The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (10 page)

Why? Projected athletic department revenue was estimated to be around $130 million for the fiscal year 2012–13, second only to Texas. Given the full-throttle race his department was running, Brandon needed virtually every dollar to self-fund twenty-nine varsity sports and 880 student-athletes, including $18 million for financial aid, $44 million in department salaries and about $15 million in interest on the debt load associated with $228 million in upgrades and renovations to just the football and basketball facilities.

What kept Brandon—and so many other athletic directors up at night—was the razor-thin margin for error. Michigan’s overall surplus for fiscal year 2012–13 was estimated to be just $5.8 million. The athletic department needed rivers of cash to stay out of the red. More than 70 percent of that money—or nearly $90 million—flowed from a single source.

“Michigan athletics cannot be successful if Michigan football does not lead our success, because the revenue it creates is what we live off of,” said Brandon. “I think it was Mark Twain who said, ‘If you put all your eggs in one basket, you better watch your basket.’ That’s our basket. It can’t get sick. It can’t falter.”

That’s where the number 22 came in. According to the latest NCAA figures, just 22 of the top 120 FBS schools had turned a profit in 2010–11. The average institutional debt of the other 100 or so schools was approaching $11 million each.

But Brandon didn’t see it that way. He didn’t see some unhealthy arms race behind the massive facilities boom sweeping across college athletics. Instead, he saw plain old American competition, with football as the economic driver to provide the coaching, the training and the academic and counseling support every one of his student-athletes deserved.

“I need that kid to get everything he or she deserves, just as if they’re some star running back on the football team,” he said. “Because if I’m not doing that, I’m doing a real disservice to that kid. Yeah, football is a huge driver for what we do, but we’re here for a greater purpose.”

At Michigan there was no question as to how that purpose would be accomplished. Plain and simple, it was Building the Brand. And nobody in college sports had proved more capable, more creative and, at times, more cutthroat in doing it than Brandon.

“Our plan is over there on the wall,” Brandon said, pointing to the right side of his desk. “It’s one sheet of paper.”

Indeed, the Michigan Athletics Game Plan had been reduced to a single page, sectioned off into twelve distinct boxes. Running vertically, along the left side, were Long-Range Goals, Strategic Initiatives and SMAC Objectives, short for Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Compatible Objectives, a product of Brandon’s days at P&G. Across the top of the page were four headings:

Listed inside the twelve boxes were forty-seven different goals and initiatives, such as “Achieve annual revenues of 160 plus million,” “Own social media,” “Encourage and reward risk-taking” and “Achieve #1 national ranking in licensing revenues and total football attendance in the same year.”

For Brandon it all started with that block
-M
logo and what Michigan football meant to his alums. He was fearful of television’s impact on game-day attendance. More than anything, he wanted that “wow” experience for his fans. So he upgraded the video boards, facilities and equipment inside Michigan Stadium, Crisler Arena and Yost Field House to the tune of $18 million. Out went the traditional pregame marching band music in the Big House in favor of a joint-jumping mix of hip-hop, rap and rock, as well as video board entertainment. Suddenly game balls were dropping out of the sky, delivered by “Rocket Man”; flyovers by stealth bombers kicked off games. Boring was out. Entertainment was in.

“We began to focus on what we call the ‘driveway to driveway’ experience,” he explained. “Everything you see, from the pregame action on the field, to halftime, to postgame, to how we usher you out to your car and get you back to your driveway, every
step
of it, is going to drive your thinking about how many season tickets you want to buy next year. And what you’ll pay for them. And my job is to get that ticket price as competitive as any other ticket price in the country.”

At the spring game Brandon had barely slowed down—a nonstop sixteen-hour whirl of meet and greets, interviews and donor and sponsor work. Through it all, he moved with the natural ease and grace of an athlete.
He honestly seemed to enjoy his game-day job—the endless shaking of hands, slapping of backs, chatting up alums, donors, sponsors and recruits.

Fresh off Hoke’s spectacular first season—an 11-2 record complete with a win over Virginia Tech in the Sugar Bowl—about ninety former players had come back to the Big House to play in the alumni game. One of Michigan’s greatest players, Desmond Howard, didn’t suit up, but he was there, watching from the sideline, sporting dark jeans, white tennis shoes, shades and a black watch cap.

“I heard there was a Desmond sighting!” said Brandon with a laugh, wrapping his arms around the former Heisman Trophy winner.

“He’s a game changer, that’s what Dave Brandon is doing,” said Howard a few minutes after the athletic director had moved on to shake yet another set of hands. “He understands the business side and he understands the athletic side and he understands the marketing side. He’s a blend of all three.”

As a self-described “left brain” guy, Brandon craved information, metrics and data. He barely slept and personally answered a couple hundred e-mails a day from friend and foe, often in exacting detail. His single-day record for meetings was seventeen, and his days often ran that long or more in hours.

“Truly a CEO, a man for our times, and I think it’s great that someone with his acumen comes into our business,” said Ben Sutton, president of IMG College, the sports business powerhouse that represented multimedia and marketing rights for more than forty BCS schools, including Michigan. “Our Michigan business, which, quite frankly, we’ve struggled with financially as a company, is getting between incrementally and exponentially better in large part due to the things he’s done in and around the program.”

When Brandon assumed ownership of Michigan athletics in the spring of 2010, about 275 people worked in the athletic department. Since that time about 80 had either voluntarily or not so voluntarily moved on. More than 300 people worked there now, but it was a completely different place—and pace. He lured Hunter Lochmann from his job as VP of marketing for the New York Knicks to be chief marketing officer for Michigan’s athletic department. Twenty-two months into the job, Lochmann had redefined goals and cleaned up the school’s sales, marketing, media, digital and social media platforms. Finding new ways, he said, to engage fans on Facebook and Twitter while optimizing ticket and merchandising sales on MGOBLUE.com one of the top collegiate sites in the country.

“He just has this sixth sense,” said Lochmann of Brandon. “In every
conversation, in every meeting, in every phone call, I learn something. The way he analyzes a situation. He always has an idea for a solution or maybe a different question you didn’t think of. Not many people have it.”

“I tell our marketing team I want every Michigan home football game to feel like a Super Bowl,” said Brandon.

By Saturday afternoon the lobby of the Sheraton Fort Worth was a nonstop parade of officially licensed products. Shirts, skirts and hats mixed with funky football fashion: crimson bow ties and madras shorts; cropped tops and cowboy boots; a hot maize mini ripped in all the right places.

Four hours before the early-evening kickoff, streets around Cowboys Stadium had a festive feel, the parking lots packed with tailgaters.

The good cheer extended inside the stadium as well. Fans from both teams bellied up, side by side, at bars soaking in the pregame festivities. The feeling was that of a giant indoor cocktail party, thirty thousand strong.

About forty minutes before kickoff, Hoke and his Wolverines took the field. The Michigan band blasted out “The Victors.” Alabama’s marching band matched the musical challenge as Saban and his Crimson Tide tore out of their tunnel.

As he stood on the field, Brandon’s eyes told the story.
This
was the kind of memorable “wow” experience he lived—and loved—to create. Not the veiled corporate sell some NFL fans experienced on Sunday. No, on this night, college football was the greatest spectacle in sports. A regular-season record $10 million payout for both teams, an athletic director’s dream.

“It’s everything we could have hoped for,” he said. “This game will sell merchandise. It will create interest for the tickets back home. It will hopefully get other networks bidding for these opportunities for us.”

Brandon’s first big “wow” had occurred on the night of September 10, 2011. When Brandon floated the idea of the first night game in U-M history, critics howled. Brandon listened and pushed ahead, breaking out new “throwback” jerseys for the occasion (on sale at an M shop near you). The team played its part, rewarding a record crowd of 114,804 with a thrilling, last-second 35–31 victory over Notre Dame. In yet another bold move, Brandon had authorized the purchase of ninety thousand yellow pom-poms. The resultant “Under the Lights” aerial photograph with those pom-poms pounding the air went up on the school’s official site. Tens of thousands of people logged on and tried to pick themselves out of the crowd; the photograph hung like a trophy on the wall outside Brandon’s office.

By the second series of the kickoff classic, Alabama had taken control of the game where it meant the most: in the trenches. Its massive, athletic offensive line—averaging six feet four inches and 320 pounds per man—simply overpowered Michigan’s defensive front. What started out as a quick 7–0 lead methodically grew to 31–0 with less than five minutes left in the first half.

“Bigger, stronger, faster,” said ESPN anchor Scott Van Pelt as he hustled down the ’Bama sideline. “I don’t know what planet [D. J.] Fluker’s from,” he said, referring to Alabama’s six-foot-six, 330-pound apartment building at right tackle, “but I know it’s not one where you and I live.”

The final score read 41–14. Michigan’s electrifying quarterback, Denard Robinson, was bottled up all night. Michigan’s offensive coordinator, Al Borges, seemed content to let him throw from the protection of the pocket, insulating, perhaps, his most important offensive asset for the long term. Afterward, Hoke took the long view. He saw the game as a “measuring stick” of how far his team still had to go to recruit the
athletes
needed to play with the big dogs.

But that was a problem for another day. On this night it was almost 11:00 central time when Michigan players began to filter out of the locker room and make their way to the team bus. They had been on the road for nearly thirty-six hours, at least five more to go before they would return to Ann Arbor around 5:00 a.m.

Brandon rode by in the passenger seat of a golf cart, his face set in stone. The stud left tackle Taylor Lewan limped by on an injured left knee. As the security line stretched out, Robinson and Hoke arrived after fulfilling their media obligations. During the game Robinson had gone down hard—twice: the first time following a helmet-to-helmet hit; the second time as the result of a desperate lunge for a failed first down that forced the star QB off the field. As he was helped to the locker room, thousands of Michigan fans stood as one and watched his every step.

But now there was Robinson, taking a bite out of a postgame sandwich while waiting to get on the bus—no worse, it appeared, for wear. His status was such he could have easily cut to the front and crashed out on the bus. Lord knows he deserved it. Instead, he waited like a walk-on, much like his head coach, who, in genuine sincerity, had found a spot in the middle of the line next to his wife: no special privileges; just a quiet, unmistakable message delivered by a coach living a life he loved.

Mike Vollmar looked over the scene. He had been the director of football
operations for Saban at both Michigan State and Alabama before joining Hoke at Michigan. He knew more than a thing or two about big-time football. One of the biggest things, he said, was there was little or no time to wallow in the losses. Or savor the wins.