Grantland article: Your team doesn't give a damn about you
I enjoy Grantland and also "Sh*t My Dad Says". So I found this entertaining, but warning it is rather crude:
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7654198/the-writer-sh*t-my-dad-says…
I think this helps put it in perspective when we are up in arms about a uniform change, a proposed mascot, moving the rivalry game, etc. As much as we LOVE our team...they don't give a damn about us in the grand scheme of things. It's about the money.
Greed is good.
Goodbye, cruel world, I have nothing to live for now, nothing. My dreams have been shattered, the very fabric of my fanship rent. What the hell am I going to do with my MGoPoints now?
Burn them, spread the ashes on your head, and then wear a maize and blue sack cloth.
I know in the truest sense it's not earth shattering, but have you seen a liveblog during a loss? You would think the world was ending. The amount of emotional investment people have, the superstitions, the game day rituals and post game meltdowns...I think this article has a funny way of putting that in perspective. Maybe I should have saved it for the next time UofM loses, but it seems like a slow day.
I was such an idiot. I didn't wear my damn Michigan boxers and we lost those games. THE ONLY TWO GAMES WHERE I DIDN'T WEAR MY MICHIGAN BOXERS WERE THE GAME THAT WE LOST. Don't you understand it? It's all because me... I can't go a day without thinking about my fateful decisions to put on the wrong boxers... The guilt still haunts me...
I now have 3 pairs of MAIZE boxers. We will never lose again
So your telling me that I really didnt have lucky Pee during Braylon fest? (seriously I was 3 seconds from peeing my pants)
Hogwash I say hogwash....
If you didn't pee then, we would have 5 straight national titles right now.
... should have saved it in a jar or something
Start a new thread.
Roy Roundtreed told me that he loved me!
EDIT: The article makes a perfectly fair point. I'm just a little heartbroken. And by "a little" I mean "utterly."
I know Michigan doesn't care about me personally ... hell, Michigan doesn't even know me. I am perfectly ok with that. I will obsessively follow the team, love the team, & cheer for the team just the same. If Michigan was a girl, I would be a really creepy person. But Michigan is a team, so it's cool.
That's true for every team but my team. My team can't be like that. My team wouldn't jack ticket prices because they know there's a waiting list. My team wouldn't charge me a fee for the priveledge of season tickets. Afterall it's not always about the money, at least not for my team.
I will remember this article when Dave Brandon makes changes that screw the fan. Whoever gives the most money will get DB's attention. It's always about the money, and not anything else. Good yet sad to be reminded about that.
An ad on the TV screen here, a banner there: before you know it, the Big House will become the Incredibly Big Minor League Baseball Stadium. Bo saw it coming in 1990, when he decided the Tigers looked like a better job than the AD position at Michigan.
I'm sure Bo is delighted that someone who calls him his "mentor" is slowly turning his program into just another giant profit center.
Of why Bo left for the Tigers, but you run with that if it fits your theory.
You are talking about tater here... his blog is called tin foil hat sports blog. Yes, he will run with whatever odd conclusion he draws from anything.
Although it's true that the athletic department may not care about us as individuals they do care about us as a fanbase. Upsetting a fanbase due to unpopular policies has a direct correlation to revenue or lack thereof.
An athletic department is not unlike a coporation and needs money survive, they're not all that different than us. We have family units "small companies" that need money to survive just as much as large corporations and athletic departments do. We may not do some of the unethical things that some corporations do to "survive" but not all companies are unethical just like not all people are unethical. Remember douche bag companies are run by douch bag people.
P.S. Does a mascot or some billboards make DB a DB? I guess it's up to the fanbase to decide.
Brandon's gonna Brand.
MGoBoard may be one of the only communities on the internet that respects Grantland. It has been panned left and right by fans but it seems to be held up in high esteem here. Why, I don't know.
No self-aware commentary is permitted.
Grantland is hit or miss. Sometimes its right on the money, most of time, its just annoying.
You must have the reactions here after their write-up on the Sugar Bowl
Doesn't bother me one bit that they're in it for the money. When we plop down cash on tickets, jerseys, what have you; we get something out of the transaction too. The joy I get from watching Trey spin one off the top of the glass against OSU in the closing seconds isn't marred by the fact Dave Brandon is sitting in his office stacking $20s like Birdman.
but i think if my team didn't care about me (us), the ohio game would be in October and there would be pizza ads on the godzilla-trons.
Even those decisions you mention are about money. Having the Ohio game the Saturday after Thanksgiving is brilliant. Do you think that Michigan Stadium would be filled if it was Indiana? Northwestern? Purdue? Illinois? We will always be full against Ohio, no matter the weather or the season.
Pizza ads? If it brought in enough money, I think DB would do it. However, the polls indicate that the fans are so solidly against this, ads become a BAD marketing decision. If you bring in money short term, but cheese off big donors, you lose in the long run.
No, we are the naive john, and we're just stupid with our obsession. Unrequited love.
IIRC, they goal was to get all of the interdivisional games the final weekend of the year, so that means the last game would be MSU or Neb, which i don't think would have trouble selling out any time of year.
and you are argreeing with me re pizza ads in that i was saying that it is not always only about money as polls are taken from fans, who the article says are not listened to. every program has ads in the stadium (nd?) and nearly every program has big donors.
still, its a tiny tiny smidge of listening
As stupid as it sounds, its actually enjoyable to be emotionally invested in something that doesn't have any real consequences on my life. If we lose a big one, I'm upset for a bit and then I move on. For a few hours I don't have to worry about school, the job market, my girl, politics, etc. It's an escape and to me that itself is worth the price of admission.
This is why it upsets me when people bring politics or religion into sports. Sports are for everyone to enjoy and I watch them to get away from all the world's bullshit. If that line is crossed it ruins it for me.
If you want to talk about the decisions that Dave Brandon is making for the team and athletic department, than sure, its pretty much all about money. But its different for the players. Pro players are just athletes getting paid to play for a team, that means if somebody else is going to give them more money to play for another team, they probably will.
But when it comes to players for Michigan, those guys are there for a lot of the same reasons that we alumni went for. And they share the pride and love for the school that we do. And when they graduate, they'll go on and spread that pride and love the same way we do.
So sure, the moves Brandon makes are about generating more money for the athletic department and promoting the brand. But I do believe that alumni share a bond, however fleeting it may be, with other alumni, and therefore also with the players.
That notion largely gets tossed out the window when it comes to pro sports though.
The narrative is a bit different for college athletics. Is Michigan threatening to move to an NCAA expansion site?
That is what has become so scary over the last decade or so. The narrative used to be different for college sports, especially Michigan.
College sports used to be a safe oasis from the mercenary environment of pro sports. As Bo used to say: "Toe meets leather at one o-clock. You want to take pictures, c'mon down then."
Now, college sports is just becomming a pro minor league. Same schlock, but with lesser athletes.
It's only a matter of time until college teams, perhaps to include Michigan, do leave the NCAA. And when they do, it will not be for the fans, it will be for the money.
There is a significant difference. Brandon does not get rich when our athletic department runs a profit. That money flows back into the department. A significant chunk of it will ultimately make it to the university in the form of tuition and room and board fees. The tuition bubble hits athletic departments hard. Our athletes do not get a waiver. The AD has to actually pay for them to go to school. As tuition skyrockets, the AD has to come up with more money. And then you have the facilities and coaching arms races, with schools spending more and more on both.
Fans seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. They want 29 varsity teams (meaning lots of scholarships paid for by the athletic department), all with state-of-the-art facilities - but they hate paying for it.
But this:
Fans seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. They want 29 varsity teams (meaning lots of scholarships paid for by the athletic department), all with state-of-the-art facilities - but they hate paying for it.
Do they? Do fans "want 29 varsity teams... all with state-of-the-art facilities"?
I don't think I do. I think Title IX wants that sort of spread, of athletic money. I'd be happy, for the most part, if Michigan ran high-level men's basketball and men's football programs, and that everything else ran like an Ivy League sports program. I'm happy to have collegians, men and women, competing. But I am turned off by the arms race of money and facilities that all seem to mimic football. My idea of what might be right is exactly what Title IX said is wrong. Shows you, what Title IX knows.
Fans may not want all of these teams to exist, but some of them have to for legal reasons. Fans do generally expect us to be competitive in as many sports as possible, though. The expensive facilities go along with that. (I don't entirely understand why they are so essential, either, but coaches across the sports seem to have collectively decided that they are.)
Brandon would have made more money in the corporate world. He was CEO of Dominos and could have likely moved on to a larger company, if he wanted.
Grantland is ok. But sometimes the articles they write are about something they think is groundbreaking or a shock, but really it's obvious. This is one of them for me. Of course it's about $$$. Without money they don't exist. So they care about the fans' money and make decisions to get the money. With that money they reinvest in the team to try and make it successful so they can get more fans and more money to reinvest in the team to try and garner more fans and more money to reinvest and on and on and on and on. Duh. They're not going to make decisions that will please fans but make them little to no money. They're also not going to make decisions that will cause them to lose every single fan. I don't think it's accurate to say that they don't give a damn about the fans. They do give back some. How well do giveaway promotions really work? Do magnetic schedules really get more people to the games? No, it's probably a waste of money.
It is certainly true of professional teams but doesn't apply to college teams at all.
College teams may not care about you if you are a "fan" but college teams are also representative of a university community that incudes students, faculty and alumni. If you are one of those people (and not just a "fan") then the teams do, in fact, care about you.
People can argue about the role of money in college sports but despite the trends, for the time being, college sports are still beholden to more than just the $$$. And if it reaches the point that it does apply to college teams then they will no longer be college teams but professional teams. At which point, students and alumni will shift their support to whoever is representing their interests. It might seem confusing to some, but college sports will never be professional sports.
Every time our favorite team does something selfish, for purely business reasons, we take it personally. Because we want to believe that they love us as much as we love them. But they don't. They just rub up against whoever has the most money.This isn't quite true, or else there would be zero small-market franchises. Even with state-of-the-art stadiums and such, franchises in small markets are foregoing revenue that they could earn elsewhere.
If this article doesn't win a Pulitzer, I'm going to kick something.
This article's thesis (that professional sports teams care about money) is one that nobody would argue with.
The article's method of proving this thesis is to tell a story riddled with cliches and one whose specific plot points were surely exaggerated.
I think this is an article far more worthy of a B- in an English 125 class than a Pulitzer Prize.
If you're old enough to buy beer and you're wearing a jersey with another man's name on it, your life has gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Cursing, talking about titty bars and caring more about a bottle of bourbon than your son. What a great father.
I should have stopped when it said he was from kentucky. Typical southerners.
It's OK, I still love them and will occasionally see them play in person. It's a distraction from my daily life, nothing more, nothing less.
They give a damn about us if it affects their revenue but if they do something and we complain loudly yet still pay to go to all the games anyways they don't care one bit.
Still though, be thankful to alumni donors who want Michigan traditions kept alive. DB knows he has to care about them because they are a big source of money.