Tradition do you really care? Or just used against rival fans?

This is a permanate change people, Brandon is simply adding to the "Michigan" brand. The changes and alt, uniforms help attract new money and fans. We have to be able to change and adapt. Recruits these day like the new flashy look and the changes that are going on. We're not Alabama we can't just go into a recruits house right now and say hey look come here and you are most likely going to win a title. The main thing is money, with all the new changes going on with the athletic deptartment money has to come from all sorts of places. This isnt about this one jersey, in future years this is going to be the norm; different unifroms, neutral site games, night games, changing apperal compaines to whoever is the highest bidder, etc. I'm not saying this is 100% bad but in the current age where money determines everything this is how it's going to be. We live in a world where college football coaches almost have more power than university presidents.

...an annoyance to be trifled with during otherwise unavoidable occasions.  This coming from someone living in ESS EEE SEE country, where I had to explain that yes, it is a big deal that Michigan plays its home games in the daytime (before 2011), and that no, no one ever thought there was anything wrong with that.

Tradition means you do something your way in spite of the way someone else might do that same thing.  It becomes an identifiable trait that is recognized as being synonymous with you, not just among your colleagues, but among anyone else who knows anything about you.  It matters.

It means that when you come in during the middle of "The Big Chill", even if you know nothing about the background of the movie, you recognize that it's Michigan playing in the college football game the characters are watching (Michigan football also makes a lesser-known cameo in "The Pink Panther Strikes Again" during a sequence involving a game being watched by...who else, President Ford).

So yeah, tradition matters...not because it's important to remind other fanbases who Michigan is (believe me, they're well aware and are likely tired of being reminded).  Tradition matters because it's important that Michigan not forget who Michigan is. 

And maybe it's because it was a part of the Michigan sporting culture; particularly, although I didn't know it at the time, Bo's turning down Texas AM to stay with a smaller salary at UM, and later, as AD, sending Billy Frieder packing prior to the BB championship after he signed a contract at ASU. I probably naively believed that winning came from resisting the temptations of greed and money, and it seemed that way after Fisher went on to win the championship. Someone posted that Bo wanted to ditch the helmet design when he first got to UM; I didn't know about that at the time either. Carr appeared to continue the tradition of winning without giving in to the pressures of big-money college sports, although, in retrospect, the MNC in '97 and the seeming near-miss in '06 draw attention away from a sort of meh-ish 8-4 to 9-3 average overall, perhaps the price of resisting the pressure of big money. Perhaps the NCAA game has given in to money in a way different from the big-money days of the '20'-60's. Perhaps TV has driven CFB away from the community-rich seeming democracy of a fans-in-attendance-driven sport to a TV-contract-advertising-revenue-driven sport, with the transition accelerating during the BCS years. The economic pressures drove cream-puff scheduling that produced 8-home-games-a-year, more fan revenue and shittier matchups. Through all this, the new CFB economic system has forced ADs to compete to pay higher coaching salaries (look what happened going from Gerg to Mattison). Increasingly, the ditching of old niceties makes the unpaid status of athletes in revenue sports harder to look at as the role of money in determining the substance of the sport increases. I can't predict the future. The viewership debacle for last year's MNC game gave me hope that the corporate side of CFB had at last gutted the goose with the golden eggs enough to maybe push the balance of power back to a more fan-oriented economic model, and that the pressure to abandon historic traditions and to conform to the featureless and faceless marketing of CFB without a sense of place or history would abate, but, as the latest clown uni business here shows us, we are not there yet. Whatever happens, I think that it is natural that, as the thing I followed these past years changes to look less like what I know, that I will lose my emotional attachment to it. It is like going back to your old hometown -- the more it resembles the way you remember it, the more at home you feel, and the more it changes, the less it matters to you that you once belonged there. I don't use tradition against other fans, I don't think. In fact, the more OSU fusses with their unis, the less that feels like The Game as I have known it since we got beat up in 1968 (I think that is the year that Woody settled on the uni that generations of M fans have grown to dread until the clowniform business got to them a few years back). Whether its ours or theirs, I am more likely to remember the black depressions that came from losing during my early teen years (unfortunately, there weren't that many big-game wins; just astronomic winning percentages capped by disappointment most years) if the unis remain reminiscent of those years. My life hinges less on these outcomes now; if modern corporate marketing tries to create a new brand identification with me now, there is a long way to go to match the passion I developed for the "tradition" over the years. This is doubly so if the new "brand" is a knock-off of the marketing precepts being used in every other geographic niche of the country. Maybe changes in the sport will make it safe to cling to tradition before the economoic pressures of the last few decades have destroyed them all. What Michigan football's trappings and traditions will look like then, I don't know, nor do I know how I will react to it or how much attachment I will feel to it.

Why hasn't Dave Brandon started selling advertising in Michigan Stadium? It would probably make Michigan more money than another new jersey for compulsive fans to buy. It would probably also create less of an overall backlash than changing the jerseys. (I mean how many places have no advertising in their football stadium? Surely Michigan can do the simple things to keep up with the Joneses AMIRITE?)

Note that I detest both Michigan's frequent changing of jerseys and the idea of selling advertising in the stadium. Yet it's baffling to me that the away (and sometimes the home) jerseys are fair game to change each week while advertising in Michigan stadium is taboo.

Yes I actually care.