Monday, August 24, 2015









Unknown said...

Looking forward to reading the book.

Superfun Happy Slide said...

The Baconism about turning fans into consumers/consumers then acting like consumers, eventually divorcing the genre of the passion that makes Saturday football the spectacle it has become, has turned into my favourite turns of a phrase. Great review, I'm anticipating this book even more now!

Chuck said...

So there's a lot to say. I'll try my best to be brief, in anticipation of reading the book (I've seen only the excerpts).

1. Rightfully, Bacon has championed the student-athletes themselves. They are mostly superior kids, very hard working, and ordinarily really great students. I expect more of the same.

2. Michigan's student-fans at football games shouldn't get off so easy. For some weird reason, Bobby Dishell comes off as a hero for protesting the general admission seating policy. He's right about that; it was a bad policy. But remember the reason for general admission. It was because the students were so crappy about showing up on time for games, if at all. Ticket prices had nothing to do with that. Students who had already paid for tickets were so casual about them, they just didn't care. Brandon tried to address that. And THAT is on the students, not Brandon.

3. It's pretty freaking ironic, for students to gripe about high ticket prices at the same time they are clamoring for a shiny new $6 million Harbaugh. With the current schedule, a Michigan student can take $185 of their Pell grant money and sell of the MSU and OSU tickets for $250 each. And then write a paper about profits.

4. Dave Brandon -- almost alone in the Michigan administration -- was the guy who stood up to the Free Press in the wake of Stretchgate and the NCAA case. (In which Michigan got pretty much nothing of a penalty for having done pretty much nothing wrong.) Remember "Dave Brandon's pimp hand"? No? They can't seem to remember it at MGoBlog, either. Where they invented it.

5. There are some pretty extreme partisan politics at work on the University of Michigan Board of Regents, and I'll be interested if Bacon was able to tell it all. Exhibit A was the fireworks debacle in the summer of 2014. Brandon's athletic department had a reasonable request; fireworks for the Penn State night game, and also in connection with the Miami University game band show, which featured the band doing the 1812 Overture on military appreciation day. The Regents turned Brandon down, in a public meeting which should have been pro forma, and in the most humiliating way they could concoct. With Regent Larry Deitch claiming that any fireworks in Michigan Stadium might be crazy-stupid dangerous. Deitch must have forgotten that THEY HAD A FIREWORKS SHOW AT THE BIG CHILL HOCKEY GAME in that same Michigan Stadium.

6. I am laughing my effing ass off at the students and alums of our rivals, who sneer at Dave Brandon's alleged commercialism. A bottle of water in Ohio Stadium is the same price as Michigan Stadium. Their seat licenses are effectively more (under a different formula) than Michigan's. And in Ohio Stadium as well as Spartan Stadium, it is wall-to-wall advertising. My favorite in the 'Shoe; Elk & Elk trial lawyers. "Serious lawyers for serious injuries." That's about $4 million in advertising revenue for The Ohio State University's athletics. And Buckeye fans don't care.