John U. Bacon

Congratulations! You not only survived that annual orgy of conspicuous consumption called the Super Bowl, you also survived the two weeks of endless stories without news that lead up to the big day.

And when the big game arrived, what was our reward? 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.

Has it come to this?

But back to the point of the whole exercise: The Super Bowl ads.

To say a bunch of ads were disappointing is like complaining that your dentist’s routine cleaning is getting predictable. We usually don’t expect ads to do anything more than annoy us.

But with Super Bowl ads, all the hype raises our expectations, and all the money companies spend – a record four million dollars for a 30-second ad – only increases the pressure.

Trying to be funny is the one, surefire way to make sure you’re not. And, because the ads are so expensive, every executive at every company has got to throw in his two cents, which is trying to create comedy by committee. And that’s the second surefire way to be sure you ain’t funny.

MiO Fit sports drinks, for example, decided to pick the overweight, un-athletic comedian Tracy Morgan to pitch their product. Which is kind of like hiring Manti Te’o to shill for Match.com. Good luck with that.

Race car driver Danica Patrick is forever telling us she wants to be taken seriously, while she is forever taking millions of dollars to appear in GoDaddy.com’s sexist, sophomoric ads.

As a friend of mine once said, if you wear the clown nose and the clown hat and you honk the clown horn, sooner or later, you’re a clown.

At the other end of the spectrum, Subway spared itself the trouble of trying at all. The entire ad consisted of people trying to say “February,” or “Feb-RU-ary,” or “Febuany,” or something, and screwing it up. I want to say, “You had to be there,” but even the people who were there weren’t laughing.

Mercedes made a mildly clever ad featuring a Rolling Stones song and Willem Dafoe as the devil, and that gets a little sympathy from me. Simply by virtue of not stinking, it made my top five.

The marketing on Super Bowl Sunday hits you like a fire hose. Even if you skipped every TV commercial, you’d still get splashed with ads.

Corporate logos flashed in front of the sportscasters’ desk, and more popped up behind it. The coin toss was sponsored by Papa John’s Pizza, the game ball was brought to you by… someone selling something – I can’t recall – and after that you could enjoy the Pepsi Half Time.

They could not stop themselves. They ran commercials right before an extra point, then ran more right after it – a 20-to-1 ratio of ads to action.

The flood of commercialism was so great, the Mercedes-Benz Superdome just couldn’t take it. She’s breakin’ up! The 34-minute blackout provided the most peaceful portion of the event. It was also the most spontaneous, which showed us that, without their cue cards, the analysts are incapable of stringing together two coherent thoughts. Maybe CBS should try hiring a couple journalists.

Good news: Next year, the blackout will be brought to you by the good folks at DTE.

Lost in all this was a football game. As I suspect you’ve heard, the teams were coached by John and Jim Harbaugh, brothers from Ann Arbor. John, the older brother, has lived in Jim’s shadow his entire life. Jim’s team came back from a 28-6 deficit to pull within one play of winning. But the pass fell incomplete, and John’s team won. Good for him.

In the old days, the game stunk, but the game day experience was – dare I say it – almost pure, by today’s standards. Now, it’s the opposite – but you can’t see the game from the trees, which are brought to you by the good folks at Weyerhaeuser lumber company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John U. Bacon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is how I feel about the Green Bay Packers.

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

Unlike most fanatics, I was not born into it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John U. Bacon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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