The hot seat, p.9
The Hot Seat, page 9
It was a little much. There’s something of the aspiring nationalist strongman in what Cowherd and Finebaum do—telling the people of Cowboys Nation or Hungary, as it were, that a primacy of strength and status is their birthright and that it has been lost because of the weakness and decadence of their quarterback, general manager, head coach, or Hungarian president.
There happens to be a useful control group in Penn State and its coach, James Franklin. Franklin got his job a year before Harbaugh at a program that has had a comparable level of success in the postintegration era. Since then, he has a winning percentage of .663 at PSU, whereas Harbaugh’s at U of M is .718. Franklin is not an ESPN character. During the period described, as far as I can find, Finebaum tweeted about him once and did two TV segments about him. Finebaum did make Franklin into a storyline on air in the fall of 2021, but only to suggest that the University of Southern California should hire him as its next coach because he has done so well at Penn State.
Fine, you’re now saying, let’s stipulate that the nasty media has been very unfair to Mr. Harbaugh. Who gives a shit? It’s another fair question. There are more urgent issues in the world, including but not limited to climate change. Also, Harbaugh did lose the games he lost; they didn’t make that up. And on occasion, he knowingly goaded members of the press, like Paul Finebaum, who he referred to in a dismissive 2017 tweet as “Pete.” Still, you got tired of his record being the only thing you ever heard about. Most of the people watching Michigan games are Michigan fans, yet they spoke to us every week like we had been in a coma for four to six years. With the guidance of a Tampa-based sports TV guru and archivist named Timothy Burke, I put together the transcripts of forty-three Michigan football broadcasts between 2018 and 2021. There were at least thirty-one comments about Harbaugh not having beaten Ohio State in the file, and I didn’t search the actual games against Ohio State.
It was the only pitch they could throw, and the lack of any other familiarity with what was going on was not an accident. Thirty years ago, there were seven major conferences: SEC, Big Ten, Big Eight, Southwest Conference, Pac-10, Big East, and ACC. The biggest of those have steadily added more programs to maximize television ratings. The Pac-10 had to be renamed the Pac-12, while the Big Eight and the Southwest formed the Big 12, which currently has ten teams because two of them moved to the SEC. It can’t rename itself the Big Ten, though, because there’s already a Big Ten, which has fourteen teams in it.
Geography has been as strained as mathematics. Rutgers, which is neither a good football program nor located in the Midwest, is now in the Big Ten because the Big Ten wanted its network to be carried in the New York City TV market; Oklahoma is about to join the “Southeastern” Conference. The Big “East” no longer exists as a football entity but at one point tried to add San Diego State, as in the San Diego that is located on the Pacific Ocean, next to Mexico. Teams no longer play regional rivals as often, if at all, and are shuffled between channels and broadcast teams in random ways to meet the needs of weekly TV schedules. In the first six weeks of the 2018 season, Northwestern appeared on ESPN, ESPNU, the Big Ten Network, Fox, Fox Sports 1, and ABC—an example I’m using because when it made that year’s Big Ten championship game against Ohio State, Fox play-by-play man Gus Johnson credited its first touchdown to Wisconsin.
In recent years, ESPN has reoriented its coverage around the College Football Playoff, the four-team championship system, launched in 2014, to which it has exclusive TV rights. When a writer I know started working at the network in that year, new employees at orientation were told that promoting the Playoff was its top corporate priority. “They actually had little cards there that ranked the company goals for 2014, with the Playoff number one,” he told me. There are 130 top-level college football teams; only four or five of them have regularly made the Playoff. Nonetheless, according to an article that ran before the 2021 season in The Athletic, the network mentioned the Playoff twenty-seven times during one three-hour December 2020 episode of College GameDay. In the article, a producer for the network said it was going to try to stop humping the thing so much during the 2021 season; during the 2021 Cheez-It Bowl, which I watched as, uh, research for this book, there were nine Playoff promos and seven for other ESPN bowl games. One can only imagine how many there would have been if they hadn’t cut back. In my file of Michigan broadcasts, the College Football Playoff, which the team did not participate in during the relevant period, was mentioned eighty-four times.
So the Graphic of Despair was an objective record of the team’s performance but also a reminder of various tiresome provocations, of the seeming impossibility of doing any better, and of one’s emotional attachments ultimately being commodities that are treated with varying degrees of intentional neglect and outright hostility for the benefit of the Disney corporation and Rupert Murdoch.
According to Karl Marx, in my understanding, alienation is the condition a person experiences when they have no autonomy over something personally or socially meaningful to them because it is subject to the power and incentives of accumulated capital. I believe I embody Marx’s concept during each of the sixteen scheduled commercial breaks in college football games. On national broadcasts, these breaks are a minimum of two and a half minutes long and can last up to four minutes. Think about that. Five to eight full-length commercials in a row, often for the same three or four products, sixteen times a game. Broadcasts often take four hours. When YouTube users go rogue and post them online with all the superfluous breaks taken out—but with the game flowing at a normal pace, downtime between plays included—they can be more than two hours shorter.
What are you gonna do, though? You can’t switch to another channel that has your game on. Fans aren’t going to stop watching their teams, and conferences believe they have to get as much money as possible because otherwise another conference is going to get the money and use it to get better at football.
I spoke about the matter with John Kosner, a former executive vice president of ESPN who now runs his own sports media investment and advisory company. Kosner grew up in New York City and became a fan of college football because it was, in his words, “so different from anything I experienced.” He recounted the stakes of a Thanksgiving 1971 game between Nebraska and Oklahoma that he remembered watching. “It had everything,” he said. “It was everything you would imagine from middle of the country, a super-rivalry between states.” (I think he is right that a football game between Oklahoma and Nebraska would have been the exact conceptual opposite of 1970s New York City.) “That game doesn’t happen anymore because Nebraska chose to go to the Big Ten,” he said wistfully.
Of course, as he recognized, the reason Nebraska chose to go to the Big Ten was because of the television money that was available to it in exchange for consolidating its brand with those of other national draws like Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State. That money was offered to the school and its well-compensated administrators by executives like John Kosner. Did that make him feel a little bad? “You’re making deals at the demand of these conferences and of the media companies you work for and it’s a competitive arena,” he said. “You might decide, ‘Gee, this is terrible. We shouldn’t do this.’ But if you decide not to make a deal, someone else is going to make that deal.
“This is a different sport, but I vividly remember a colleague at ESPN complaining when we were carrying way too many regular season college basketball games and the quality wasn’t there. And the solution he thought of was, ‘Well, let’s drop like fifty games.’ So another colleague of mine wisely pointed out, ‘Okay. So what’s going to happen to those other fifty games?’ And my friend said, ‘Well, Fox will have them.’ If Fox has them, then what have you really achieved?”
Sure, I said. But what about the goddang timeouts?
“What happens is the conference is saying, ‘Okay, we want more for our rights, or we want $25 million for the Big 12 championship game,’” Kosner said. “And the answer frequently is, ‘We want to expand the commercial for that.’ And they say, ‘Okay.’”
Recruits responded to the Playoff by increasingly clustering at the schools that were initial competitors in the Playoff, giving those schools better chances of being selected for and winning subsequent Playoffs. When Elliott began calculating the blue-chip ratio in 2014, only one team had a number greater than 70 percent: Alabama, with 73 percent. Alabama is now up to 84 percent, with Georgia at 80 percent and Ohio State at 79 percent. While most players stay local, the best recruits are pursued nationally, a process that has also gotten easier for top schools because of digital film, which allows them to evaluate basically any player in the country. Elliott noted that Michigan’s eminently decent performance according to advanced metrics was, to many such top players, basically irrelevant. “Recruits don’t give a shit about power rankings. They’ll look at the Playoff standings, they’ll look at who’s in the Playoff, they’ll see who won the Ohio State-Michigan game, that type of stuff. They’re not looking at SP+ or FPI or Sagarin or whatever metric you like,” he said, naming some metrics I liked. “They want to see the name-brand win that you have.” Recruits saw the Hated Self-Reinforcing Graphic of Despair too—that’s one of the reasons it was self-reinforcing!
People inside the program were also conscious, perhaps too conscious, of what was being said outside of it. When I talked to Chris Partridge, the former Michigan coach, I presented one or two theories I had about why the team hadn’t won its biggest games when he was there. He said he had tried to come up with such an explanation himself—“it drove me crazy”—but in hindsight felt there wasn’t much more to the matter than bad luck. Then we had a conversation about two losses to Ohio State. The first one took place in 2016 in Columbus, when the Buckeyes’ quarterback was quite obviously stopped short on a fourth and one run that would have ended the game, only for the biased and incompetent officiating crew to award a first down anyway. (Ohio State fans have a different perspective on this event—the wrong perspective.) The second was in 2018, when Ohio State would have suffered a deflating upset and been eliminated from the Big Ten race the week prior if University of Maryland’s quarterback hadn’t missed a short two-point conversion throw to a wide-open receiver in the end zone in overtime. My conversation with Partridge, ostensibly an interview between a professional journalist and an expert, could have easily been between me and any other addled superfan. Here is the Rev.com transcription service’s version of the exchange:
Ben Mathis-Lilley: They’ve had some bad luck in a couple games. In that 2016 game, and—
Chris Partridge: Just think about if we would have beat Ohio State in that game. It’s a whole different direction. Think about 2018 when Maryland is about to beat Ohio State. They short hop the ball in the end zone. If they would have won that game, we would have won the Big Ten.
BML: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
CP: But instead, Ohio State wins, we play them the next week, and they beat us. If Maryland beat them at that point, we’re the Big Ten East champions, and we get a whole different Ohio State team the next week.
BML: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
CP: So those little things in football, that can make the difference. Those are the things that make the difference in what happens and the confidence of a program.
“Mm-hmm (affirmative)” indeed. I spent Wisconsin week fearing a cascade of little things going wrong. It was a road game, and while Wisconsin was not as good as it had been in most recent seasons, it was still a decent team that would finish the season 9-4 and was favored by Las Vegas by two points. The matchup had the vintage notes and mouthfeel of a game in which Michigan would be competitive until one of its players made an unlikely or unlucky mistake in a crucial situation, giving Wisconsin a drive on which it had a chance to seal the game. Then one of its players would do something clutch and unlikely in an equally crucial situation, and the Badgers would ultimately win by, let’s say, eleven points. It had that feeling. It was going to go to show once again that Jim Harbaugh something something Michigan big games something something, and I was going to barf and light myself on fire.
As defensive lineman Mike Morris said after the team crushed Northern Illinois, “We know if we lose a game, everyone’s gonna say, ‘Oh, Michigan sucks again.’”
The Badgers were also a troubling opponent symbolically, because for the last two decades or so, Wisconsin had been exemplifying Michigan’s virtues better than Michigan. A series of head coaches who’d each worked for one of their predecessors had built a winning operation with an uncanny ability to identify beefy young men who had neck tendons the size of elevator cables but also possessed the insane world-class lateral quickness required to end up as NFL offensive linemen or defensive ends or linebackers. To wit, soon-to-be Hall of Fame offensive tackle Joe Thomas, drafted out of Wisconsin in 2007, attended Brookfield High School in Wisconsin’s Waukesha County, while future Hall of Fame defensive end J. J. Watt, drafted out of Wisconsin in 2011, attended Pewaukee High School, which is also in Waukesha County, nine miles away. (As did his younger brother, T. J. Watt, who shares the all-time NFL single-season sack record.) In 2020, the Dallas Cowboys drafted Wisconsin center Tyler Biadasz, who is from Amherst, Wisconsin (population 1,039) to replace retiring former Wisconsin center Travis Frederick, who is from Walworth, Wisconsin (population 2,821). What the hell?
Whatever sort of dairy witchcraft was going on in Waukesha County, the beef boys had rolled the beef train over Michigan in most of the teams’ recent matchups, including 2019 (359 rushing yards for Wisconsin) and 2020 (341 rushing yards). Wisconsin was an excellent Midwestern university that had found its football niche (continuity of the beef process) and consistently won a lot of games. It probably wasn’t going to win the national championship, but it had calibrated its expectations and goals very well relative to its resources. Meanwhile, here was Michigan going from one thing to another, still trying to be a national powerhouse, and constantly tripping over its own ass and falling into a well with a beehive stuck on its head. Shit. Should we aspire to be Wisconsin?
I had also made an unconscionable mistake regarding the weekend of the game, promising my son, who had recently turned five and loves fire trucks and firefighters, that we could drive to a parade that is put on annually by volunteer fire companies in the rural, mountainous part of New Jersey, which, I was as surprised as anyone to find out, is an actual existing part of New Jersey. It was a huge error, putting my family ahead of college football, and the parade started a half hour after the game. So we all drove the hour up there—I, my wife, and the three kids (there’s also a three-year-old daughter and a nine-month-old baby)—and, at my insistence, watched the first quarter at a fortuitously excellent and accommodating Greek restaurant and bar that happened to be on the parade route.
The results were suspiciously promising. Wisconsin’s defense was extremely tough and knew what it was doing; its line wasn’t as easily pushed around, and its linebackers weren’t as easily tricked into going the wrong direction, as the previous opponents’ had been. There was always someone to smash into Haskins and Corum after they’d gone two or three yards. But they were getting those two or three yards. (“That is a tough dude,” Harbaugh said of Corum later. “Some of the hits he took would have killed a lesser man.”) And those yards were keeping Michigan’s offense afloat long enough to occasionally get Wisconsin’s goat with long passes. The one I saw before the parade started was a flea-flicker, where the running back takes the ball but then tosses it back to the quarterback for a long heave past the members of the defensive secondary, who are, hopefully, all like, “What? but I thought it was a running play!” When it happens, you have to say, “Flea-flicker!” out loud, which I did while standing with a beer in my hand next to a high table and kind of trying to watch my kids out of the corner of my eye. And when McNamara released the subsequent heave, it was in rhythm, with the confidence of someone who had an open receiver, and even though I couldn’t yet see the receiver on the screen, I felt good about it and said, “Touchdown,” which is what you do if you think there’s going to be a touchdown, to show that you know how the game works. Indeed, wide receiver Cornelius Johnson was open, and he caught it for a thirty-four-yard touchdown. My wife wasn’t watching. “I think we ordered too much food,” she said.
When it had the ball, Wisconsin wasn’t able to run on Michigan this time. Mike MacDonald, the new defensive coordinator, had changed Michigan’s defensive scheme to involve larger linemen. He often put one more defensive tackle on the field than the previous coordinator had put on the field, which is the kind of absolutely, idiotically basic idea that fans often have about how to fix something. You know: We’re getting pushed around out there! We should have bigger guys! Why don’t the coaches play the bigger guys? Appallingly, it worked perfectly. Wisconsin recorded forty-three rushing yards on the day. Come on!
The parade started. Somehow, everything was functioning on my phone except ESPN, Twitter, and the web browser—a sick, disgusting joke, worse than what happened to Sisyphus or the guy who had the water disappear beneath him when he tried to drink. My wife’s phone worked fine, and she kept tormenting me on purpose by saying things like “They scored again!” without telling me who they were. I kept sneaking away to look in the front window of the restaurant only for there to be commercials on. At one point I was able to determine that Michigan was winning 13-3, but then a few minutes later it was 13-10, and the shock of seeing that score load on the phone was one I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy (my wife). We were near the start of the parade route, and from our vantage point in the grass along the two-lane state road it was proceeding down, we could see, to our left, a line going up the mountain (?!) where the subsequent companies and local marching bands and such were mustering. Despair-inducingly, they never stopped doing so; there would be a break, and I would think, I’ll be able to catch the fourth quarter, and then Yankee Fucking Doodle and the goddamn Pequannock Township Fife and Drum Corps or whatever would turn a corner moving about one and a half miles per hour.
