This Week’s Obsession: Dave’s Burner Account
hashtag ifitaintbrokebreakit [Eric Uphurch]
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BECAUSE OF RECENT EVENTS, LET’S JUST NAME SOME ENTIRELY THEORETICAL DAVE BRANDON BURNER ACCOUNTS AND SEE WHERE THIS GOES
slackbot: quit drinking and go to bed
Ace: Slackbot knows this is a bad idea but we’re gonna power through it.
The Mathlete: This a probable mild bad decision, @probablemild
Seth: @thebrand1234567
Ace: @retailactivationerror
The Mathlete: @enoughlatenightdrinking
Alex: @campdavid6969
Ace: @everafter734
Alex: @vulturecapitaltoysrus
Seth: @tgiff And by the way we are docking the cost of those cardboard boxes from your last paycheck.
Ace: @findanewteam
@happylife_goblue
Seth: @...
The Mathlete: @plentyofseatsonmyjet
Ace: @lochdogg
The Mathlete: @wowexperience
Seth: @section1.
Ace: lol, was waiting for that one.
Seth: Sorry, Section 1.
Ace: Should we maybe tell people why we’re doing this? This is why we’re doing this:
The Curious Case of Bryan Colangelo and the Secret Twitter Account
A collection of Twitter accounts that has criticized Joel Embiid and Markelle Fultz, disclosed sensitive information, and outlined team strategy shares eye-opening similarities. What does that have to do with the Philadelphia 76ers’ decision-maker?
I never thought I’d say anything like this but… at least Brandon knew better than to get on the bad side of his own players?
[After THE JUMP: we create the space.]
The Mathlete: (do we want to offer some sort of a bounty for anyone that can track back a potential Brandon burner account)
Ace: (my god yes, I still have that Dave Brandon football card)
slackbot: quit drinking and go to bed
Brian: @mypersonalityihavetofixit
Seth: @createthefuture, @innovatethespace
Brian: I should state for the record that I don't think Brandon actually had any burners.
Ace: …but we’d be interested in learning about any.
Brian: Because he just emailed people under his own account.
Ace: This is true.
Brian: Also remember that post on the official site about "big boy football"?
Ace: His university account!
Brian: To have a burner you have to have a sense of shame.
Seth: @pimphand from back when Dave read MGoBlog.
Ace: Or be illegally sharing medical information. So… maybe we should check some tweets from after the Morris incident.
Brian: Again, Michigan was just throwing that out there in public possibly illegally. I absolve Dave Brandon of the sin of having burners, because he's guilty of all others.
slackbot: quit drinking and go to bed
Alex: Would you put it past @pizzadave5and7 to defend Dave Brandon's sartorial choices online?
slackbot: quit drinking and go to bed
Ace: Every time I think back to 2014 it gets more and more, just, how did any of this happen.
@onedaymediatour
A deep cut: @heretoacceptanaward
Alex: My take remains this: if Shane doesn't get concussed, and if Michigan doesn't create a massive PR crisis, Brandon isn't fired in time, Harbaugh doesn't go to Ann Arbor, and we get Butch Jones or something.
Ace: The emails helped.
Alex: but. his. e. mails.
Brian: I don't want to get into Man In The High Castle alternate histories until Harbaugh wins a thing
Ace: Fair.
Seth: Michigan had way more problems in 2014 than the football coach.
Ace: There was a rally on the school president’s front lawn during, I believe, his first week on the job? About football. He came from Brown. That had to be a hell of a hello for Schlissel. He still looked completely befuddled about most of this at the presser announcing DB’s “resignation.”
Alex: Well if @thebrandthebrandthebrand had made some good points in Schlissel's menchies, who knows what would have happened.
Ace: @deleharding
Brian: Yes, poor bastard. "This seems like the kind of academic institution I can respectably leave my post for. Oh, look, a protest! The vital wellspring of campus life! Seems strangely male, I wonder if this is about--
it's about what?
Did I sign that contract already?"
Seth: Schlissel had a pre-scheduled meeting the morning of the Fire Brandon rally with the Detroit Jewish Community Relations Council. First thing he said when he met with us (i.e. our director and board officials) was "I don't want to talk about football."
Brian: We all get there eventually.
Ace:
Surreal.
Was then, even more now.
Brian: I cannot believe that happened
Alex: I was in a creative writing class in Angell Hall when this was happening and my classmates were wondering why a helicopter was hovering overhead.
The Mathlete: Remember how I was randomly in town and you, your wife and I randomly ate dinner together after?
Brian: At Seoul Garden?
The Mathlete: Red Hawk, I think.
Brian: Both good options.
Ace: I definitely took photos of Brian getting interviewed on the local news in a Michigan hockey jersey.
Seth: Kenny Magee sent me some photos of that. I think the reporter had to stand on a duffel bag because Brian was too tall for her.
Ace:
The Mathlete: you were plotting your run from Trustee
Ace: The whole album is just absurd.
The Mathlete: We should plan a 5 year reunion of the event.
Alex: I'm hoping for An Oral History Of The Demise Of David Brandon at some point.
Seth: I bet Two Cokes guy is successful now.
Ace: The absolute best protest sign, bar none.
Seth: Ohshit the meme guy is in there.
Ace: HE’S EVERYWHERE
Brian: Some months later a guy @-d me something about how Brandon had accomplished more than I ever would and his twitter bio said he was the manager of brand activation for a pro sports team.
Ace: That was Dave Brandon.
slackbot: quit drinking and go to bed
Brian: His twitter was not anonymous! He swiftly deleted the tweet and went private IIRC.
Ace: lol
Brian: I am the manager of brand de-activation
Ace: Way better gig
Seth: That explains the website launch.
Ace: Hey-o.
Coming soon!
The Mathlete: -ish
Brian: GUYS
Ace: we’re all fired
Seth: No it's still Thursday.
Wednesday
Whatever I blog.
(for now)
Ace: TWO DAYS, BABY
FIRE ALL THE TAKES
Brian: Anyway this is probably enough Dave Brandon retrospective for one year.
slackbot: quit drinking and go to bed
The Mathlete: We need to save some for the Anniversary Party next year.
Ace: Yes. Thank you, Bryan Colangelo, but also not.
Alex: More like Cryan Bolange-- no, NO wait! sorry! I'm trying to dele-- [gets hauled into the Sarlacc Pit]
I quit drinking and went to bed. Liver gave out.
when the front page posts by the staff are defunct michigan blogs and reliviing the horror that was Brandon.
This was my terrible idea. I'm working on some real content that, uh, I sure hope gets posted this evening.
This entire article was a way to tease the news of the website re-launch, wasn't it?
I was told there was going to be a Big Ten Fantasy football draft?
NOOOOOOOooooooooooo!!!!
#bringdavebrandonbacktoumich
Is that a touch football tackling dummy?
A burner DB account would be hard to detect on here because he would probably spend a lot of his time trashing WD, and there are guys that do that already. Non zero chance that he got in on the "let's create obnoxious fake accounts on Mgoblog" sweepstakes that we had a couple of months ago, though.
as any offseason content can possibly get. You can't get any more offseasony. If you were to ask, how can someone make content any more offseasony than this, the answer is. . . you can't.
Fuck Dave Brandon.
I remember a time when the "2 cokes" thing was effectively debunked as being the stupid not-what-you-think-it-was story by some guy named Brian Cook on a blog called MGoBlog. Actually, Brian could have done a lot better at debunking, but Brian was (rightly) mad that it had happened at all, notwithstanding the fact that the original problem wasn't Brandon's doing at all.
And yet now we are building a generation that will believe the lie that David Brandon arranged for the "2 Cokes" promotion, and that the reason for the "2 Cokes" promotion existed at all was because Michigan football was so bad that no one would go unless tickets were given away.
If we were to go back to Brandon's ouster, the thing that I'd really like to see, now that everybody is over it, is the full printout of those emails that led to Brandon's replies. I still don't think that anybody has been given the full details on those people, who seem to have made Wolverine Devotee's career as an MGoBlogger. My intel is that those emails, and the authors, deserved the rather mild response that they got. One way to settle it; show them all, WD.
Personally, although it was certainly a bad time for a lot of reasons, I like Brandon's replies as being part of the same guy who was a hero to me (and many other commenting members of these pages) as being the one guy who was unafraid to push back on the media narrative with the alleged football violations. Check that; Brandon wasn't the only guy. Brian Cook was another guy, with the brains and the balls and the platform to push back. Brandon was just the only guy with any position at the University of Michigan to push back. God bless him for that.
I've read Bacon of course. And Bacon is right, of course. But a few guys might remember my asking Bacon a question on the radio about all of this, and the question was whether Bacon was comfortable with the popular reactions to his book in which Brandon was being made into a cartoon villain. The kind of cartoon villain that MGoBlog now makes of Brandon almost any time his name comes up. And of course Bacon was not comfortable with that notion of villainy.
I believe this is in fact the burner account. Nice to meet you "Section 1.8"!!
When Canham hired Schembechler, they made a deal and shook hands. And Canham wanted to then introduce Schembechler to the media (notably, including the great Bump Elliott whose grace in that transition is nothing short of amazing and to everyone's -- but especially Bump's -- credit).
Bo said to Canham something like, don't we need to sign a contract or something? And Canham's reply was, Bo, if it doesn't work out and you're going to get fired, they'll be firing me too...
(I don't have my copy of the book with me in the office, so sorry for any misquotes.)
Well, Canham knew what he was talking about. It didn't work out with Brady Hoke, and both he and Brandon were gone.
I remember a time when the "2 cokes" thing was effectively debunked as being the stupid not-what-you-think-it-was story by some guy named Brian Cook on a blog called MGoBlog. Actually, Brian could have done a lot better at debunking, but Brian was (rightly) mad that it had happened at all, notwithstanding the fact that the original problem wasn't Brandon's doing at all.Whether or not Brandon personally came up with the two-Cokes-for-Michigan-tickets promotion is really beside the point. Under his watch, demand for football tickets plummeted so much that it was now necessary to resort to massive promotions like that just to get tickets in peoples' hands.
Look, let's just be clear about it. The "2 Cokes" promotion came about because a Michigan Union contractor had some extra tickets. They were going to distribute them, the desired target recipients were to be Michigan-student Union customers, and so they did it without the AD's say-so.
It wasn't "necessary to resort to massive promotions like that." It wasn't "massive." It wasn't a general "promotion." It was for students. And it wasn't "promoted" by Brandon.
You say that ticket demand "plummeted" under Brandon. Is there some MGoData on that? Didn't my close personal friend WD have some data on that recently?
2014 marked the end of my 30+ year tenure as a season ticket holder as well as many of the friends and neighbors I had met along the way. John U Bacon wrote a story in Yahoo about it in which he featured my old tailgate crew as being one of the remaining diehard holdouts as ticket sales plummeted (they all gave them up this year BTW).
I dont have any concrete data points but you and I are about the same age which means we've been going to games for a long, long time. And I dont remember EVER seeing scenes like this through the years before 2014- even at a basically meaningless pre-conference game blowout.
That's the student section. We'll have to start a whole new thread on the lameness of the students with their subsidized, below-market, no-PSD tickets.
...the far more important point (to you, no doubt, and to me as well) is that you are now a "former" season ticket patron. I feel very bad about that.
I presume, that things like PSD's, rising ticket prices, parking, and people's (your some-time guests) desires to watch the games on 60" HDTV's are what drove you out. Dave Brandon was acutely aware of the competition of televsion versus the live experience and he said so, quite rightly.
I welcome your comments in reply. What we know, is that none of those problems are the personal doings of David Brandon. Brandon was probably the greatest single fundraiser and rainmaker the Michigan Athletic Department has ever known. If Brandon is second, to Don Canham, it is still the highest praise.
Another anecdotal evidence as well: 2013 was also my last season as a season ticket holder. I drectly left due to increasing corporatization and plummeting fan experiment. After 2013 I had a come to Jesus moment with myself and asked myself why I was paying $1k+ for an activity I am receiving minimal benefits. It was simple cost/benefit/loss calculus. I remember I sent back my ticket renewal that spring with "Not renewing due to Dave Brandon" written on the bottom next to the cost.
What is, "increasing corporatization and plummenting fan experiment"? I'd like you to be specific with regrad to the personal evils of Dave Brandon.
Before you begin, let us recall/agree that:
- Brandon did not institute PSD's.
- Brandon raised some ticket prices, just like Bill Martin had done, and all of the AD's had before him, and just like Warde Manuel will, in 2019.
- One of the worst and most inexcusable things to happen during Brandon's tenure, the shifting of our MSU game to odd-numbered years, is reputed to have been forced on Michigan by the Conference. I cannot vouch for that, but I don't have any evidence to point at Brandon (or Mark Hollis, for that matter).
- Brandon had a role in, but was by no means determinative, in scheduling some night games. I don't know if you hate night games as I do, or if you like them, as many on this Board seem to. Whatever; Brandon's night game history consisted of little more than 2 home games with Notre Dame. Television contracts seem to be forcing more night games than Dave Brandon ever did. And Brandon was no the guy who ordered lthe lights for the tops of the concourses.
- Brandon resisted the commercialization of the interior of the Stadium in a way consistent with his predecessors and his successor. Not perfect, but substantially alike.
- And of course, Dave Brandon presided over more major gifts to the Athleitc Department's general fund than anyone in history.
I have news for you about the streak. (It's also in the book.)
Let's be even more clear. The "Michigan Union contractor" was Coca-Cola. It "had some extra tickets" because it was given the tickets by the athletic department to give away.
They were given the tickets for the sole purpose of giving them away. How else are they going to give them away, other than by exchanging them for the purchase of a Coca-Cola product? Here is an idea of what it looked like to the general public:
https://deadspin.com/michigan-pretends-it-isnt-desperate-to-give-away-t…
Or you can see a less snarky version with the same facts here:
http://www.mlive.com/wolverines/index.ssf/2014/09/promotion_selling_two…
Of course, the athletic department later denied that they wanted Coca-Cola to give away the tickets like that. But I am interested in your theory: what was supposed to happen with those tickets when the athletic department gave them to Coca-Cola?
...also came after us, in their efforts to defend local hero Michael Rosenberg. 'Member this one?
https://deadspin.com/5351207/the-michigan-fans-jihad-against-michael-rosenberg
Does anybody know how many tickets were at stake in that "massive" promotion? Less than a hundred, right?
And yes, I also linked to a "mainstream" article so nobody would make the issue revolve around their opinion of Deadspin.
But my question for you still stands: what do you imagine that the AD wanted Coca-Cola to do with that packet of free tickets they were given?
Tickets that are sold to corporate buyers; tickets exchanged in contracts with the variety of Stadium, Athletic Department, and University contractors. I'm not going to bother to try to keep track of them.
I'm not defending everything that happened under Brandon. I thought I made that clear enough.
What I am more than happy to do, however, is to throw cold water on yet another MGoPage where Brandon is made into a cartoon villain.
And in this case, the "2 Cokes" reaction was so out of line with reality, so unrepresentative of facts, as to be more lie than truth. We led the nation in home attendance in 2013, as we have in most years.
These weren't meant for corporate buyers, as you correctly pointed out earlier. They weren't corporate giveaways, and nobody's asking you to bother to try to "keep track of" them. Of course there are thousands of those tickets.
These tickets, though, were given to Coca-Cola for the sole purpose of distributing to students (again--you correctly stated that above)! Even the AD acknowledged that: it was a "retail activation," they said. If you were Coca-Cola, how would you have undertaken that task? If you were the athletic department representative, how would you have expected Coca-Cola to have undertaken that task?
The AD wanted these tickets given away. It happened. It bounced back on them, as so many things did at the time, and they said anything they could to try to convince people that what was plainly happening wasn't actually happening.
But fine. If you toe the party line--it was a "retail activation" gone wrong--you still can't get me to pretend that everything was all right with attendance in 2013. It wasn't. If you were going to the games, you recognized it.
And yes, there were (and still are) attendance issues.
BY far the most noticeable attendance issue, is that the student section is almost never filled when a game starts, and is almost never filled when a game ends. And in between, it is the spottiest attendance in the whole Stadium.
And yes, there are a lot of long-time season ticket patrons who are giving up. I know many of them. In virtually no case that I know of, was "David Brandon" the reason for quitting. It was costs; it was the lack of interest among family and friends; it was tv; it was the tug of other matters in life; it was parking; it was a lot of things.
I am talking about thousands of ticket holders (when we are talking about students in particular) and millions of dollars (when we are talking about PSD payors whose interest in paying for Michigan football is waning).
It is ongoing; and as such, it is obviously far removed from David Brandon.
So, in that context, the "2 Cokes" promotion is a story that was, as I said, more misinformation than it was information about anything of substance.
Okay Dave
One way to settle it; show them all, WD
"But his emails" is certainly a stance once could take, I suppose
The most appropriate response to Section 1.8 (next to farting noises, I suppose):
... and I am very happy with the lack of advertising in Michigan Stadium.
But without a doubt as far as I am aware, the Kraft Noodle has appeared at landmarks all across the country from Boston's Faneuil Hall, to San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, with stops like Wrigley Field in between, and basically no one in America was as persnickety about it, as certain groups of Michigan football fans.
Y'all want to pay the FBS football players, but y'all won't do what it takes to get that kind of revenue.
For my part, I'm totally cool with less advertising, less professionalism of the athletes, less exploitation of the athletes. Do all of that first, before some payment scheme. Because I don't know where some of you think the money is going to come from.
You amaze me with the hills that you choose to die on. You make the Allied defense of France and the low countries in 1940 look savvy and effective.
We absolutely do not have a shortage in revenue. Student athletes are bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars for us. We could easily afford to compensate them fairly.
And we sure as hell don't have to sell out the soul of our stadium to make that happen. These two things are unrelated.
But respectfully, I think it should be in a different forum, and it'll have to wait until I have more time.
Why? Why would you want a fight? What value does that bring?
You clearly have a position you want to communicate. It is either contrary to or immaterial to the majority of readers/posters on this site.
What is gained by perpetuating a combative discourse?
Given he's on account 1.8, that choice of forum may not entirely be his.
True. Great to see you posting in the threads again. Hope you are having a good day today.
I for one am more than happy to relive these days of yesteryear now that we are "effectively" out on the other side with an AD/Coach that get it.
Now let's win some damn football games.
I found a good article about Brandon's guest stint on The Apprentice with Trump during his Regent and Dominos CEO days.
In a nutshell, he takes credit for choosing the guy Trump fired that week, and thinks that Trump is a nice, thoughful guy.
“It’s the single biggest public relations success we’ve had at Domino’s in many years,” Brandon said.
@DaveBrandon't
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