The hot seat, p.4
The Hot Seat, page 4
At Michigan, football was another way to keep up the university’s profile relative to the East Coast icons of higher education. Coach-turned-athletic-director Fielding Yost designed and built Michigan Stadium in 1927 in response to the venues that had been erected at rivals Minnesota and Ohio State. Yost put together a scrapbook of images to inspire himself, Kinney said, which included both the Roman Colosseum (modesty!) and the Yale Bowl. He marketed the bonds that financed Michigan Stadium’s construction to the general public, offering seats between the forty-yard lines in exchange for bond purchases. His catchphrase was, “Athletics for all.” Said Kinney, “He genuinely believed that, but it was also a very convenient way to get money for the athletic department.” At Michigan and elsewhere, the oft-remarked-upon category of people who didn’t attend a college but developed an attachment to its teams—fans of other schools call them “Walmart Wolverines” because of where they are assumed to have gotten their team gear—was created intentionally.
Yost’s most significant successor in the field of cash accumulation was Don Canham, a track coach who was hired as athletic director in 1968. Canham sold season tickets via direct mail with what were, for the time, flashy, four-color brochures promoting the purchase, as Bacon has written, in less-than-subtle fashion to women as a way to get their husbands and children out of the house for an entire Saturday. Canham hired Bo Schembechler and launched Michigan into the era in which every sports facility (and even some coaching staff titles, like the “Sanford Robertson Offensive Coordinator” position) is named after donors, setting it up with systemic resources that seem almost insurmountable to most other schools. (They aren’t always insurmountable! Just ask Appalachian State! And then set me on fire and throw me out of a helicopter!)
Michigan’s fight song, “The Victors,” written in 1889, emphasizes that its players are “Champions of the West,” as in the Western Conference, the predecessor of the Big Ten, so named when states like Michigan and Ohio were not too long removed from being considered the country’s western frontier. I found a reference to Michigan as “the Harvard of the West” in a magazine from 1909, and to Harvard as “the Michigan of the East” (you can get T-shirts that say this) in an alumni publication from 1937. (And also, very randomly, in an ahead-of-the-curve University of Oklahoma periodical from 1936.) A 1948 football yearbook describes U of M’s athletic facilities as “working monuments to the Michigan ideal of education for a well-rounded life” and mentions that its current football staff “maintains the same degree of balance and scholarship that has always distinguished Michigan.” A contemporaneous book called Modern Football, written by longtime Michigan coach Fritz Crisler, recommends “hardening” one’s muscles during preseason training with activities that include “rolling on the floor” and “diving on the ground.” Thus rose the Michigan Man, judiciously balancing his scholarship and civic leadership with muscles hardened from smashing his face into the ground on purpose.
It was not the salad days for the United States, the state of Michigan, or its flagship university’s men when I arrived in Ann Arbor for the opening football game of the 2021 season. For one, the school had recently issued a report, compiled by an outside law firm, about more than one thousand instances of sexual abuse allegedly committed between 1966 and 2003 by a university doctor named Robert Anderson during physical examinations of athletes and other students. The report documented evidence that university authority figures, including Bo Schembechler and Don Canham, failed to act on students’ contemporary accounts of feeling uncomfortable (or worse) about Anderson’s exams. The report cited four accounts given by athletes who said they told Schembechler they believed Anderson had done something improper, and Canham is alleged to have been told at least twice about potential misconduct while the doctor was affiliated with the athletic department; neither of the men is known to have pursued an investigation of the allegations. (The university announced a settlement of just under $500 million with 1,050 accusers in related litigation in January 2022. Anderson died in 2008.)
In the local history section of a bookstore called Nicola’s, located in a tasteful strip mall on the west side of town, the titles told a story of decline. Among them were Forgotten Landmarks of Detroit, A $500 House in Detroit, Fading Ads of Detroit, Teardown, and The Poisoned City (the latter two about Flint). There is a book called Detroit City Is the Place to Be by a writer named Mark Binelli, but its title (taken from a Ted Nugent song) is wistful—Binelli writes about moving back to the city at a time when it was, to most people, not the place to be at all. Foreign competition started threatening the Big Three automakers in the 1960s, and the companies began to move their manufacturing abroad. The decline of this sector, when combined with the rise of segregated suburbs, was devastating to the Black populations of cities like Detroit, Flint, and Saginaw.
At the time of the game, a third wave of COVID-19 was spreading through the population, with more than two thousand new cases being reported in the state each day, one of the highest rates in the nation. Employment and consumption shocks had left many local businesses either partially or fully closed because of cash-flow problems and understaffing. When I parked downtown on Thursday, the sun’s long late-afternoon rays were falling on mostly empty stretches of sidewalk. The café at which I intended to buy an iced coffee was closed, the next one I found was closed as well, and I ended up drinking a hot coffee poured over ice by a nonplussed bartender at the Jolly Pumpkin brewpub. Entire sections of wrought-iron outdoor tables were empty because there was no one to wait on them. Long strings of the concession stands under the bleachers would be shuttered at the game itself.
Many citizens had nevertheless chosen to not be vaccinated against the disease that was responsible for all of this, which spoke to a wider distrust in expertise and institutions that had been made absurdly explicit months earlier when federal authorities accused a number of local “militia” members of planning to kidnap and possibly murder Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer because of mask rules and other pandemic-related restrictions she had imposed. Michigan had come a long way in the wrong direction from Jonas Salk, it seemed. (As of this writing, two of the men have been acquitted, two pleaded guilty, and others are still facing charges.)
On the other end of the political spectrum, the leftist political movement of “democratic socialists” had popularized a critique of elite “meritocratic” entities like U of M, which were accused of helping entrench the upper class at the same time they condemned students who weren’t already rich to a lifetime of student debt in the stagnant middle and lower income brackets. Across the street from my parking spot downtown, there was a new high-rise luxury building—one of several that are widely perceived as being targeted to wealthy out-of-state students—called the Varsity. Rent for its 430-square-foot studio apartments started at $2,169 per month.
Black Lives Matter activism, in which a number of Michigan football players had participated, had moreover drawn attention to racial segregation in ostensibly progressive cities and institutions like Ann Arbor and U of M, whose Black populations (7 percent for the city, 4 percent for the school) are significantly lower than the Black population in the state, which is 15 percent. (The university has, it’s worth noting, been held back in efforts to maintain a diverse student body by a 2006 state law that forbids it from considering race in admissions. In the 1990s, Black enrollment was as high as 8.9 percent.)
It was a fraught time to be a tradition-obsessed institution that purported to value merit, rule following, and success, and that was in the back of some fans’ minds when they argued about Harbaugh. One was university regent Jordan Acker, a gregarious, high-energy thirty-six-year-old who, like the other seven regents who hold ultimate power over the school by virtue of being able to hire and fire its presidents and approve its budget, won his position in a statewide election. Acker, who is a lawyer, a Democrat, and a major U of M sports fan, said,
I always tell people that the same problems that Democrats have in Ohio are the same problems Michigan has in Ohio. What we’ve seen in Ohio over the last thirty to forty years, maybe longer even, is a demographic shift. The belt from Akron through Youngstown, or from Youngstown to Akron into Cleveland to Toledo, was an area at the University of Michigan that was our prime recruiting territory for decades. And not only that, the people in that area, there are Michigan fans pretty much everywhere, to the point where Toledo’s like a fifty-fifty town. The problem has been that a lot of people left northern Ohio as the population has shifted south and west. And as Columbus has grown, and Cincinnati, and those suburbs have grown, you see less and less people who are Michigan fans. Those big high schools in southern Ohio and central Ohio don’t send kids to U of M. It’s made recruiting in Ohio a lot more difficult, because these kids, now they are raised in areas that are 100 percent Buckeye areas.
His theory checks out. Desmond Howard and Charles Woodson, among many other Wolverine standouts, were from northern Ohio, and its Democratic-leaning working-class population has been shrinking in proportion to more Republican parts of Ohio for years. (Northern Ohio’s white population, for the record, has also become less Democratic, especially since Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.)
Acker raised the issue within the context of the so-called name, image, and likeness (NIL) legislation that had been passed by states across the country. The bills called for college athletes to be able to be paid for product endorsements and the like without losing their NCAA eligibility. Shortly before the season started, the NCAA had abandoned its opposition to such payments. Acker was diplomatically critical of the conservatism with which the university administration had handled the issue in preceding years, feeling that it should have been a leader in advocating affirmatively for such rights. In addition to being a less offensively unfair way to divide some of the vast revenue generated by major sports, Acker said, NIL was the sort of thing that was practically incumbent upon a program with high academic standards to explore as a means of, well, winning more without having to abandon its standards.
“Michigan fans want to win and want players to graduate, and they want lots of wins and lots of players graduating. And they’re not willing to sacrifice one for the other, they’re just not,” he said. He was effusive in praising Harbaugh and Manuel for their attention to the scholar-athlete ideal. But he also admitted the scholar-athlete ideal had not quite been getting it done recently in late November. “It’s not a sustainable path—I can’t ask Michigan fans to accept losing to OSU. I wouldn’t want them to. But we have to take advantage of everything we can to make that happen, obviously, within our values as an institution.”
It was, frankly, a tough spot.
On the other hand, there was a goddang football game to be played. “We enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants,” the late Jack Gilbert argues in a poem called “A Brief for the Defense,” which is about the classic question of how all-encompassing our despair should be amid the world’s inexhaustible supply of suffering, sickness, starvation, sorrow, “awfulness,” and “slaughter.” If we were not also meant to experience happiness despite these burdens, he asserts, “the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine” and “the Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well.” September weekends in the football territories of the upper Midwest were also made fine: the crowds humming with energy, the helmets polished, the sky an endless blue.
Much of southeast and central Michigan is flat and has been cleared for farmland or divided into “charter townships,” which are quasi-municipal, Michigan-specific zoning designations whose legal meaning I’m too bored to look up even for the purposes of finishing this sentence, but which seem to mostly encompass subdivisions serviced by strip-mall, big-box, and franchise-restaurant complexes of varying sizes. They can feel interchangeable. Ann Arbor, by contrast, is in a pocket of hills. Its borders enclose a cultural cornucopia of non–chain restaurants, bars that run the gamut from classy to disgusting (there is one called the Eight Ball, which is a euphemism for a bag of cocaine, and it smells like pee, or at least it used to; my apologies to the Eight Ball if it got rid of the pee smell), musical venues of various sizes, expensive coffee shops, gourmet grocery stores, and two theaters with old-time marquee signs. College towns are where American states and regions that for the most part do not prioritize soulfulness or distinctiveness keep a reserve of soul and distinctiveness, and Ann Arbor is the preeminent example of that, unless you count Madison, which I don’t, because I haven’t been there.
For all its big-budget aspects, college football is still for the most part played in these smaller towns and cities that are otherwise not set up to handle crowds. While newer pro stadiums and arenas are generally located at the center of parking lot complexes, dedicated freeway exits, and other support amenities, college football games are like asteroids landing on areas that, for the other 358-odd days a year, are just regular places. Michigan Stadium is bordered by a golf course, a high school, and a rental-heavy residential neighborhood. (Older pro stadiums such as Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, and Lambeau Field—affiliated, perhaps not coincidentally, with some of the most valuable and beloved franchises—are located in these kinds of settings too.) It’s a single-deck bowl built into a hill, supported by blocks-long walls of red brick several stories high and flanked at each end by two gigantic blue signs, visible from far yonder, that say “M.” It’s past the south end of the academic campus, a fifteen-minute walk from the main quad area and downtown, such that game day creates a ceremonial mass migration of the city’s population. It is the biggest stadium in North America, which is awesome.
In the little plaza by the gates, a guy who’s become famous online for wearing an unnerving full-body wolverine costume with strange blue eyes, known colloquially as the Murderwolf, was hanging around giving high-fives. The bleachers were not quite packed, but there were no empty sections. Recent history weighed on the mood, but Harbaugh had brought in a number of young, energetic coaches, and (as always) there were a lot of players on the roster who seemed like they had serious potential. If they all got going in the same direction, without any of the bouts of teamwide malaise and confusion that had marred recent history, maybe they would win some games.
I was sitting at about the ten-yard line some seventy rows up with a guy named Alex, a tall, young gentleman with dark hair who was part of the Twitter group direct-message conversation. He had an ambivalence about Michigan and life in general that I related to—it was sometimes so strong that it seemed reflected in his posture—and he had actually invited me into the chat, which aside from me is mostly alums or Michigan natives in their late twenties. They are all leftists of varying degrees, and they are deeply emotionally invested in college football outcomes despite their awareness that the sport is exploitative and dangerous. They are (I think justifiably) grouchy about the financial situation that baby boomers have put their generation in, and they believe there should be much more federal social spending that might benefit them, although they must have at least some amount of disposable income available because they are always exchanging information about the state of their sports gambling. (They’re all great guys, and despite often buying IPAs that cost $3.99 per can, I also believe there should be more social spending, and that it should benefit my family.)
The public address announcer opened proceedings by alluding to the strange circumstances in which the 2020 season had been (partly) played. “After 644 days away,” he said, “good morning and welcome to Michigan Stadium.” The band’s drum major successfully leaned back, limbo-style, and touched his big fuzzy hat to the ground, as per tradition. There was an A-10 Warthog flyover and a paratrooper landing, which was narrated from the field by a guy with a microphone who was wearing the kind of busy skulls-and-flowers shirt that energy-drink MMA enthusiasts wear. “Sleepy Joe [Biden] is revitalizing the flyover industry,” Alex said to me, cryptically and leftistly. (I have since discussed the remark with him; he claims its meaning is evident.)
There was a big cheer when James Earl Jones’s face appeared on the video board playing the team’s pregame hype video, which he narrates using a script that was written in part by Harbaugh. (Jones is an alumnus from the class of 1955.) It begins with Jones very dramatically picking up a pair of headphones in a recording booth—and is, I think it can be safely said, the only football hype video that brags that the team’s fans “respect integrity and honor excellence.” (“We are the greatest university in the world,” he adds, and when he says it, it sounds true, even though the greatest university in the world is known to be Harvard, which is the school I actually attended, because of my excellence.) I felt a modest release of dopamine in my brain when the board cut to a live shot of Harbaugh waddling between the team and the wall of the tunnel where it was waiting to take the field. (His gait bears the jutting wonkiness of fourteen eventful years in the NFL.) That was still my guy. Our guy. Maybe.
The atmosphere early in the game was apprehensive. Western was a decent team, but Michigan should beat decent teams, and a loss on this Saturday would have pointed strongly toward things being really bad again this year. After all the mental work everyone had done following the previous season to get themselves ready to at least consider the possibility of a winning season, a loss would have really let the air out.
Looking back, I think the whole situation turned on a third down completion to a tight end named Erick All on the team’s first possession of the year. Michigan had struggled on third downs the previous season, as well as on the other downs. Despite All being an obviously superior athlete and a smiley, well-liked person around the program, he had had a bad season individually, flat-out dropping four well-thrown, easy passes in memorable situations.
