athletic director series

Previously: overview.

feeling that a ticket you have is a precious thing is good

More games should mean things

This is something that Brandon was moving towards getting right, save for the horrible contract that saw him eat an extra Notre Dame home game at the (hopefully temporary) end of that series. And that contract might not have been his doing.

This year's football schedule has one tomato can on it, UNLV, and three actual teams: BYU, Oregon State, and Utah. BYU and Oregon State are one-off home games. They're more expensive, but we've finally reached the point where spending an extra few hundred thousand dollars on an opponent like that has a clear ROI in ticket sales. (That is the reason Brandon was getting that right.) One of the smartest things he said during his tenure was about this.

Unfortunately, I have been able to google it to get the exact quote, but it was along the lines of "we have to get out of the business of scheduling games that feel like exhibitions to fans." He largely put his money where his mouth was in that department. Or tried to, anyway. It still galls that Michigan State landed a home and home with Alabama and Michigan was forced to play a "neutral" site matchup in Dallas against them.

But Brandon was right: repeated tomato can poundings make the fan look at his ticket and feel like a sap. The Product™ boils down to that: you look at the ticket that has a section and seat and opponent on it and you feel a certain way. For years many of these tickets have made you feel like it's another way to pay for the Ohio State game. That is going to remain true, but being less explicit about it is a first step on the road towards making fans feel like part of the enterprise instead of marks.

There's not much flexibility when it comes to college football. Michigan's going to play in their division and they've got three games a year (Indiana, Rutgers, Maryland) that aren't going to feel like much no matter what happens. They've been filling out the nonconference schedule with more respectable opponents; further additions have to happen a decade or more out. The wider landscape of college football will help here: double the number of teams in the playoff means double the number of late-season games that can impact the championship picture.

Michigan's other two revenue sports could use some help. This year's hockey schedule was a textbook example of what not to do: a weird one-off at Ferris State before even the exhibition games, home games piled into the fall when most fans are busy with football, an almost two-month absence from Yost in January and February punctuated by a fiasco of an outdoor game taken in by fewer fans than would have been at a home game.

Meanwhile, basketball plays a lot of nonconference games against the Coppin States of the world. It was seven last year (they just happened to lose two): Hillsdale, Bucknell, Detroit, Nicholls State, NJIT, EMU, and Coppin State. I don't see a great solution there given the way college basketball works: you're going to have a preseason tournament, you're going to have a game just before Christmas no one wants to play, there's not enough room to do anything interesting.

The conference, though… the conference could use some tweaking. Here are a couple of concrete plans to make basketball and hockey games have more wow factor on the ticket.

Basketball: making 14 an asset

Wisconsin ran away with the Big Ten title this year. Their last seven games included matchups against 9-9 Illinois, 4-14 Penn State, and two against 6-12 Minnesota. What if their stretch run was nothing but the other three games—Maryland, Michigan State, Ohio State—and so was everyone else's? And what if you could never point to anyone's schedule and say that's why team X won?

This is possible, even in a 14-team conference if you're willing to rethink a conference schedule. You can have a true, fair, thrilling championship in 19 conference games:

• FIRST 13: round-robin amongst all teams
• LAST 6: split the league into top and bottom halves, have second round-robin within.

Everyone in each half plays the same schedule. The last three weeks of the regular season are an all-out brawl for a banner that means something it might not in a world where getting the wrong teams twice could knock you down a peg.

The downsides are real but not insurmountable. You would not know the last six games of your schedule until a few days before. With home sites that's not a huge problem. There will be demand for those games. And teams right around the cutoff could find their path to a bid get harder as teams just above it draw a bunch of tough games and teams below it lose the opportunity to knock off a Wisconsin. That effect is probably marginal (on average it's turning three games into somewhat harder or easier ones).

If they tried this I bet they would never even think about going back once they saw, say, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin, OSU, Indiana, and Illinois have a three-week war for a Big Ten title.

Hockey: a state championship

The FA Cup: the only time anyone has ever believed in Wigan

There's not a whole lot Hypothetical Michigan AD can do about the Big Ten or NCAA's playoff format. (It does sound like the national tournament is in line for some long-overdue changes.) But he can probably get the Michigan schools together to provide early-season matchups some additional oomph.

The formation of the Big Ten is something college hockey needed if they were ever going to expand past two western conferences, but it broke up a bunch of 40-year-old rivalries that mean something to college hockey fans. Instead of having every Michigan team save Tech in a single conference, now they're spread across three. The GLI has tried to compensate by inviting a Michigan team for the foreseeable future, but that doesn't do much for the three teams that aren't invited in any particular year.

Nor does it have that much selling power. The GLI is a nice event, but it's always been a little silly that Michigan has a banner for years they won it. It's two games. The trophy doesn't have a name. It's not, say, a 40-pound bronzed cast of Red Berenson's head.

What if the first half of the season had a different competition in it? Soccer does this to excellent effect. A state championship competition that features World Cup/Champions League style groups would be a reasonable time commitment and a way to inject stakes into otherwise fuzzy early-season matchups.

A problem: there are seven Michigan teams, not eight. We will fill in the eighth spot with a guest program. This could either rotate between reasonably local programs (ND, OSU, BGSU, Miami, even PSU) or be permanent.

Hypothetical groups:

GROUP A	GROUP B
Michigan	Michigan State
Notre Dame	Western Michigan
Michigan Tech	LSSU
Northern Michigan	Ferris State

Each team plays the others twice, whether that's home and home or not. The next year invert home/road and do it again; then switch the groups up. The only hard and fast rule is that Michigan and Michigan State are separate. The four teams in the bottom two rows are all WCHA members. They can either book an early-season conference series to count for the state championship or schedule bonus nonconference series, their choice.

After that's done, the top two in each group play for the Michigan Themed Hockey Trophy* at the Joe. (The other two also go to the Joe and play because everyone wants to know they've got X number of games booked.)

This is a commitment of eight games—six for teams currently in the WCHA. For teams in the Big Ten (20 conference games), Hockey East (22), or NCHC (24) that is doable. It does seriously restrict the flexibility of WCHA teams (28 games), but a lot of these games are the ones these schools would want to schedule anyway. For example, Ferris's nonconference schedule included two games against State, one against Michigan, and the GLI. Tech played Michigan and in the GLI. They would be signing up for another two or three games only. And the lack of flexibility is offset by the fact that they're locking in a Michigan or Michigan State series annually.

If you can pull this off then your early season, normally something without stakes other than the hope down the road your Pairwise ranking will be good, becomes three weekends in which you hope to qualify for a GLI that means you can print out shirts that say State Champs and kiss let's just say a 40-pound bronze cast of Red Berenson's head.

like this except with Red Berenson's head

Play for things. Give us stakes. A ticket that reads "Red Berenson's 40 Pound Head Tournament" is better than one that just says "Western Michigan."

*[Options: unearth the Ron Mason trophy that went kaput when the CCHA did, inaugurate a Red Berenson trophy for the former Michigan player and Detroit Red Wing, or go studiously neutral but somewhat silly by naming it after a guy who didn't play college hockey.

Gordie Howe played in the defunct minor-pro version of the USHL for a year, not the CHL, and he's Gordie Howe. So he's a good idea if you're going that route.]

thanks to Patrick's drone title is close to literally true [Patrick Barron]

One of the frequent criticisms of the Brandon obit was that it was all napalm. I admit that. That post wasn't supposed to do anything except document the era we'd just gone through.

When I did that I got a lot of requests of varying politeness levels for an alternate vision of the athletic department. This series of posts seeks to lay one out.

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:

1. graduate athletes
2. win games
3. 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. (Ace is doing some work on Bacon's book and has access to the numbers. They are staggering. WRITE FASTER BACON.)

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.

via EDSBS

Hypothetical athletic director's main goal is to figure out what went wrong between the department and the fanbase and set about making the experience of being a Michigan fan one that is peerless. Actual athletic director seemed to not think about this one iota, and thus he is in Scottsdale watching Wrath of Khan over and over again.