From the Student Section Just Wants to Sit Down

Submitted by SaddestTailgateEver on

My first game at the Big House was, like it is for many people, my freshman year. I’d grown up in a Michigan State house through the 90s, I was a Cubs fan, my high school football team went 0 and 9 my senior year. I was pretty accustomed to sports pain, or so I thought. Here I was coming to Michigan, the winningest football program and so things would be different. And for part of that game, watching from all the way up in Row 96, it looked like I was going to be right. Things didn’t quite go as planned in that game against Utah in 2008, and they didn’t go much better 6 years later, and as I sat in the upper concourse waiting out the rain delay I had a moment to reflect on where things have come since then and what has changed.

From a program standpoint, it’s hard to pin it. Is it the play calling? Is it lack of player development? Is it blown assignments? Lack of execution? A young line that’s still learning and has busts just often enough to make Gardner skittish? Is Gardner still living in fear of the ghosts of last season? And if so who could really blame him? Fortunately for me, that’s not an analysis I’ve undertaken to dissect. There are people much more qualified to speak on the state of the team and the staff than I.

From a fan experience, however, it’s lamentably easy to pin it. And after the third straight home game with a sub-sellout crowd, the students wanted those on the field to understand it as easily as we did. Immediately after the home attendance was announced (a 103k figure that no one around me believed was accurate for even a second) the students started a cheer. Quiet at first but soon growing to include much of Section 26 as well as surrounding sections.

“FI-RE BRAN-DON” clap clap clap clap clap “FI-RE BRAN-DON”…

In a game that will likely see some subset of the coaching staff placed in the crosshairs, the students wanted to make it abundantly clear that they had one person in particular they want gone. And to be fair, I’m, ordinarily one of the last to jump on the “fire someone” bandwagon. I was in the “give RichRod one more year” camp. Until today I was in the “we’re not going to fire Hoke” camp, and truthfully, I’m still not quite ready to declare that the sky is falling. Basically since the get-go, however, I’ve wanted Brandon gone. As much as we harp on “this is Michigan” and “it’s gonna be Michigan again” and every other thing about “being Michigan” every single game, the athletic department continues to demonstrate that it doesn’t have a clue what it means to “be Michigan”.

Up until the rain delay, I was pretty confident that I wouldn’t have much content to fill this out with. —    The real people seats above the student section stayed empty the whole game #ThanksDaveBrandon. The student section by and large was on time #ActuallyThanksMichaelProppe. And the student section stayed mostly intact until we were forced to leave our seats. — Then the content flood began. We walked from Row A all the way to upper concourse to take shelter. We talked with friends from other seating groups and tried to take stock of the weather and how long a delay we were expecting. As the time wore on, and lightning kept flashing, and Grapentine did his level best to make each further delay somewhat interesting, we were getting tired and thirsty, and looked for a spot to sit down. By this point there were maybe 60 people in the upper concourse. Maybe. And the athletic department had already literally locked up folding chairs. Locked them to the fence so that people could not sit down in them during a 2.5 hour delay. Trying to sit somewhere, we asked if we could sit in some of the chairs that were currently going unused. The event staff person obliged and unlocked them for us and we started to sit down. No sooner did we unfold the first chair then we were told by Jim, another event staffer working in the upper concourse, that we could not use those chairs. We asked why. He said it was a handicapped section and—unfathomably, despite the 20 or so people already sitting in chairs much like these, despite them being unused, and despite them being unlocked expressly so that we could use them—we were not allowed to.  

This is what the Michigan fan experience has become with Brandon at the helm—a, probably otherwise kind, old man telling the kids they can’t sit down. It’s not that they’re evil or poorly intentioned, it’s that at a fundamental level they just don’t get it anymore, or in some cases they never did. The athletic department has prioritized branding over winning, profits over performance, gimmicks over actually addressing issues raised, and as a result has driven the students—much of the lifeblood of the stadium experience—away. I recall a quote from the athletic department a year or so ago regarding the severe drop in student ticket sales where it was asserted that the students not buying tickets were the ones unlikely to show up anyways. Keeping an eye on the section above the student section through the first three games of this season it has become readily apparent that no one is going to show up for those seats anyways. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get students to take those seats back? I guess we’re trying that with $40 single game tickets that students are unsurprisingly not jumping through hoops for.  I know his years at Dominos likely didn’t prepare him for husbandry metaphors but the adage “you can shear a sheep many times but you can only skin him once” comes to mind, and Dave just doesn’t know how to shear.

Comments

pearlw

September 22nd, 2014 at 7:46 PM ^

Except
1) he was the CEO at Domino's for years before the IPO (you ignore that pre-IPO period).
2) He still is chairman of board at domino's there so has to get much of credit.
3) The recovery came due to the change in the recipe of their pizza which he spearheaded but he left within a monht of it being introduced so you dont really give him the credit for that even though it was his initiative.

But I know its always more popular here to just blame Brandon for everything so I understand why its presented as you do above (or why Ramzy did the same).

Seth

September 23rd, 2014 at 1:43 PM ^

Not really the story of DB at Domino's. Brandon came in when Bain bought it from Monaghan, who ran Domino's like a family company that had some weird traditions and funded Monaghan's weird politics. Brandon's job from the start was to make the company function like a corporation, and he had to fight a lot of institutional people to do so. He was undoubtedly successful at this, and I am sure it informed his actions at Michigan as he methodically cleaned out anyone who wasn't on the same page as he was.

DB's baby was the oven baked sandwiches and other non-pizza products, and in modernizing marketing and delivery. The change in recipe was a response to a consumer taste test in 2009, and while Brandon indeed was part of the "our pizza sucks; we're making a new one" response, it was Come to Jesus moment for everybody in the company. DB didn't get to see the fruition of it; they announced the shift in December 2009 and Brandon took the Michigan job in January 2010. He remains a head honcho but not a particularly engaged one.

Domino's recent success wasn't really Brandon's doing. They were extraordinarily smart (or lucky) to have a near perfect response to a shift in the commodities market: Domino's has to carry a significant amount of wheat futures so they don't run into a shortfall, and they happened to sell off a ton of those futures in 2010 right before wheat prices went into a 4-year freefall. The guy mostly responsible for their record profitability was CFO Michael Lawton, who foresaw the glut of U.S. Wheat in 2010. That is still paying off.

hailtothevictors08

September 22nd, 2014 at 6:57 PM ^

During said wait, the concession stand closest to my section said they have a policy against selling food in a weather delay so I sat on the ground, hungry and thirsty.

It was my second lowest fan expirence after only NW '08. 

ThoseWhoStayUofM

September 22nd, 2014 at 7:55 PM ^

So according to this Diary, Dave Brandon is ultimately responsible for not being allowed to use folding chairs during a rain delay, therefore he should be fired.  That's an interesting perspective.



Of course, many people will reply saying that there are countless other reasons he deserves to lose his job.  There will undoubtedly be statistical figures cited to support this claim, but at no point will any person present a concrete example of something Dave Brandon did wrong along with a course of action that would have been better.



Do you know the biggest impact Dave Brandon has on the Michigan football program?  He schedules opponents, and in that regard, he has been outstanding.  You may say, "The Appalachian State 2.0 game was a terrible decision."  Was it?  Was it really?  It was one game.  Look at the nonconference games he has for us in the near and distant future.



In 2015, we have Oregon State, Utah, and BYU!



In 2016, we have UCF and Hawaii



In 2017, we have Florida and Cincinatti.



In 2018,  we have Arkansas and SMU.



Then we have Washington, Virginia Tech, UCLA, Texas, and Oklahoma - year by year - until 2027!  Dave Brandon is doing a hell of a job and getting no credit from you snobby, shortsighted, ignorant "fans".

bluebyyou

September 22nd, 2014 at 8:08 PM ^

So big fucking deal.  Sit on the ground with your back against a wall in the concourse out of the rain for a while like kids do when they wait in line all night for an iPhone or tickets to a rock concert. Yeah, it would have been nice to sit in a chair, but come on, is it really that big of a deal? 

It is real easy to shit on Brandon, and maybe he got it wrong with the student section and with Hoke.  So fire his ass and be done with it already.  Brandon would be making a boatload more money working in private industry.  If his decisions were bad, that's one thing; not all decisions are good ones.  His motives, I suspect, were well intentioned.  I get tired of some of his shenanigans too, but he is trying to make money for his department.  Sometimes he takes things too far, but he's not putting the additional dollars in his own pocket.  And as much as losing is killing us, it is killing him also in ways that keep you up at night long after the sting of losing has been drowned in a couple of dozen beers.

A bunch of us were at the game, as we are most Saturdays when Michigan plays at home.  We were all totally soaked from the rain and it took a couple of hours to get home in the damn traffic. We all made it, no one got hurt and when we got home, we changed clothes and proceeded to have a fun evening with good food and drink.  Like most everyone else on this board, we were bummed by the outcome of the game. But life goes on.  

So neg me all to hell if you want, but keep some perspective. 

 

 

bluebyyou

September 22nd, 2014 at 8:36 PM ^

The whining gets old after a while. It was a warm afternoon that got rainy. Big fucking deal. No one got hurt, no one was struck by lighting or hit by a falling tree on the way back to the bars, and some folks, who celebrate standing for the entirety of most games, were minorly inconvenienced while they were standing in the concourse out of the rain.