John U. Bacon

Last week, I explained why Michigan students are dropping football tickets in record numbers – about 40% in the last two years. It touched a nerve – actually a few hundred thousand nerves. And not just among Michigan fans, but college football fans nationwide, who recognized many of the same flaws at their favorite university that were turning them off, too.

It’s all well and good to criticize Michigan’s athletic administration – and apparently very cathartic for many fans, too. But it doesn’t solve the central problem: How can college programs protect an experience millions of fans and students have loved for decades, before it’s too late?

Yes, winning helps. But when Michigan went 3-9, 5-7, 7-6 a few years ago, they still had a robust wait list. And when USC was winning national titles about the same time, they rarely sold out their Coliseum. Fans obviously love winning, but what they want – what they need – runs deeper than that.

Allow me to offer a few suggestions.

First, some easy ones: Give the fans real opponents, at a reasonable price, then revert the student ticket policy back to what it was, for – well, forever. Freshmen sit in the end zone, and seniors get the best seats. Simple.

Want them to show up on time? Don’t bully them, or tease them with donuts or cell phone service. Just remove the least appealing aspect of a modern football Saturday: boredom.

What’s boring? Waiting in line for 30 minutes to get in your seat. Or worse, being forced to arrive hours before kickoff, with nothing to do but sit in the heat, the cold or the rain, while your classmates are still outside tailgating. Then there’s the 20-minute wait for a six-dollar hot dog.

Fans at home don’t have to wait in line for any of these things. Why should fans who paid hundreds to sit in the stands? Hire a few more folks, reduce the lines, and keep the fans happy.

Everybody’s most hated delay is waiting for TV timeouts to end. Because every game is televised, ticket holders endure about 20 commercial breaks per game, plus halftime. That adds up to more than 30 minutes of TV timeouts – about three times more than the 11 minutes the ball is actually in play.

To loyal fans who sit in a stadium that is too hot in September and too cold in November – and often too rainy in between – this is as galling as taking the time, money, and effort to drive downtown to a local store, only to have to wait while the clerk talks on the phone with someone who didn’t bother to do any of those things.

Why do the powers that be let TV spoil your day at the stadium? TV doesn’t stop car races, golf tournaments or soccer games – yet those still make millions of dollars for all involved. If the TV whizzes can’t figure out how to make a buck on football without ruining the experience for paying customers, those fans will figure it out for themselves, and stay home.

While TV is running its ads, Michigan too often gives its loyal season ticket holders not the marching band or – heaven forbid – silence, but obnoxiously loud rock music and, yes, ads! Spectators spend hundreds of dollars to suffer through almost as many ads as the folks watching at home for free. Sssssuckers!

Yes, advertising in the Big House does matter. Americans are bombarded by ads, about 5,000 a day. Michigan Stadium used to be a sanctuary from modern marketing, an urban version of a national park. Now it’s just another stop on the sales train.

I’m amazed how eagerly universities have sold their souls to TV. It wasn’t always this way. Bo Schembechler said, “Toe meets leather at 1:05. If you want to televise it, fine. If you don’t, that’s fine too.”

Bo’s boss, Don Canham, backed him. TV was dying for a night game at the Big House. Canham wasn’t. So, they compromised – and didn’t have one.

If fans want night games, fine – give ‘em what they want. But nobody likes waiting for TV to decide when Michigan is going to play that week – especially fans flying in from far away.

This past fall, ESPN descended on Evanston, Illinois, for a game between Ohio State and Northwestern – a rarity. When ESPN told the folks at Northwestern to get rid of these shrubs and those bushes near Lake Michigan, because ESPN wanted to build their set there, Northwestern did something none of the big boys have the guts to do: They said, “No. You can set up where we planned it.”

What did ESPN do? They followed Northwestern’s orders. What else could they do?

The universities still have the power – but only if they’re willing to use it.

Okay, you start dictating terms to TV networks, they might cut back on the cash (though I doubt it). But even if they did, what would that mean? Perhaps Michigan’s rowing team would have to make do with a $20 million training facility, instead of a $25 million one. Maybe Michigan’s head coach would have to get by on $2 million a year, instead of $4 million. Perhaps Michigan’s athletic director – and yes, he does pay himself – might just have to feed his family on $300,000 a year, instead of $1.3 million.

I think universities could somehow survive these deprivations. It would be worth it if, in the bargain, they get their souls back.

Which brings me to legendary Michigan broadcaster Bob Ufer, who often said, “Michigan football is a religion, and Saturday is the holy day of obligation.” He was on to something. Athletic directors need to remember the people in the stands are not customers. They’re believers. Treat them accordingly – or lose them forever.

That is not unique to Michigan. Researching my latest book, “Fourth and Long,” I met Dr. Ed Zeiders, the pastor of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in State College. He has seen what a college football team can do for a community in ways others might not.

“We are desperately needy,” he told me. “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. Our culture is devoid of these things.”

Pastor Ed, as he’s known, fills those needs every week at his church. But he couldn’t help but notice the place of worship down the street can host 108,000 believers every Saturday.

“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.”

And this brings us to the central problem: a misguided mindset driving the entire enterprise into the ground. If you think the University of Michigan is just a brand, and the athletic department is merely a business, you will turn off the very people who’ve been coming to your temple for decades.

Break faith with your flock, and you will not get them back with fancier wine. Welcome them, and the faithful will follow.

You have a choice. Just remember: The fans do, too.

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

Because my last 700-word commentary completely covered every subject in the sports world that occurred in 2013, my editor thought, “Hey, why not preview the year in sports in January?!”

Why not? Because I have no idea what’s going to happen, that’s why. Nobody does. That’s why we watch sports: We don’t know how it’s going to end. It’s also why we shouldn’t watch pregame shows: everybody is just guessing.

Nonetheless, if The Chronicle wants to pay me to make wild, unsupported guesses – then doggonnit, that’s what I’ll do. Just one of the many duties that come with being a hard-hitting investigative journalist.

Let’s start at the bottom. That means, of course, the Detroit Lions.

The Lions finished yet another season by missing the playoffs, and firing their coach. If you’re surprised by any of this, you have not been paying the slightest attention, and probably don’t know that the football is the one with pointy ends.

In my lifetime, the Lions have won exactly one playoff game – and I am no spring chicken. At this rate, if I want to see the Lions win the Super Bowl, I’ll have to live… several lifetimes.

In 1997, I wrote: “The Lions’ four decades of mediocrity beg more fundamental questions. Why did [the Lions] pick Wayne Fontes in the first place? Why have they been so patient with him? And why are the Lions so attracted to nice guys who finish third?”

Seventeen years, seven head coaches, and zero playoff wins later, we are asking the same questions. First wild guess: 17 years from now, we’ll be asking the same ones.

Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo has gotten the Spartans into the NCAA tournament every year, for 16 straight years. He once told me, as a joke, that maybe they should miss the tournament one year, just to remind their fans it’s not a birthright. Maybe, but not this year. The Spartans are 15-1, ranked fourth, and flying high.

Izzo has won seven Big Ten titles, been to five Final Fours and won the national title in 2000. But I’ve often said his best season of coaching was 2010, when they lost two-time Big Ten player of the year Kalin Lucas, and got to the Final Four without him.

By that measure, this could be Michigan head coach John Beilein’s best season, too. Last year they got to the NCAA finals for the first time since the Fab Five. They were expected to do big things this year, too. But then star center Mitch McGary had to bow out for back surgery. It was a colossal blow – to which the Wolverines have responded by winning six straight games, including their first four Big Ten contests. Do not count them out.

That brings us to the Detroit Pistons, for some reason. The Pistons made the playoffs for eight straight years until their owner, Bill Davidson, passed away in 2009. They haven’t made it back since,  and they won’t this year.

The Red Wings, in contrast, are extremely well run, and proved it by making the playoffs every season since 1990 – a record that spans longer than the lifetimes of some of their players. Another wild guess: their streak will not be broken this spring, either.

The Tigers are in for an interesting year. After Jim Leyland retired, they hired Brad Ausmus to manage the team. Ausmus, a Dartmouth grad, might be the smartest, best looking manager the game has ever seen. And that will carry him right up to… opening day.

In college football, the questions are simple: Are the Spartans really all that? And when will the Wolverines return to being all that?

The Spartans went 13-1 last season, beating Michigan and Ohio State to win the Big Ten title, then followed up with a Rose Bowl win over Stanford – all with players those schools didn’t want. Can they do it again, and prove it was no fluke?

At Michigan, the Wolverines are trying to prove that the last decade was a fluke, and they still belong among the nation’s elite teams. The big story this month was not a big bowl win or a big recruit, but the firing of an offensive coordinator, and the hiring of a new one. Good move.

I’ve never seen a fan base so excited over the hiring of an offensive coordinator. And I’ve never seen that excitement so justified.

Will Michigan’s offense be better than last year’s? Well, as my dad so often told me as a kid, when you’re on the floor, you can’t fall out of bed. The best date on the schedule next year might be October 25, when the Wolverines travel to East Lansing to face the Spartans.

Be sure to tune in 11 months from now, when I will publicly deny making any one of these predictions.

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 year in sports, 2013, started out with the Detroit Lions missing the playoffs, and hockey fans missing the entire National Hockey League season.

The NHL hadn’t played a game since the Stanley Cup Finals that spring. The lockout started the way these things usually do: The players thought the owners made too much money, and the owners thought the players made too much money. And, of course, both sides were dead right.

On one side, you had NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, widely considered the worst commissioner in sports today – and maybe ever – who gets booed by the fans whenever he shows up. On the players’ side, you had union chief Donald Fehr, who led the baseball players union to cancel the 1994 World Series.

Well, you can guess what happened: a game of chicken between two stubborn leaders bent on self-destruction.

Fortunately, a government mediator – yes, you heard that correctly – saved the day, and hockey resumed. All of it only goes to prove my theory: hockey is the greatest sport, run by the dumbest people.

Things picked up after that.

Ann Arbor’s own Harbaugh brothers, John and Jim, coached their teams into the Super Bowl. Their dad, Jack, coached under Michigan legend Bo Schembechler, and Jim was his star quarterback, and played in the NFL. But on this day, John – the older, quieter, less celebrated brother – was the star, with his Baltimore Ravens holding off Jim’s San Francisco 49ers, 34-31.

The bigger surprise: On the one day we actually look forward to watching TV ads, they were so bland and boring and just plain bad, we had no choice but to turn our attention to the actual football game.

Michigan basketball coach John Beilein, the eighth of nine kids, started his career when he literally climbed out of a sanitation sewer to teach high social studies and coach three sports. Four decades and eight teams later, the 60-year old coach led his Wolverines to the NCAA Final Four, then the finals. It was the feel-good story of the spring.

After Michigan fired its last four basketball coaches, three in the wake of scandals, Michigan just might have finally gotten the right guy. He just took a little while to get there.

Andy Murray became the first British tennis player to win Wimbledon since 1936, and the first Scotsman since 1896 – something to savor.

Jim Leyland’s Detroit Tigers won the division title for the fourth time in eight years, then retired. He had plenty of critics, but I couldn’t help but notice his teams always won. Everywhere. In the minors. In the majors. In the National League. In the American League. At every level, in eight different states, and five different decades. Leyland must have done something computers can’t. I’m glad that still matters.

Ohio State University president Gordon Gee’s ability to put money in the bank was equaled only by his ability to put his foot in his mouth. In politics, they say, when your opponent is shooting himself in the foot, don’t grab the gun. His final gaffe: “The Fathers are holy on Sunday, and they’re holy hell the rest of the week. You just can’t trust those damn Catholics on a Thursday or a Friday, and so, literally, I can say that.” Yes, and so, literally, Ohio State can ask you to leave.

The NCAA decided to reduce the sanctions against Penn State’s players, who didn’t know who Jerry Sandusky was until he was arrested. The same month, Grambling’s players boycotted a mid-season game. College players have no power, until they sit down. Then they have all the power.

The Michigan football team’s dreams of a division title ended with five league losses. The Wolverines best game was a one-point loss to hated Ohio State, the first time I have ever seen Michigan fans feeling better about their team after a loss than before it.

While the Wolverines were stumbling, up the road Michigan State quietly won the division to face those same Buckeyes, leaving Wolverine fans to wish for the lights to go out, a la the Super Bowl. No luck. The Spartans beat the Buckeyes 34-24, to win their first trip to the Rose Bowl in a quarter century.

In the 80th annual Mud Bowl, played in a mucky swamp in front of Michigan’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon house, an estimated 2,000 fans showed up to watch. But it’s hard to say, because the Mud Bowl doesn’t have turnstiles, ticket scanners or seat licenses – or TV timeouts, for that matter.  It was cold, it was chaotic, it was crazy, but the pure energy pulled the crowd in, just as it surely did when students played the first game in 1869.

The players weren’t battling for money or fame, just pride. They showed all of us why football had caught on in the first place. It was a nice reminder.

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

I’ve often joked that some Michigan football fans aren’t happy unless they’re not happy. But after eleven games this season, even they could be excused for having plenty to be unhappy about. A week ago, the Wolverines were 3-and-4 in the Big Ten, with undefeated Ohio State coming up next.

The Wolverines had been surprisingly bad all season – until the Ohio State game, when they were suddenly, surprisingly good, falling short by just one point in the final minute. It was the first time I have ever seen Michigan fans feeling better about their team after a loss than before it.

Still, the heroic performance was bittersweet. The most common reaction I’ve heard this week: Where was that team all year? And which team will return next year – the one that got crushed by Michigan State, or the one that almost beat the Buckeyes?

But Michigan’s bigger problems are off the field, not on it. In just four years, the athletic department’s budget has expanded from $100 million to $137 million – and that does not include the $340 million earmarked for a new building master plan.  This rapidly growing empire could be threatened by a perfect storm of a bad record, skyrocketing ticket prices, and next season’s horrible home schedule.

This brings up two questions: How do they increase the budget by 37%? And where do they spend it?

First, Athletic Director Dave Brandon pushed aside faculty control. Michigan’s Advisory Board on Intercollegiate Athletics didn’t even know he planned to promote Michigan’s men’s and women’s lacrosse teams to varsity status – at a cost of over $3 million year – until the day before it was announced. But that’s one day sooner than they hear about large hikes in ticket prices, and just about everything else the athletic department is doing.

Michigan’s late athletic director, Don Canham, wrote in 2005 that without faculty control, athletic directors have virtually no restraints. “What $70-million dollar business could conduct business without a board of control?” Just eight years after Canham wrote his final piece, warning of “unbridled expansion,” Michigan’s athletic budget has almost doubled. Guess Mr. Canham knew what he was talking about.

Second, the athletic department needed to find new sources of revenue, and squeeze more money out of the old ones. To do so, it has tripled the size of its development staff, and pumped the prices of tickets and “seat licenses” by roughly 30% to 50%, or about $100 per seat. The athletic department now charges $9,000 for corporate events in the stadium skyboxes and $6,000 for a one-hour wedding reception on the 50-yard line. They even charge school kids for tours, which Michigan had always provided for free.

When former athletic director Bill Martin told me, “Just because you can charge them more, doesn’t mean you should,” he sounded like somebody who had retired a century ago, not in 2010.

Add it all up, and the department will not just cover its expanded $137 million budget, it will show a nearly $9 million budget surplus.

So, where does all this money go? Brandon declined to be interviewed for my latest book, “Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football,” so I talked to Bill Martin and former Michigan president James Duderstadt, who have seen a few budgets in their day. They’re alarmed that so little of the new money actually goes to student-athletes, and is instead spent on – well, just about everything else.

Staff salaries, for example, have grown from $34 million to $49 million under Brandon, including a 62% increase in administrator compensation. The athletic department’s spending on “Marketing, promotions and ticketing,” and “Professional travel and conference dues,” have tripled to almost three million. But perhaps most surprising is the $2.6 million the department now spends on “Hosting, Food and Special Events,” an increase of almost 500%.

In other words, the additional millions the fans are now being forced to pay are not going to the students on the field, but the suits in the building – including almost a million dollars a year for the athletic director himself, three times the salary of his predecessor.

“Look into how much is spent on marketing, then look at how effective it is,” Martin told me. “You don’t have to do marketing at Michigan. We have the fans. We have the support. We have a great reputation. All you have to do is win. If you win, they will come. You just need to make it as affordable as possible for your fans.”

Dudertadt added, “It’s a different operation now. And I think it’s a house of cards. No matter how much you ‘build the brand,’ if you don’t have the product, sooner or later, it gets you.”

And that’s why the football players aren’t just fighting for their teammates and their school, or even the school’s other sports. They’re fighting to pay for the soaring salaries of people they’ll never meet.

If you care about Michigan athletics, it’s scary to think what could happen when the players inevitably fall short, and the fountain of fan money starts to dry up.

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

Tomorrow morning, one of Michigan’s oldest traditions will be on display. No, not at the Big House, but at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house.

That’s where they’ve played something they call The Mud Bowl every year since 1933, the same season Jerry Ford played center for the national champion Wolverines, and Columbia University won the Rose Bowl.

Back then, the leap from the Mud Bowl to the Rose Bowl was a lot smaller than it is today. Oh, and a new venture called the National Football League was little more than a decade old, but few cared. Today college football is a lot closer to the NFL than it is to the Mud Bowl – which still doesn’t charge its spectators a dime.

Last fall, I woke up on a cold, rainy Saturday morning to see the tradition for myself.

A few days before, the fraternity had its pledges dig up their front yard, flood it with water, and voilà! Their lawn becomes a bowl of mud, ready for the annual football game.

By 10 a.m., the bowl-shaped front lawn was packed with an estimated two thousand people, but it’s hard to say, because the Mud Bowl doesn’t have turnstiles, ticket scanners or seat licenses.

The “field,” which doesn’t have a blade of grass on it by game day, is not quite twenty-five yards by fifty yards. But that’s okay, because it’s not quite rectangular, either, or even flat. It runs uphill from west to east about four feet. The SAEs naturally gave the deeper end to their opponents, the Fijis, who’d won a playoff for this honor.

The play wasn’t pretty, but it was fierce, with almost every down resulting in at least one player getting jammed face-first into the swamp, followed by a five-man shoving match, which usually ended with at least one more player eating mud. If you could claim anything was “beautiful” about a game that couldn’t be uglier, it’s that they were playing this hard for nothing more than bragging rights. No money, no fame, just pride – which might explain why neither side backed down an inch.

On one play, the Fijis had the SAE quarterback on the run. He escaped his attackers, only to tackle himself by tripping in the mud and wiping out. Although he was clearly down – his mud-covered T-shirt told you that – a Fiji slogging by still felt the need to dunk the quarterback’s face into the mud. And that started yet another fight.

That’s when it hit me: All of us watching this primal contest had gone farther back in time than just eight decades. We had traveled all the way back to 1869, and we were watching the first American football game between Rutgers and Princeton. It was glorified rugby – an excellent outlet for excess testosterone, and catalyst for school spirit.

The forward passes the players threw were new, but everything else had been done before, countless times – and these players were showing all of us why football had caught on in the first place. It was cold, it was chaotic, it was crazy, but the pure energy pulled the crowd in, just as it surely did four years after the Civil War. The banks were packed with people the entire game, and I didn’t see a single soul leave. Of course, it helped that they didn’t have to suffer through any TV time-outs.

After SAE dispensed with the Fijis 30-21, they naturally celebrated by diving into the mud – and not just the players, but all the brothers.

Every Michigan football player I’ve ever talked to about the Mud Bowl was dying to play in it. I know of at least a few who – at the risk of Coach Schembechler killing them with his bare hands – snuck out of the Campus Inn hotel early on Saturday morning to see the spectacle for themselves, before dashing back to catch the team buses to the Big House. Given the forty-hour workweeks they go through just to play big-time college football, it’s not hard to understand why they might envy the Mud Bowlers their simple fun.

If you added it all up, the frat brothers might have the better deal.

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

Michigan football fans often wear funny pants and funny hats. They sing funny songs and tell funny stories.

But to Michigan fans, some things are not funny – and Appalachian State is about five of them.

You might recall those guys, who opened the 2007 season against the fifth-ranked Wolverines. Everybody made fun of Appalachian State, because nobody knew where it was. It turns out it isn’t even a state. I looked it up.

Their fight song didn’t make a very strong argument, either: “Hi-Hi-yike-us. No-body like us. We are the Mountaineers! Always a-winning. Always a-grinning. Always a-feeling fine. You bet, hey. Go Apps!”

“The Victors,” it was not.

No ranked team in the game’s top division, like Michigan, had ever lost to a team from Appalachian State’s division. The point spread was 27. Not since 1891, when the Wolverines opened the season against Ann Arbor High School, did Michigan’s home opener seem like such a mismatch.

Until the game started, that is.

App State led most of the game, and held a 34-32 lead when Michigan set up for a last second field goal. As scary as it had been, once Michigan kicked the field goal, everybody figured, all would be well.

But Appalachian State blocked the kick, won the game, and sent Michigan’s players and fans into a vortex of pain and shame. It is still considered the greatest upset in the history of college football, a game now called simply, “The Horror.” There’s no need to explain what it means to a Michigan fan.

With it, Michigan’s aura of invincibility, even at the Big House, vanished.

The next year, a bad Toledo team proved it was no fluke when the Rockets became the first Mid-American Conference school to beat the Wolverines in 25 attempts.

But these losses seemed like bad nightmares after coach Brady Hoke led the Wolverines to an 11-2 season in 2011, including Michigan’s first victory over Ohio State since 2003, and its first BCS bowl victory since a young man named Tom Brady did it 12 years earlier. The ghosts were gone. 

This season the Wolverines crushed Central Michigan, 59-9, then beat Notre Dame at home. The aura, it seemed, was back.

Next up: the Akron Zips, named for rubber galoshes that were popular 90 years ago. The Zips finished their last three seasons with identically miserable marks of 1 win against 11 losses. They had not won a single road game in five years. Did they really think they’d break that streak in the nation’s biggest stadium, against the only BCS team with a 16-game home winning streak?

This was the kind of game where Michigan coaches tell the back ups, “You’ll be getting in this weekend,” and thousands of fans don’t show up until the second half, or show up at all.

But the lowly Zips had other plans. They went ahead 10-7 in the third quarter, and again, 24-21 with just four minutes left. Years ago, Michigan fans would have been mildly amused by the plucky visitors, still confident that their Wolverines would be stomping them shortly.

But after the Appalachian State and Toledo debacles, the nightmares came creeping back. The fans were often silent – covering their foreheads, eyes and ears, in the fear that it could all come true again.

Their Wolverines responded by marching down the field in just 91 seconds to retake the lead, 28-24. But the Zips did something that was becoming increasingly common since The Horror: They responded by marching down the field themselves, playing without fear.

The Zips had already knocked a would-be field goal off the upright. They had already thrown an interception in the endzone. And they had already thrown another pass right through the hands of a receiver in the endzone. If they had capitalized on any of those opportunities, they could have taken the lead, or set themselves up to win the game at the end. Instead, on the final play, the quarterback threw too high, incomplete.

The Wolverines might have been lucky, but they survived.

Some pundits are already calling this the game “The Worst Win Ever” – but the key word is “win.” Unlike upsets, fans forget about ugly victories pretty fast.

But these three games set up next year’s rematch with – you’re not going to believe this – Appalachian State. Despite the recent stunners, you’d still be foolish to bet against the Wolverines. But not as foolish as you would have been seven years ago. The ghosts just might be here to stay.

About the writer: Ann Arbor resident 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,” was 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!