by-year contract, leaving him entirely at the mercy of the coach. At an upright school like Northwestern, the players don’t have anything to worry about. But at too many other schools, the coaches exploit this shady arrangement every season.

A scholarship should automatically cover the players’ entire education, even if their careers end due to injuries or disappointing play, so long as they’re making an honest effort – and they should keep that scholarship until they earn their degree, even after their eligibility runs out. It’s difficult to finish a bachelor’s degree while working 40 hours a week on your sport – and that’s what it takes, no matter what the NCAA claims.

Michigan quarterback Devin Gardner is a serious student, who asks more questions per hour than the rest of his classmates combined. He does very well in class, though not as well as he’d like. When I asked him once what he would be if he wasn’t the Michigan quarterback, he thought about it, then said, “An ‘A’ student.”

If the NCAA is serious about the “student” part of “student-athlete,” now would be a great time to prove it.

The NCAA should also ban the increasingly obscene practice of paying bonuses to head coaches, assistant coaches and even athletic directors for milestones the players themselves achieve. Last week, when Ohio State wrestler Logan Stieber won his third consecutive national title without a loss – an incredible feat – his athletic director, Gene Smith, automatically received an $18,000 bonus for Stieber’s thousands of hours of work. Stieber, of course, couldn’t take an extra dime.

Doesn’t the nonprofit NCAA find that outrageous?

They should also outlaw, completely, the practice of “oversigning.” This occurs when unethical coaches promise more incoming freshmen scholarships than they have. When they all arrive on campus in August, they conduct what amounts to an on-campus try-out to whittle their numbers down to the 25 scholarships they actually have. The losers go home, having already turned down offers from other schools, and try to pick up the pieces.

If the NCAA rights these wrongs, I’d bet the Northwestern players call their efforts a success – as they should – and drop their campaign.

And there are good reasons why they might. Most college athletes are actually getting a pretty good deal. In my previous book, “Three and Out,” I calculated that for an out-of-state, fifth-year senior at Michigan, the free tuition, meals and travel easily come to $580,000. And that doesn’t count the cost of the academic counseling and tutoring, the strength and conditioning, or the athletic training – let alone the cost of those buildings. If the student-athletes become employees, the IRS could easily conclude they have to pay taxes on their scholarships, and everything else.

If the players do unionize, and become employees of their schools, I also wonder if their new identity will diminish the appeal of college sports. College fans aren’t attracted to excellence – any pro team can beat any college team, in any sport – they’re attracted to romance. If the magic bubble bursts, the fans might decide to stop supporting the venture, and then who’s paying the bills?

In fact, both parties should be careful what they wish for, or the law of unintended consequences could obliterate the benefits both sides receive. I honestly don’t think either side has given the long-term consequences of their actions very much thought.

For now, the NLRB’s decision is less important legally than it is symbolically – more Rosa Parks than Brown v. Board of Education. For the first time, a group of players has formally organized, and been officially recognized. And in the process, they’ve discovered something I finally realized in the past couple years: the players have no power – until they threaten to sit down, together. Then, suddenly, they have all of it.

I hope the people who run college athletics are listening – but their hearing has been impaired for so long, I wouldn’t bet on it.

They should do the right thing, and do it now, or risk losing everything.

Seems like an easy decision to you and me – but that’s why we’re not the NCAA.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.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!

John U. Bacon

One debate I could do without is the question of who is a real Michigan fan, and who isn’t?

On the face of it, the question is pretty stupid. A Michigan fan is a fan of Michigan. And beyond the surface, it’s still pretty stupid. But let’s play it out.

The argument goes that only those who attended Michigan can call themselves Michigan fans. The rest? They’re mere “Walmart Wolverines” – fans who could have picked any school to cheer for, as well as any other, just like we pick the pro teams we want to follow, with no other connection than geography.

Why shouldn’t hard-cord alumni turn their backs on their non-degreed brethren?

There’s a history here, going back to James B. Angell, Michigan’s longest serving – and most important – president.

Angell took office in 1871 – eight years before Michigan’s first football game – and served until 1909, charting a course for Michigan that the university still follows, and other schools adopted. A Brown University alum and former faculty member, Angell’s vision for Michigan was to create a university that could provide “an uncommon education for the common man.”

He was thrilled to see the sons and daughters of farmers and factory workers becoming philosophers, but he couldn’t stand the game of football they – and everyone else – loved so much. Having seen first-hand the hysteria the sport created on campus, he wrote his fellow Big Ten presidents during that momentous 1905 season with great concern.

“The absorbing interest and excitement of the students – not to speak of the public – in the preparation for the intercollegiate games make a damaging invasion into the proper work of the university for the first ten or twelve weeks of the academic year. This is not true of the players alone, but of the main body of students, who think and talk of little else but the game.”

President Angell simply hoped to return college athletics to the English ideal, which allowed for more student participation and less notoriety for the victors. The idea of strangers with no connection to the university paying to watch them play struck him as odd and possibly dangerous.

But Angell failed to see football’s value in pitching his public school to the taxpayers, who picked up over 90% of the budget until the 1960s, missing the point that for many Michiganders, there were few other reasons to support the state school. If you were a farmer in Fennville or a factory worker in Flint, why would you vote for millage after millage to go to the state universities?

My answer is the Big House. As Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy once said, “A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.” To which Bear Bryant added, “It’s kind of hard to rally around a math class.”

Football, then and now, serves as the one place on campus where everyone feels welcome. On any given Saturday, fully a quarter of the 100,000 folks who pack the Big House did not attend the school. They include some of the university’s most loyal fans, and biggest donors.

According to Nate Silver – yes, that Nate Silver, who correctly predicted every state in the 2012 presidential election – the nation’s three biggest college football fan bases are Ohio State’s (3.2 million), Michigan’s (2.9 million), and Penn State’s (2.6 million), for a total of about 8.7 million fans, which is more than the entire Pac-12 combined. These three schools usually lead the nation in home attendance, too.

These stats teach a few less obvious but equally important lessons, too. If these teams depended solely on their students and alumni for support, they would have only about a fifth of their current following, since the “subway alums” constitute roughly 80% of their fan base.

Turning our attention back to the Big Ten’s “Big Three” programs, and the 8.7 millions fans who follow them: their gigantic stadiums hold more than three hundred thousand fans, but that still leaves 8.4 million of their followers on the outside looking in, which those fans eagerly do through TV and the Internet. If you want to know why the Big Ten Network was the first conference network, and is by far the most successful, that’s where you start: 17.5 million fans, dwarfing the next-biggest fan base, the SEC’s, at 13.6 million. And that’s why the Big Ten Network now reaches an estimated 53 million households: because it can.

The Big Ten’s 17.5 million fans undoubtedly include just about every demographic you can name in substantial numbers, but it’s what they have in common that’s most important here: a shared love of their favorite Big Ten schools and the conference itself, its history and traditions, right down to their memories of the same games.

Joining a hundred thousand like-minded strangers solves a modern problem, too. The Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa both noted that the great disease of Western civilization is loneliness. Yes, it’s possible to be lonely in a crowd – but not this one.

Studies show our endorphins spike when we march in formation, sing in unison, or cheer together in a stadium. Where else can you be certain a hundred thousand other people are feeling exactly what you’re feeling, exactly when you’re feeling it? This is why such places are more important now than ever.

Think about it. The Big Ten’s twelve teams do not play one game that’s not televised. You can sit back in your easy chair right at home and watch every game. Likewise, every song in the world can be purchased for a few bucks, and every movie is on DVD. Yet we still go to concerts, movies, and games, just as our ancestors did almost a century ago. If Beethoven, Humphrey Bogart, or Fielding H. Yost visited those places today, they would think almost nothing had changed.

Why do we pay money to go to these places? Because we need to be together.

Ken Fischer has run the internationally acclaimed University Musical Society for years with a simple philosophy: “Everybody in. Nobody out.” If the UMS, which has played host to everyone from Marian Anderson to Leonard Bernstein to Yo-Yo Ma, can open its arms to everyone, you’d think a football stadium could do the same.

We need to share something we care about with strangers. And to fill that need, you could do worse than Big Ten football.

“We have too much pluribus,” filmmaker Ken Burns said twenty years ago, “and not enough unum.” If that was true then – before the flourishing of private schools, charter schools and home schooling; before the creation of 500 TV stations that allow us to pick what kind of news we want to hear; before the Internet allowed us to see only the information and people we want, and ignore the rest – it is surely more true now.

Dr. Ed Zeiders, the pastor of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church right in downtown State College, has seen what the football team can do for the faithful in ways others might not.

“We are desperately needy,” he told me. “We need something to cheer about and rally around. Our culture is devoid of these things.

“We need a place to stand, and a people to stand with, and a cause to stand for. That is not original with me. That came out of World Methodism. And those three propositions hold the key to healthy and value-oriented living. I’ve taught and preached that for a lot of years.

“I have this belief that academics should be that unifying principle, but the evidence points to something else.”

While “Pastor Ed” has done a fine job creating that environment in his church, he joked with me that he couldn’t help but notice that the one down the street holds 108,000 true believers.

“Sports has the capacity to make that happen,” he said. “That can get skewed and twisted, especially in the marketing side of the equation, but my interest in sports is more in the community that forms around them. What my wife and I enjoy is the friendships we create in the stands. There is an ease with which sports fans connect with each other. And it has the potential to hold up something that is admirable and unifying.”

College football stadiums are now one of the few remaining places where we connect across race and religion, age and gender, economics and politics. And we do it with vigor.

When Fielding Yost opened Michigan Stadium in 1927, it seated 84,000 fans – three times the population of tiny Ann Arbor. It has played host to Heisman heroes, national champions, presidents, prime ministers, poet laureates, and over 40 million fans. It’s where Michigan fans showed the nation how to tailgate, and do the wave.

At one of the world’s great universities, this is the front porch. When you walk through the front gates, no one should care – and most don’t – about your age or income, or your race, religion or creed. Most don’t even care if you went to school there. They care about one thing: Can you sing “The Victors”? If you know when to throw your fist in the air, you’re in.

Welcome to the Big House. Hail.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.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!

John U. Bacon

The Grambling State University football team plays in the unheralded Southwestern Athletic Conference, in the division beneath the big boys. They had an 11-game losing streak, stretching back into the 2012 season.

In short, this was not a team that warranted national attention.

But the Grambling Tigers finally got some last month. No, they didn’t notch their first win that day – or even another loss. They didn’t play – and it wasn’t due to bad weather or a bye week. The players simply refused to take the field.

Grambling is a historically black college with a rich tradition. Their legendary coach, Eddie Robinson, won 408 games, which set the record Joe Paterno would break, then relinquish, due to NCAA sanctions.

One of Robinson’s biggest stars was Doug Williams, the first African-American quarterback to lead his team to a Super Bowl title.

But, as a coach, Williams was more beloved than successful. His Grambling teams couldn’t get it done, while the school itself suffered draconian budget cuts. The players had to travel by bus and work out in a weight room so decrepit, several suffered staph infections.

This fall, it all came to a head.

Williams raised money for a new floor, but not through the proper channels, so the school didn’t spend the money. After the team lost its first seven games, the Grambling president fired Coach Williams, without discussing the decision with the players, before or after. The school replaced Williams with interim head coach George Ragsdale, which pleased the players even less.

For the players, it was the last straw. They were tired of playing in a second-rate, unsafe program. They were tired of being taken for granted. And they quickly tired of the new coach the school had foisted upon them.

So, before the team’s October 19th game at Jackson State in Mississippi, the players voted to stay home. In other words, to boycott.

Yes, this ticked off Jackson State. It was a league game, after all, and Jackson State’s homecoming too, which cost the city some serious money.

Still, the news faded fast. Who really cares whether a winless, second-tier team plays or not?

But it should get the attention of the people who run college football, because they better understand something that everyone else seemed to miss: in the current equation, the players have absolutely no power, until they sit down. Then, all of a sudden, they have all the power.

Last fall, when I was doing research for my latest book, “Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football,” I walked down to see the tailgaters before the Michigan-Michigan State game. I visited the massive Pioneer High School parking lot kitty-corner from Michigan Stadium, where, every football Saturday, hundreds of RVs and countless cars disgorge coolers, grills, generators, footballs, cornhole boards and beanbags, and a sea of tailgating fans.

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

Warhurst looked around at the thousands of people happily spending about $500 on that day’s game – and many of them much more. Two golf courses across Main Street were just as full. So was the stadium parking lot and dozens of residential blocks within a mile of the Big House.

“You look at all this, you look at how much money people spend, and how much those guys make,” he said, pointing a thumb at the Big House, “and you have to think, one of these times the players are going to run out of that tunnel, sit down on the benches, and refuse to play until they get paid.

“One of these days.”

William Friday, the former president of the University of North Carolina, told the writer Taylor Branch that if a certain team – not his own school’s – reached the NCAA basketball championship game a few years ago, “they were going to dress and go out on the floor, but refuse to play.” Because the team didn’t make it to the finals, we’ll never know if they would have followed through. But any team in the tournament could do it, jeopardizing the $1 billion March Madness generates in TV ads alone, the highest ad revenue of any sporting event.

Just as Warhurst postulated, any football team could do the same thing – which demonstrates just how fragile the sport’s foundation really is. As the salaries of coaches and athletic directors soar into the millions, while the players’ income remains stuck at zero, it’s not hard to imagine a point when the players finally say, “Enough.”

When Warhurst told me that, we both assumed that day was a long way off. But after the Grambling players boycotted, I now believe the future might be coming a lot faster than we thought.

One question remains: Do the people who make their millions off those amateur athletes know it?

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.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!

John U. Bacon

Moments before the Michigan Wolverines introduced Brady Hoke as their new head football coach in 2011, Michigan fans had lots of questions. Why not hire a national star like Les Miles or Jim Harbaugh, who both played at Michigan? Who was Brady Hoke? Was he up to the task of taking over the Wolverines, and returning the team to glory?

Hoke answered these questions by nailing his first press conference. He won over more Michigan fans in just a few minutes than his predecessor, Rich Rodriguez, had been able to capture in three years, for a variety of reasons. When a reporter asked Hoke if the Wolverines would be rebuilding in his first season, he famously replied, “This is Michigan, for godsakes” – and a star was born.

It’s hard to remember a happier honeymoon than Hoke’s. In his rookie season, the Wolverines beat Notre Dame, Nebraska and Ohio State – the latter for the first time in eight years. They won their first BCS bowl game since a young man named Tom Brady did the job in 2000, en route to an 11-2 record. From the fans in the stands to the team in the trenches, the love for Coach Hoke was universal.

But then a great senior class graduated, the schedule got tougher, and Michigan’s amazing luck finally ran out. Hoke’s second team went 8-5, but most fans gave Hoke a pass, and I believe rightly so.

But the Wolverines don’t look much better this year, and might even be worse.

The Wolverines narrowly escaped losing to the lowly Akron Zips – which might have topped Michigan’s historic upset at the hands of Appalachian State. Then they barely slipped past a bad Connecticut team – which fired their coach shortly thereafter – before finally losing to a Penn State squad so hampered by sanctions, including a drastic reduction of scholarships, it was playing with one hand tied behind its back.

Still, the Wolverines were 6-1 – until last weekend. The final score said Michigan State 29, Michigan 6, but the Spartans did a lot more damage than that. They swarmed Michigan quarterback Devin Gardner all day, sacking him seven times, and held Michigan to minus-48 yards rushing. Yes, that’s right: Michigan would have been better off not running a play at all than trying to run the ball.

The Spartans are now 8-1, and playing for a Big Ten title. The Wolverines are 6-2, and playing to keep their fans on the bandwagon. It’s not the two losses that have Wolverine fans worried. It’s that the team is not getting better. Instead of looking sharp and strong – Michigan trademarks – they look sloppy and soft, and seemingly more so every week.

To Michigan fans’ credit, only the lunatic fringe is calling for Hoke’s head. His two great recruiting classes have barely reached the field, and even hinting that the coach is in trouble could scare off the next class of recruits. Further, if Michigan fires two consecutive coaches after three years, the place starts to look like a revolving door that no credible coaching candidate would even consider.

A more concrete problem is next year’s home schedule, which might be the worst in Michigan history. Instead of being served traditional rivals like Notre Dame, Michigan State and Ohio State, Michigan fans will be treated to Miami of Ohio, new Big Ten member Maryland, and yes, Appalachian State, for reasons only the athletic director must know.

Well, the schedule might be down, but the prices are sky high! Taking in a Michigan football game for a family of four – without restaurants or hotels – can easily top a thousand bucks, the rough equivalent of two days at DisneyWorld.

Michigan’s bean counters are worried that thousands of fans, already pushed to the limit, might finally drop their tickets. That could break Michigan’s 38-year streak of 100,000-plus crowds. A few more losses on the field in the remaining four games – none of them easy – certainly wouldn’t help.

Last year, I wrote, “It won’t be fair to judge Hoke until his recruits become his players, and that takes a few years. By then, fans will either find Hoke’s coaching style charming or cheesy, depending on one just thing: the number of games he wins.”

Former coach Bo Schembechler used to say: every day, you get better, or you get worse. If the Wolverines get better, the wins will take care of themselves over time, and all will be right in Arborville. If they don’t, no one can save them, and the future will be someone else’s to face.

And that is the last thing Michigan needs right now.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.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!

John U. Bacon

Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany, who might be the smartest man in college sports, stood outside the Big Ten’s brand new offices last week, telling a group of reporters, “Maybe in football and basketball, it would work better if more kids had a chance to go directly into the professional ranks. If they’re not comfortable and want to monetize, let the minor leagues flourish.”

It isn’t clear if Delany’s comments reflected his deeply held beliefs, an offhand comment, or just a daring bluff – but if it’s the latter, it isn’t as daring as it seems.

By challenging the NFL and NBA to start their own minor leagues, Delany doesn’t have much to lose. He knows they won’t, because they have every reason not to. They’ve used the college leagues to develop their players from the day the pro leagues started. Why would they derail the gravy train now?

And even if they did, it wouldn’t cost the Big Ten much, if anything.

But if we call Delany’s bluff and play it out, we’ll see it leads to one idea that could actually save what we love most about college football: the passion no other sport can match. 

The Unexamined Root of the Problem

I came to the same conclusion Delany did several years ago, though for different reasons.

Working on a book proposal a decade ago, I was struck by the essential difference between American football and basketball on the one hand, and just about every sport in the world on the other: football and basketball developed primarily as college games. When the NFL and NBA opened decades later, they simply hired the best college players available, but it still took the pro leagues decades to challenge the popularity of college football and basketball. The NFL didn’t get a permanent foothold until the classic 1958 title between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts, and the NBA Finals were still on tape-delay until Magic and Bird joined the league in 1979.

Why does this matter? Because by starting after college football and basketball were already established, the NFL and NBA were freed from having to develop viable minor leagues of their own, making them virtually the only sports in the world that don’t have them. Roughly a century ago, Major League Baseball and the NHL could not rely on the nascent college programs to fill their rosters, so they had to create their own minor leagues.

And that’s why today, almost every high school football and basketball star has just one path to the big leagues: the NCAA. This makes no sense. Athletes and universities can benefit each other, but they shouldn’t need to. Pelé never had to worry about passing 12 credits before playing in his first World Cup, and the University of Chicago figured out it didn’t need a football team to be a world-class university. As former University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins liked to say, “Football is to education as bullfighting is to agriculture.” He backed it up in 1939, when he pulled the Maroons out of the Big Ten. Today, Chicago’s admissions department is the fourth most selective in the country, behind only those of Harvard, Yale and Princeton.

When a committed student-athlete enrolls in a four-year college, everyone involved receives at least some benefit. The athlete gets a free education, an enduring asset no matter what he does on the field, and the college enjoys reflected glory from his performance. But when we require a gifted athlete with little or no interest in higher education to enroll in a four-year college to get to the NFL or NBA, he is more likely to fail in the classroom, which may actually prevent him from pursuing a promising athletic career – something that happens only in America – and the school’s academic reputation will take a very public hit. Nobody wins.

So, how do we fix this?

The Pros and Cons of Paying Players

Everyone agrees it’s increasingly difficult to support the farce that the NCAA is foisting upon us, but we can’t agree on how to fix it. In recent years we’ve seen proposals ranging from school-sponsored minor league teams to ending big-time college sports altogether.

The most popular idea sits between those two extremes: give up the ruse, and pay the players. After all, everyone seems to be making millions off the athletes, except the athletes.

Consider the skyrocketing salaries of Division I football coaches, which now average more than $2 million a year, an increase of 750 percent (adjusted for inflation) since 1984, about 20 times more than professors’ salaries increased over the same period. In 2012, the highest-paid state employee in 27 states was a football coach, and in 13 it was a basketball coach. The number of states whose highest-paid public employee was a university president? Four. The explosion in CEO pay, and the rationales that go with it, would be a fair comparison.

This chasm between the value of the players’ scholarships and their coaches’ salaries will only become more obscene with the arrival of the four-team playoff this season, whose TV rights alone will be worth $5.64 billion over 12 years, or about $470 million a year – all for three games. In the NCAA basketball tournament this past spring, March Madness generated $1 billion – in ad revenue alone.

As I wrote in “Fourth and Long“:

They will tell you it’s the cost of doing business – but what’s the business, exactly? When 60 Minutes interviewed [former Domino’s Pizza CEO-turned-Michigan athletic director] 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 most serious threat to big-time college athletics is not the endless scandals, which affect only those who get caught, but the rampant greed, which affects everybody. As Michael Kinsley has famously said, “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal.  The scandal is what’s legal.”

With so many millions sloshing around the athletes, it’s no surprise they’re reaching their limits. And it’s not just “Johnny Football” Manziel, a uniquely unsympathetic figure, either, but Kain Colter, Northwestern’s pre-med quarterback, who has taken to wearing an armband with “A.P.U.” on it, for All Players United, in support of those fighting to protect their rights, and their safety.

Certainly, the idea of giving the players a stipend of a thousand or two a year – which the NCAA almost passed four decades ago – so they can pay for a dinner date, a winter coat or a trip home, is long overdue. But even that modest proposal will cost more than its proponents imagine, since Title IX will dictate all scholarship athletes receive the same stipend, be they the All-American quarterback or the second-string coxswain on the women’s crew team.

Thus, when people talk about $20,000 “salaries” for college athletes, the cost at the biggest programs, which have some 700 student-athletes, will quickly exceed $10 million. And before you know it, you’re talking real money.

If you think for a second these payments will be deducted from the coaches’ bloated salaries, I have a “Johnny Football” autograph to sell you. No, these salaries will be piled on to the mountain of money that college athletic departments already spend every year. And they will pay for that pile, of course, by extracting still more millions from alternate jersey sales, rising seat license “donations,” corporate partnerships, and the ads that come with them – the very things that are alienating lifelong fans.

If I’m right that the biggest threat to college football is not scandal but greed, paying the players will only exacerbate the sport’s central problem, setting up the kind of tug-of-wars we see in pro sports that turn everybody off. Pouring more gasoline on a fire will not make it smaller. Paying players will not solve the problem it is intended to solve – the players will soon want more, just like the coaches, and not without reason – but it will create many new problems that will threaten the future of the sport.

Universities already have a difficult time controlling their athletic departments, and the pay-to-play plans will not make it any easier. They will turn the student-athletes into bona fide employees, which will open a Pandora’s box of legal issues, and questions from the IRS.

The pay-to-play proposals also assume the current record TV ratings, sweetheart corporate deals and sold-out stadiums will continue far into the future. But we’ve already seen plenty of signs that the fans are also nearing their breaking point.

Penn State fans travel an average of four hours to see their Nittany Lions play – as hardcore as any fans in college football. But Penn State snapped its six-year streak of 100,000-plus crowds more than a year before Jerry Sandusky was arrested, thanks to an aggressive seat-license program. Three thousand fans dropped their season tickets in 2010, when the seat-license program was introduced, three thousand more did the next year, and the departures have only accelerated since. When I attended the University of Central Florida-Penn State game this fall, my friends estimated there were no more than 85,000 fans in the stands that night – no matter what they announced as the “official paid attendance.”

Penn State fans are not the canaries in the coalmine. They are the coalminers. And if they’re starting to climb out of their favorite mine, no program is safe.

The cost for a family of four to attend a Michigan football game, with average seats and no hotel rooms or restaurant meals, runs about $500 – more than a day at Disney World. And Mickey never loses. While the Michigan athletic department claims the streak of 100,000-plus crowds, dating back to 1975, has never been broken, the game against Akron revealed wide swaths of empty seats, particularly in the student section – your future season ticket holders.

If you crank up the seat licenses, the TV timeouts and the endless ads another notch or two to pay players’ salaries, you will risk losing a generation of fans, and the whole enterprise will erode. The question of paying the players will become truly academic if there’s no money to pay them.

When did you last attend a boxing match or a horse race? If the bottom can fall out of those once robust sports, it can happen to college football, too. And if you like Off-Track Betting Parlors, and the empty stands they create, you’re going to love the future of big-time college sports.

Creating Two Tracks to the Big Leagues

Despite the many good reasons to pay the players, I think there are better reasons not to – and a better way to fix the problem that paying the players is intended to fix.

Delany might not be serious about his dare, but I am.

In my previous book “Three and Out,” I wrote, “For those rare stars, I’ve always believed, the NFL and NBA should set up viable minor leagues to give such players a real choice – the same one high school hockey and baseball players have.”

That came out two years ago. The need for this change is much more urgent today.

What football and basketball players need is what baseball and hockey players have enjoyed for almost a century: a viable minor league, so players who don’t want to be college students, and prefer to be paid in cash instead of scholarships, can do just that.

This would cut down on the majority of problems that beset both sports, almost overnight. Johnny Football? Sign all you want. “One and done” becomes “None and done.” Go!

Delany’s bold statement aside, you have to believe that if the NFL and NBA actually called his bluff, he might fear losing some of the NCAA’s most exciting players to the new minor leagues – and with them, some of the appeal of college football and basketball.

Fret not. As I write in “Fourth and Long”:

College athletes are more passionate playing for a scholarship than pro athletes are playing for millions. And we admire them more for this very reason. It’s the difference between citizen soldiers volunteering for the army and hired Hessians. Give us the doughboys, the G.I. Joes, and the grunts fighting for a cause.

And this is why we watch: not for perfection, but passion – the same reason over a million fans watch the Little League World Series every summer. This point is easily proven: the worst team in the NFL would crush the best team in college football, every year. Yet college football is the only sport in the world that draws more fans to its games than the big league teams it feeds. The attendance at Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State typically averages 50 percent more than that of the NFL teams in those states—and often doubles it. No minor league baseball or hockey team comes close to matching the attendance of their parent clubs.

This basic truth escapes both the proponents of paying players and the NCAA executives who try to squelch minor leagues from starting: college football is selling romance, not prowess. If ability were the only appeal, we’d move NFL games to Saturday and watch those games instead. But if you lose the romance of college football, you will lose the fans of college football.

In 2005, former Michigan athletic director Bill Martin commissioned a professionally conducted survey, which revealed that Michigan football season-ticket holders were doggedly loyal, with slightly more than half of them holding their seats for more than two decades. They were about 50 percent more likely to buy Michigan basketball season tickets than season tickets for any professional team. Only 9 percent of Michigan season-ticket holders also bought season tickets to any professional team, and this survey was taken when Michigan basketball was down and the Detroit Red Wings and Pistons were just a few years away from their latest titles.

This tells us a basic truth: College football fans don’t just love football. They love college football – the history, the traditions, the rituals, and the rivalries that surpass those of the pro game. They are attracted to the belief that it’s based on ideals that go beyond the field, do not fade with time, and are passed down to the next generation.

We don’t have to wonder if creating a separate minor league system will work. We already know: Just check out college hockey. The players who would rather have a paycheck than a scholarship can jump straight to the minor leagues – and they do. Because the players who opt for college are not forced to do so by the NHL, the graduation rates tend to be much higher in college hockey, and the scandals much fewer. College hockey fans love them all the more, because they know the guys they’re cheering for have chosen to be college hockey players. They’re the real deal.

In hockey, at least, both the minor leagues and the colleges deliver the players and the fans exactly what they promise. The only games they play are on the ice.

How to Make It Honest

Okay, but why would the NFL and NBA ever go for this, and voluntarily invest millions of their own money to create something they’ve been getting for free since they started? They wouldn’t, of course, so you’d have to force them.

But forcing them can be accomplished in one step: bring back freshmen ineligibility. If you want to make it honest, that’s how you do it.

In fact, freshmen ineligibility was the rule from 1905, the year the NCAA was founded, until 1972, and for a simple reason: colleges actually believed their athletes should be students first, and this is how they proved it. It gave all athletes a year to get their feet on the ground, and catch up where needed. Dean Smith and Terry Holland argued before the Knight Commission about the merits of freshmen ineligibility – but that was nine years ago, and nothing has changed.  Until the NCAA, the leagues, the presidents and the athletic directors bring back freshmen ineligibility, you should not take them seriously when they speak of “student-athletes.” They do not mean it.

By requiring all student-athletes to be actual student-athletes, many elite athletes will opt out – but there’s no way the NFL or the NBA will let talented 18-year-olds wander off if they might be able to help their teams win games. So, the NFL and NBA would almost certainly do what they should have done decades ago: Prepare players for their leagues, with their own money, by starting their own minor league teams.

Creating two paths to the pros will throw a bucket of cold water on the overheated facilities arms race, the soaring coaches’ salaries and the insane TV contracts. Yes, those things exist in college hockey and baseball, but nowhere near on the same scale. Restoring a sense of proportion is what we’re seeking here.

Yes, we need other reforms, too. We need to put an end to the NCAA’s absurd charade of posing as the sheriff when it’s really the saloonkeeper. Universities should hire athletic directors who’ve spent their working lives nurturing student-athletes, not “maximizing the revenue streams” of their “brand.” And we should require all universities to reinstate true faculty oversight of their athletic programs.

“Without faculty control,” Michigan’s legendary athletic director, Don Canham, wrote in an essay that came out after his death in 2005, “the presidents are running up to $70 million budget programs (Michigan, Ohio State, Stanford, Texas, etc.) with no oversight. What $70-million business could conduct business without a board of control?” In the eight years since Canham warned of “unbridled expansion,” Michigan’s budget has more than doubled. Guess he knew something.

All these changes are needed, but creating a second path to the pros is the key. And – as Smith, Holland and Canham himself urged – restoring freshmen ineligibility is the way to do it.

No, this solution will not create a perfect world. There will still be athletes who aren’t bona fide college students. There will still be coaches and boosters happy to break the rules. And there will still be an outsized mania for the sport. The goal is not perfection, but sanity – to protect the integrity of the universities the players are representing, and to preserve the passion the players and fans still feel for their favorite game.

The time to save this century-old game is now. And creating minor leagues to preserve college athletics, while giving all athletes a real choice, is the way to do it.

It’s time to call Mr. Delany’s bluff.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.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!

John U. Bacon

On November 5, 2011, Penn State’s former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was arrested on forty criminal counts, including the sexual assault of eight boys over a fifteen-year period, one of them in the showers of Penn State’s football building.

That put in motion a series of events that few could have imagined: it exposed the worst scandal in the history of modern sports; it led to the midseason firing of the iconic Joe Paterno; it prompted the hiring of little-known New England Patriots offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien; it resulted in Penn State’s commissioning the Freeh Report, which concluded university leaders knew enough about what Sandusky had done, but cared more about protecting the university’s image than his young victims; and it surely accelerated Paterno’s decline and death – all within three months of Sandusky’s arrest.

But Penn State’s troubles were far from over.

Most of the players didn’t know who Sandusky was, but their reactions were pretty swift. “They used to hang people at the Centre County Courthouse,” senior linebacker Mike Mauti told me, “and frankly, I would have been okay with that. Hell, give us the rope, and we’ll do it for you.”

But few Penn State insiders thought the NCAA would punish the football program for Sandusky’s sins, and they had precedent on their side. NCAA officials usually steered clear of the most serious matters, including rape and murder, leaving them for the appropriate legal authorities, while the NCAA ruled on whether players are allowed to put cream cheese or jam on their breakfast bagel. (They are not.) Letting the NCAA rule on a child rapist is as unwise as putting a meter reader in charge of a serial murder. They were in way over their heads – and they proved it.

At 10 a.m. Monday morning, July 23, 2012, Penn State’s football players gathered in their lounge to watch NCAA president Mark Emmert lay out a series of penalties. One erased a wide swath of Penn State’s rich history, vacating all victories from 1998 through 2011 — thereby dropping Paterno from the perch of his profession down to fifth. The sanctions also threatened Penn State’s future: a $60 million fine, a four-year postseason ban, and a drastic reduction in scholarships, from 85 to 65.

Emmert declared Penn State’s penalties might be considered “greater than any other seen in NCAA history.”

The public focused on the bowl ban, but Coach Bill O’Brien was far more worried about another clause, which allowed Penn State players to transfer immediately, without penalty, to any school they liked, and coaches from other schools to recruit them all over again. That could amount a death sentence, by slow poisoning. Could Penn State’s program survive?

O’Brien spoke immediately to his shell-shocked squad.

“We’re not here to understand the rules,” he told them. “We’re here to follow them. It’s my obligation to tell you that you are free to go anywhere you want, with no penalties. However, if you stay, I promise you, you will never forget it… and you will still get a great education.’ ”

At Penn State, that promise is not hollow. Joe Paterno surely had his blind spots, but how to run a clean program was not one of them. Even the Starbuck baristas in town know they can’t give a Penn State player so much as a free latte.

Within 24 hours, a hundred coaches from around the country converged on the parking lot of Penn State’s football building in the hopes of luring their players away. Some of those coaches, the players knew from being recruited the first time, would offer the players money, women and more.

Would O’Brien’s simple offer be enough to keep his players in State College?

“Were we in danger of a complete collapse?” assistant coach Larry Johnson, Sr., wondered aloud. “No question. The threat was as real as it could be.”

The NCAA sanctions were putting the lie to the NCAA’s own propaganda, which officially discouraged transfers because “student-athletes” are supposed to pick their schools for the education, not the athletic opportunities. But there Emmert was, inviting Penn State’s student-athletes to jettison the university that graduated 91% of its student-athletes – a big reason many of them chose Penn State in the first place – to transfer to programs that couldn’t come close to that rate.

Not only did it suddenly fall to every Penn State player who stayed to protect their storied program from disintegrating, they could only do so by upholding the very values the NCAA itself could apparently no longer proclaim with a straight face.

Amazingly, almost all of the players stayed – but they were rewarded with two straight losses, forcing them to save the season. Again, they rallied, finishing with a surprising 8-4 record, capped by an overtime victory over Wisconsin, the eventual Big Ten champions.

They had survived the sanctions, and the start to their season.

Emmert was probably as surprised as anyone. This week, the NCAA announced they were reducing Penn State’s penalties, restoring scholarships faster than originally planned – though, I suspect, for the wrong reasons.

Penn State’s leadership still seems lost. The 32-member board of trustees – one of the most dysfunctional boards in higher education, seemingly by design – hired one of their own, a former trustee whose business had gone bankrupt, to run the athletic department with no prior experience. How Sandusky was able to get away with his heinous crimes for so long, they still haven’t determined. The countless court cases to come will likely have something to say about that.

But the players’ stoic response to the sanctions turned the tide of public opinion – and that’s what turns the NCAA around. It is an organization without any guiding principles, save one: Do whatever is best for the NCAA, at that moment. That its decision also happens to be what’s best for Penn State’s student-athletes is merely a coincidence.

At the end of Penn State’s surprising season, one assistant coach told me, he’d always remember that their kids knew how to handle the situation better than most of the adults.

What was true ten months ago is just as true today. Important lessons were learned – about honesty, resilience and responsibility – just not by the people who needed to learn them.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident John U. Bacon is the author of the national bestsellers “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.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!

John U. Bacon

Even those who don’t follow sports probably know the Super Bowl is a week from Sunday.  And, for the first time ever, in any major American sport, the opposing head coaches are brothers. More important for Michiganders, they are the Harbaugh brothers, John and Jim, who went to Ann Arbor Pioneer High School. So, you’ll probably start to hear lots of stories from the folks who met them along the way.

Well, count me in.

Their dad, Jack, coached under Michigan’s Bo Schembechler in the ’70s. His oldest son John played football at Pioneer High and Miami of Ohio, then worked his way up the ladder until he became the head coach of the Baltimore Ravens in 2008. He told the Washington Post he’s based his coaching philosophy on Bo’s coaching philosophy.

John’s younger brother Jim has had a complicated relationship with Michigan, but not with Bo. Jim is my age, and when we were 12 he was Michigan’s ball boy – which made all of us envious. I played against him in baseball, and with him in hockey. That was my best sport, and I was just barely better than he was – that’s my claim, anyway – and hockey was his fourth sport, which he played on the side during basketball season. Guess which one of us became a sports writer?

Even in eighth grade, Harbaugh might have been the most competitive person I’ve ever met – and in my business, I have met a few.

He played four sports every year, specialization be damned. In his first year in high school, he was Pioneer’s starting quarterback, starting point guard, and starting pitcher. That is an athlete.

When his dad started coaching at Stanford, Jim finished high school in Palo Alto, but even Stanford didn’t offer him a scholarship. Late in the recruiting cycle, only Wisconsin – then a Big Ten bottom feeder – offered him a full ride, until Schembechler saved him with a scholarship at the eleventh hour.

What happened next is the stuff of legend. Jim Harbaugh started his sophomore year, until he broke his arm trying to recover a fumble mid-season. The team finished 6-6, Bo’s worst season. The next year, a healthy Harbaugh led Michigan to a #2 final ranking, the highest of Bo’s career. In Harbaugh’s last season, the Wolverines were undefeated, ranked second in the nation, with a real chance to win Bo’s first and only national title, going into their last home game – which they lost, to a mediocre Minnesota squad.

Everybody was distraught – but not Harbaugh, who immediately and publicly guaranteed victory over Ohio State.  Nobody ever said the man lacked confidence. Then he backed it up with a key play late in the game, when he ignored a Buckeye defender coming right at him to launch a long pass to Jon Kolesar to clinch the victory. But that’s not what Harbaugh remembered.

When Bo passed away in 2006, just as we were finishing his last book, I solicited stories from his former players. Harbaugh had just been named Stanford’s head coach, which obviously made him a little busy, but he dropped everything to send me this.

“To this day,” he wrote, “I remember almost all of my encounters with Bo in great detail.” But the most memorable, he said, occurred a few days after Harbaugh’s last Ohio State game, the one mentioned above. Bo called him into his office, and told him to sit down. Then Bo stood up, planted both fists on his desk, looked Harbaugh right in the eye – and told he had played one of the finest games he had ever seen a Michigan quarterback play. Then he fell back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “What it must feel like,” he said, “to have a son play the way you did! To stand in that pocket with the safety bearing down on you unblocked, and hit Jon Kolesar to seal the victory. UNBLOCKED!” He chuckled, and said, “I’m proud of you, Jim.”

Harbaugh wrote, “I felt as loved and appreciated as I have ever felt, like I was one of Bo’s sons. In reality, I was one of Bo’s thousands of sons.”

Next Sunday, in the Super Bowl, it’s not just two brothers facing each other, but two of Bo’s sons. We don’t have to wonder if Bo would be proud.

About the writer: John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.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!

John U. Bacon

This week, the University of Michigan announced an increase in the cost of “seat licenses” for football season ticket holders.

Before I dive into what all this means, let me explain what a “seat license” is, because, if you’re a normal person, it won’t make much sense.

A “seat license” is a fee that teams make their fans pay just to reserve the right to buy the actual tickets. They call it a donation – which is a stretch, since every fan apparently decided to donate exactly the same amount, or lose our tickets. But that allows us to claim it as a gift to a state university, and a tax deduction.

It’s hard to call that honest. Thanks to the latest hike, it’s hard to call it cheap, either.

In fairness, Michigan was the last of the top 20 programs, ranked by attendance, to adopt a seat license program, in 2005 – even though Michigan always finishes first in attendance. And the seat licenses started gradually: $250 for the best seats the first year, then $500 the second. They were nice enough to spare the folks in the endzone.

But this week Michigan pushed the seat license for the top ticket up to $600 each, and even the folks in the endzone will have to pay $150 per ticket, just for the right to buy them. In the past decade, the total cost of my two tickets on the ten-yard line has more than tripled, to over $1,700. But my seats are no better, and the schedule keeps getting worse.

It makes you wonder how we got here.

I can remember on football Saturdays our parents giving us five bucks each, and that would cover a two-dollar student ticket, a hot dog, a coke, and a little plastic football to toss around outside the stadium at halftime. That finski made the Michigan football players the cheapest babysitters in town. We got hooked watching the band flying out of the tunnel, the players leaping up to touch the banner, and the little dogs, Whiskey and Brandy, nosing a soccer ball up and down the field at halftime. We fell in love with it all – and I couldn’t wait for football season to come around again.

When we became Michigan students, it never occurred to us that we wouldn’t go to every game we could. What else would you want to do?

Former Michigan Athletic Director Don Canham sold the experience – and we bought it. Canham was a great marketer, but what impressed me most was what he would not do for money: solicit donors, put advertising on the uniforms or in the stadium, charge for tours – or ask for a raise. He had already made millions in business, and didn’t feel the need to squeeze more from his alma mater.

The current athletic department now aggressively seeks donors and corporate sponsors. It has brought advertising back to Crisler, in a big way, and has started sneaking advertising into the once-pristine Big House, too. They now charge to host corporate events, wedding receptions, and even school tours, which had been free since the Big House opened in 1927. Heck, until a few years ago, they didn’t even lock the gates during the week.

Michigan’s not alone, of course, and they will tell you it’s the cost of doing business – but what business, exactly? When current Athletic Director Dave Brandon said on “60 Minutes” that the “business model is broken” – what he failed to grasp was that it’s “broken” because it was never intended 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?

From its inception over a century ago, the athletic department’s goal was simply to be self-sustaining. They exercised a balance between meeting the financial needs of the athletic program, and restraining themselves from becoming a simply-for-profit professional team. But the goal now is more, more, more, with no limits in sight – but for what?

Skyrocketing salaries, for starters. In 1969, Bo Schembechler came to Michigan for $21,000. Today Brady Hoke receives $3.25 million a year – 155 times more than Bo received his first season – and Hoke is still a half-million dollars behind Iowa’s Kirk Ferentz.

When Bill Martin reluctantly accepted the job of athletic director in 2000, he insisted he be paid a dollar his first year, and his second, before agreeing in his third year to the middling rate of about $300,000. Like Canham, Martin had become a multi-millionaire businessman, and didn’t want to be a burden to his alma mater. He later turned down the president’s offer to double his salary, and declined all bonuses, while removing all advertising from Crisler Arena.

His successor, Dave Brandon, served as the CEO for two Fortune 500 companies, and is worth well over $100 million. His salary at Michigan is fast approaching a million dollars, including bonuses. For the first time in Michigan’s long history, the athletic director makes more than the president.

The people behind our current “business model” count on our boundless passion for Michigan football to keep us coming back – and they know how to exploit it. But my passion is for the players and the band and the tailgaters who will give just about any passerby a hot dog and a beer, simply for the asking. My love is not for the money-changers trying to turn a buck on every facet of our fun.

I might not be alone. For the first time since Bo got here in 1969, when attendance started growing every year, you’re starting to see the trend go the other way. Some games this year you could see thousands of empty seats, most of them in the student section, and I have a theory as to why.

Walk around Michigan Stadium, and you won’t see many kids. How many parents want to shell out a few hundred bucks for what is now the most expensive babysitter in town? Better to leave the kids at home, bring your business associates, and call it a tax deduction.

When these kids become college students, they are not addicted to Michigan football the way we were. Many of them could take it or leave it – and they proved it this fall.

But none of this solves my problem, the same one thousands of longtime fans are facing: Will I shell out $700 for my two seat licenses? Yeah, I probably will. And they know it.

But for the first time since I plunked down two bucks for a student ticket 40 years ago, I feel less like a loyal fan, and more like a fool. And that doesn’t feel good.

This might be the dawn of a new era – or the dusk of an old one.

About the writer: John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.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!

John U. Bacon

College football’s regular season ended Saturday, with the various conference championship games closing out a 14-week season. The next day, Sunday, the 35 bowl games sent out their invitations to 70 lucky teams. But when you look a little closer at their bowl offers, you have to wonder if those 70 teams were really that lucky at all.

The people who sell bowl games need us to believe a few things: (1) Their games are rewards for teams that had a great season; (2) They offer players and fans a much-wanted vacation; and (3) The bowls are nonprofits, while the schools make a killing.

These claims are nice – and would be even nicer if any of them they were actually true.

Forty years ago, college football got by with just 11 bowl games. The 22 teams the bowls invited were truly elite, and so were the bowls themselves – like the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl and The Granddaddy of Them All, the Rose Bowl. Back then, when your team got into a bowl game, you knew they’d done something special.

But in the past four decades, the number of bowls has more than tripled, to a staggering 35. The “bowl season” now stretches almost a full month, which is how many days you need to fit in such timeless classics as The Meineke Car Care Bowl, the Advocare V100 Independence Bowl, and the legendary Taxslayer.com Bowl. How many Taxslayer.coms fit into a bowl? It’s a question only theologians can answer.

To fill this glut of games, the bowls need 70 willing teams. But there are just 124 teams to choose from, and by definition, only 62 are above average. So some bowls have to settle for teams that didn’t finish in the top half of their sport – let alone their conferences. This year, 13 bowl teams don’t even have winning records.

When your team gets into a bowl game today, you know they… must not be on probation.

What used to be a special trip to be savored is now a chore to be completed. I’ve talked to hundreds of players, who’ve told me if they’re not going to one of the best bowls, they would rather skip the 15 mandatory practices, and the trip to Shreveport, or Boise, or Detroit, and stay home for the holidays.

The fans apparently feel the same way. Very few bowls sell all their seats, and more than a third of them draw fewer than 40,000 fans. You can fire a canon in those stadiums, then go find the canon ball and fire it again, and still not hit anybody.

This is all silly excess, but it crosses the line into corruption when you look at the bowls’ finances. The bowls are officially nonprofit, and they want you to believe it’s the schools they invite that are making out like bandits. But the only ones not profiting are the schools, their players, and the bands, which often have to pay for their seats before providing free half-time entertainment.

No, it’s the bowls themselves that make the money – and the coaches and athletic directors who receive bonuses for dragging their teams to these games.

Here’s how the bowl scam works: The schools have to pay for their flights, hotels and meals – which adds up to real money pretty fast when you start counting the hundreds of players, coaches, staffers, university VIPs and band members they bring. Then the bowls force them to buy tens of thousands of tickets they couldn’t give away if they tried.

And all that sets up the final outrage: According to Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter and Jeff Passan’s authoritative book, “Death to the BCS,” which includes the best reporting on this subject I’ve seen, because the bowls can pick their guests from a number of different schools, they can take advantage of the schools’ irrational desire to play in a post-season game, by making them negotiate against each other for a coveted invitation. And this results in schools agreeing to accept less and less of the advertised payout, all the way down to nothing. And that is exactly what the Motor City Bowl actually paid Florida Atlantic in 2009. Shameless.

Only half the teams lose their bowl games, of course – but almost all of them lose their shirts going to them.

All this is bad enough, but right when you think it couldn’t get worse, here you go: the men in the gaudy blazers who run these “nonprofit” bowls walk off with solid six-figure salaries – all for setting up one game a year, that no one wants to play in, or watch.

How do you fix this mess? Simple: Prohibit the practice of forcing schools to buy tickets they don’t want. (If the NCAA can prohibit schools from letting their student-athletes put cream cheese on a bagel for breakfast, they can prohibit this.) Second, make the bowls actually pay the schools exactly what they proudly announce they’re paying them. And while we’re at it: make the bowls pay for the schools’ travel expenses, too.

If the bowls decide it’s still worth it – and the better ones will – great. Everybody wins, just like the old days.

But if they don’t – and the lesser ones won’t – they’re free to close shop, and end the charade.

They won’t be missed.

About the writer: John U. Bacon is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” and “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football” – both national bestsellers. His upcoming book, “Fourth and Long: The Future of College Football,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in September 2013. You can follow him on Twitter (@Johnubacon), and at johnubacon.com.

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