The U-M Athletic Dept., Revised

by Brian Cook

THIS IS AN alternate vision of the U-M Athletic Department. First some base principles:

Michigan isn’t leaving the conference and has to work within the confines of the new Big Ten. If this was “conference commissioner time” I would immediately exile Maryland and Rutgers; it’s not.

Michigan is also working within the realities of the current NCAA. Massive changes to amateurism are beyond the scope here.

Ditto Title IX.

We can look at some base assumptions: that profit is a main indicator of health, that the primary “customers” of an athletic department are the athletes, that you should follow Industry Best Practices so that you can point to them when someone questions a decision you made. We’re just trying to work within the system we’ve got, as goofy as it is.

First: what are we trying to do here?

Goals

Michigan’s athletic department is many things to many people: marketing for the university, jobs for people directly affiliated and not (hi), a connection to college, a path to an education, an entertainment activity. I’ve tried to boil things down to the core things, and those seem to be:

graduate athletes

win games

sustain the enterprise

Aside from a blip during the RR/Carr transition Michigan seems to be doing fine with #1 across all sports. Hypothetical athletic director wouldn’t have to change a thing there. #2 amounts to “hire good coaches,” which is very important and not very interesting to talk about. You and I both agree that it’s a better idea to hire Jim Harbaugh than someone else. The end.

Sustaining

Sustaining the enterprise is where athletic directors vary the most and have the most influence. You can play Texas A&M if you’re Texas… or not. You can have the most expensive student ticket prices in the conference… or not. You can build a palace for a non-revenue sport… or not.

Sustaining the enterprise is a mixture of generating revenue and maintaining and expanding your fanbase. Don’t charge enough and you can’t retain your coaches or build the latest fantabulous doohickey to keep up with the Joneses. Charge too much, as Michigan did with their student tickets, and you start eating your seed corn as people drop out of the ticket-buying section of the fanbase—and possibly altogether, long term.

Maintaining or expanding a fanbase isn’t just about numbers, either: it’s about depth of connection. When the Pistons hit their Joe Dumars Is Definitely Crazy Now period, the Palace emptied out like someone letting the air out of the balloon. Michigan has a much deeper connection with most of its fans and weathered a decade of play that was not much fun at all until the bottom dropped out last year.

If hypothetical alternate universe athletic director is going to sustain the enterprise he has to be thinking about creating that connection. Sports fans can be a weird lot: part customer, part captive, part fanatic. The whole point of sports is to be of a tribe. I can say “1997 Penn State” and you will have an emotional response. We can see someone in an Andy Katzenmoyer jersey and have that same response. Balancing the new with the old is difficult but mandatory, and if you don’t you can end up with a rebellion on your hands. SBNation has an excellent article on the tumultuous recent history of AS Roma, a Serie A team recently purchased by some Americans who found themselves in for a major culture shock when the Roma “ultras” walked out of the stadium en masse:

The Americani may build Roma their new stadium, they may manage to push reform of the Italian league, curb fan violence, expand their marketing reach, and lure millions of tourists to watch Roma each Sunday. But if they have any chance of really succeeding at breaking the peculiar quagmire that is Italian soccer, they will need to heed the lesson from the Curva Sud. When the ultras walked out of the Stadio Olimpico, the Curva Sud did not just demonstrate that they would not support a team that does not win. Rather, they showed Roma’s American owners that they cannot be taken for granted. They are not merely a “fan base.” They are not a “target audience” or “core ticket buyers.” They are not untapped consumer demand lying in wait for better marketing, an international brand, or a more packaged game day experience.

By walking out, the Curva Sud showed that they are not customers. For better or worse, they are Roma. And without them, the Americani have nothing.

Roma’s ultras are hooligans taken to the nth degree. They’re also a reason that Roma means anything to anyone when Serie A attendance is in tatters. It is far clearer in Euro soccer that the fans have some form of ownership. While Roma is particularly extreme, Michigan’s students demonstrated that if sufficiently pissed off they can effect change.

This is the point at which people get pissed off enough. Television’s primacy has provided an alternative and degraded the in-game experience. It has also homogenized things. The history of college football nonconference scheduling over the past 20 years tells the story well enough: there was a great thing that built up a lot of goodwill, that goodwill was completely mined out by a series of spreadsheet robots, and now someone has to build that goodwill back.