College football fans have many ways to cope with their teams suffering through miserable seasons. Some fans get their release on message boards, unloading their frustrations on the similarly minded. Others adopt new teams or at least pretend like they aren’t affiliated with the now-defrocked unit. Still others fantasize about how a new coach is going to save their souls.
Michigan football shares the American economy’s worst flaw
College football illustrates the trend of American institutions being run by people whose talents lie in maximizing short-term profit instead of creating a quality product.
My preferred outlet is to lose myself in something else. Michigan can't score points or stop the immortal Gary Nova from tallying a career high? That's no problem. I'll just read about the history of the U.S. economy. That way, I can conform to the Michigan Man stereotype and pretend that I am above the childish waste of time that is college football.
The punchline is that I can’t escape the appalling status of Michigan football, even when reading about something totally unrelated. Take for example Michael Lind’s explanations in Land of Promise for what he calls the Great Unraveling, the decline of the American economy from its heights in the three decades after World War II. One such explanation is that our major corporations stopped being run by people who knew how to make things and started being run by financial carnies:
The harm done by the conglomerate movement in the wake of Celler-Kefauver* [a law that prevented companies in the same industry from merging and thereby led to companies from different industries merging] was compounded by the change in corporate culture that it produced. Many of the CEOs of the great industrial corporations of the mid-twentieth century, like Alfred Sloan and Charles Wilson, had engineering degrees. In the new conglomerates, corporate leadership increasingly passed to Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and CEOs with backgrounds in finance who didn’t know anything about a particular produce or industry. “Companies do not make money,” the influential management theorist Peter Drucker insisted. “Companies make shoes.” That might have been the motto of the triumphal managerial capitalism of the middle decades of the twentieth century. But in the second half of the century, more and more managers as well as investors disagreed. It did not matter what a company made as long as it made money.
Even as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and other industrial countries focused on developing world-class manufacturing, the leaders of many American manufacturing companies neglected the making of superior products in order to pursue short-term gains from mergers and financial manipulation. Beginning in the 1970s, these trend lines would converge and the American economy would pay a heavy price.
* - Those of you who are familiar with “The Godfather: Part II” will recognize Senator Kefauver’s name. One of Hyman Roth’s favorite things about Cuba is that he is free to make money “without Kefauver, the goddamn Justice Department and the F.B.I.”
I read that on a plane and confused the guy in 13C by blurting out, “Dave Brandon!”
Most major universities that have top-notch athletic programs hire athletic directors who have experience in the administration of intercollegiate sports. In Lind’s parlance, this would be the equivalent of a computer company promoting an engineer who knows how computers work.
University president Mary Sue Coleman, illustrating the Michigan Difference in her own special way, instead chose to hire Dave Brandon as Michigan’s athletic director in 2010. Brandon had no experience with the administration of intercollegiate sports at that time, save for having been a benchwarmer on three of Bo Schembechler’s teams in the 1970s and then having been a regent of the university from 1998 to 2006, both of which are tangentially connected (at best) to the role of being an athletic director.
Dave Brandon, Photo credit: Gregory Shamus, Getty Images
Instead, Brandon’s primary experience consistent of being the CEO of a direct mail company and then Domino’s Pizza. The latter saw its stock price improve significantly after Brandon left the company to try his hand at running a major athletic department.
Needless to say, the decision to hire Brandon has not been a major success. Brandon’s biggest decision as athletic director was to hire football coach Brady Hoke, a move that four years later looks like a massive failure and was, in fact, questionable at the time it was made. Hoke had a losing record in eight years as a head coach, albeit amid rebuilding jobs.
Michigan’s football attendance, always a point of pride on the part of Wolverine fans, has dropped significantly, such that the school’s famed streak of having a six-figure attendance for every game dating back to 1975 is being prolonged only by chicanery. The prospect of softening demand for football tickets is dangerous for Brandon’s department because he has presided over an explosion in expenses, which can only be paid for by the football program.
Brandon has run Michigan’s athletic department in a predictable way, given his background. Brandon had no experience in running an athletic department, so it would stand to reason that he might botch his biggest decision by thinking that he was too smart for the conventional wisdom that hiring a coach with a winning record is important for a major program. A corporate executive with a background in marketing, he has tried every which way to sell tickets and merchandise, all while the core product has declined. No manipulation of figures can induce people to pay money to see a shoddy product.
In the short term, a business can look healthy when its managers are focused on making the next balance sheet look good. In the long term, focusing on turning a quick profit at the expense of making a good product is a disaster.
There are a number of recent examples of this phenomenon in college football, even in Michigan’s conference. The Big Ten added Maryland and Rutgers in order to expand the reach of the Big Ten Network. Meanwhile, the product on the field has hardly been worse, as the Big Ten is the weakest of the power conferences. The average Big Ten team would be an almost nine-point underdog against the average SEC team, though that’s not exactly the fault of the new schools. The league is making money, but is the point of a conference to line the pockets of its members or to put a good product on the field?
Hey, we finally joined Facebook!
A second example is the declining quality of non-conference games. It’s no accident that the season’s first bonanza weekend of matchups came when conference play started in earnest. In recent years, athletic directors have shied away from scheduling major opponents because doing so requires playing non-conference games on the road. Fewer home games means less money coming into the program.
The good news is that college football is too damn good for even the people running it to screw up. Michigan will someday be back, because Brandon’s marketing gimmicks cannot destroy the winged helmet, the Big House, and “The Victors.”
College football will survive the bean counters who give us Alabama-Florida Atlantic instead of Alabama-Notre Dame because those spreadsheet-focused managers cannot destroy the day that never comes. The players who play the game and the coaches who coach it will keep on giving us the Hail Mary and the pop pass, no matter how much the people running the sport try to cheapen it.
See More:
