For most of my life it’s been simple: you support the team 100%, you root for them until the final buzzer, you hope against logic for a win and when you lose you immediately start thinking about next week or next year. Shoot, if America has a third national anthem behind “The Star Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America,” that anthem even includes the line “for it’s root, root, root for the home team; if they don’t win it’s a shame.” (It also includes some direct product placement for Cracker Jack, meaning that it really fits the American brand as a national anthem, but that’s another post altogether…)
But thanks to the team I felt the most loyal to (the Michigan Wolverines) and to the team I probably care about most right now (the Detroit Tigers), I’m questioning the notion of sports loyalty and demanding that that loyalty go both ways. Here’s my story.
The Easy Explanation: The Detroit Tigers
I was six years old when the Tigers won the 1984 World Series and it was amazing – a magical summer from which I still vividly remember Ernie Harwell’s voice on the radio, the animated Tiger promo on TV before turning it over to George Kell, and countless evenings falling asleep watching games on TV or listening to them on the radio – I was six!! – and waking up the next morning to check the box score in the newspaper. My favorite player was Alan Trammell – he’d go on to win World Series MVP thanks mostly to a 2-HR, 4-RBI game my dad attended at Tiger Stadium, I’ll never forget – mainly because I liked the double consonants in his box score abbreviation Trmmll. We celebrated with the whole city the night they finished off the Padres – when the doorbell rang minutes after Willie Hernandez jumped into Lance Parrish’s arms after the popout to third, a neighbor dumped a beer on my father’s head and the night continued from there – and I was a Detroit Tiger for Halloween a week or so later. Three years later we made the playoffs again, and then…
For nineteen years I really didn’t care. The team was terrible – it set the MLB record for most losses in a season during that stretch and was really never relevant past June. But from 2006 on I’ve been a huge fan again, ever since the team had a hot April and May in 2006 and showed some promise. It made the World Series that year and has been back to the postseason several times since, and more importantly it’s galvanized Metro Detroit and all of us expatriates – it’s bonded together a community that desperately needed inspiration in the face of global recession and its devastating impact on the auto industry and the city of Detroit (much like, around the same time, the New Orleans Saints lifted up the Katrina-ravaged city of New Orleans…more on all this in a second). It’s brought millions into a struggling – bankrupt, even – city and made us all feel proud. I can honestly say that between the ages of 10 and 25 I didn’t care at all about baseball and now I’m a massive fan, and it’s due entirely to one word: the “Detroit” in Detroit Tigers.
That word Detroit is everything to me, just like the words “New Orleans” meant so much to Saints fans, like the letters “U-S-A” meant so much during the Miracle on Ice, and really just like the phrase “<Geographic Place> _________s” means to 90+% of any team’s fans. Sports are all kinds of fun, but of the reasons we truly care about any single game, the geographic name attached to “Lions/Tigers/Bears” represents a massive proportion. Shakespeare asks “would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?” and my answer is “the Lions stink, but only by the name Detroit can they find my unconditional love.” Offensive coordinator Romeo Crennel finds millions of Juliets by the city half of his employer’s name alone – we care because the geographic branding of sports makes us care.
And long story short, we spend time, money, and energy on that love with this part of the deal in place: Superstar Athlete X can make millions of dollars while making Billionaire Owner Y tens of millions more, just as long as while playing under the banner of “City/State/Region(I see you Patriots/Buccaneers)” they pretend to care just as much as we do. Which brings me back to the Tigers. We Detroiters love them unconditionally – but we’ll boo the heck out of a player that offends us. It’s not batting average – for the most part we love Mendoza-line Alex Avila because he takes a licking for us and keeps on ticking. It’s not salary and underperformance – we’re all pulling for Justin Verlander to discover his MVP stuff even while watching guys nowhere near his pay grade like Madison Bumgardner and James Shields light up the World Series.
But when overpriced 1st baseman Prince Fielder ends his 0-for-infinity postseason with the Tigers last season by claiming that he won’t let it bother him because he has kids and he’s on to the next thing, screw him. And when overpriced reliever Joe Nathan blows a save on a Sunday in Toronto (after the team lost on Saturday) and says it won’t ruin his weekend, screw him. We don’t mind that you make millions off our nine dollar stadium beers and the countless in-game promotions for Belle Tire and 1-800-CALL-SAM that litter your broadcasts, just as long as you pretend you care as much as we do.
And it’s fucking easy. When things go well, say “and don’t let me forget to thank the best damn fans in the land…they really kept us going out there.” When things go poorly you don’t even have to mention us (although it would be nice): “I let myself down, I let my teammates down (and I let the fans down) and you can rest assured that’s going to fuel some intense workouts during the offseason.”
I mean, come on guys. Everyone lies to keep the people interested in them happy. Former romantic partners say “it’s not you, it’s me.” Employers go the Up In The Air route telling us “Anyone who’s ever changed the world has been in your position.” Politicians tell us that they’re about change and the little guy. Shoot, the strippers upon whom you make it rain make almost your damn salary lying to fans, and the best analogue to you is rockstars who love nothing more than to call out the city name where they’re playing “Helooooo, Deeeetroit” to make us think they care about the city between Cleveland and Chicago on this 85-city tour. We don’t pay exorbitant ticket prices just to watch you play; we pay them because we think you care about us collectively like you think we care about you individually. You know damn well we’d sell you down the river for someone with a .08 higher batting average and we know that you’d sleep with our girlfriend without caring about either of us. It’s the illusion that makes this fun, so get on board. You’re playing under the banner of our city, and that banner accounts for a huge part of your salary. Act like you care.
Now, before I leave the Tigers let me illustrate this point that the city name matters so much. For decades “they” have been saying how soccer is just about to take off in the US, and it’s only gradually begun to escalate in recent years. Why? In large part because great soccer players play for teams with names that don’t resonate with us. It’s not that we don’t recognize the talent of Neymar and Messi, it’s just that none of us live in Spain where they play. It’s not even the low scoring that people complain ab out – tons of NFL games are field goal snoozefests and baseball and hockey games are often 2-1 or 3-2. We root for the teams geographically associated with where we live, which is why “Tampa Bay” (Buccaneers, Rays, Lightning) isn’t named after a city (the Tampa Bay is an inlet of the Gulf of Mexico; Tampa is a city but St. Petersburg on the other side of the Bay is also a city so they named it after the waterway to get the whole area interested), “Carolina” (Panthers, Hurricanes) isn’t named after a state, and the New York Jets and Giants aren’t named after the city/state they play in. Teams know that their branding is massively dependent on geography, which is why they lean on the brand names of the areas they wish to serve/exploit. Which brings me too…
It’s Complicated: University of Michigan
As I type this, a huge portion of the Michigan fanbase is rooting for our Athletic Director, Dave Brandon, to be fired. No one is really “rooting” anymore for the football coach, Brady Hoke, to be fired because there’s no rooting to be done. He’s a terrible football coach, a dead man walking, and he’ll walk away having “””earned””” (one set of quotation marks didn’t seem enough) over $15 million for his “”efforts.””
Now, if you’re not a Michigan fan/alum you might think that the outcry is either just about football results (which are dismal) or about both football results and the handling of Shane Morris’ concussion in the recent game against Minnesota. But that’s nowhere near the whole story. In his four years as athletic director, Brandon has seemingly thrived on antagonizing students and alumni, with his exploits, among others, including:
-the escalation of ticket prices for students from ~$28/game to ~$42/game (a 50% increase in the days of pretty flat inflation)
-the corporatization of the game experience, with in-game advertisements on the (new-ish) jumbotrons, piped-in rock music drowning out the band and students, etc*.
-overwhelming “Constant Contact(TM)” with alums and season ticket holders to advertise products, events, and donation opportunities
-an antagonistic relationship with fans (emailing fans to “avoid driving on Stadium Blvd.” to not see his new multimillion dollar ad billboard, telling fans to “find another team to support”, holding press conferences talking about how “real fans would support his decisions,” etc.
-raising overall ticket prices and seat donations to a deteriorating football product with an unappealing schedule, and burning through what used to be a decades-long waiting list for season tickets to what is now the need to huck single-game tickets for free with purchase of Coca-Cola products.
Now, the long version of all this is a tirade I’ve already given on several installments of the Buckeye Brothers Podcast (yep, I’m consorting with the enemy now looking for an outlet to express my frustration), but the shorter version is this:
I get that pro sports have pure capitalism as their master, and that they have to appeal to the lowest common denominator to maximize revenue – especially when the product itself is so often out of their control with the need for parity. With 32 teams in each league and one champion per year, all held in by salary caps and trade deadlines and the like, every team will have some down years and need to resort to gimmickry to attract casual fans via group sales stunts and overdone hype. But college should be different – even at a school like Michigan with 110,000 seats to fill, there are tens of thousands of students each year *which also* means that there are hundreds of thousands of alumni who want to relive their glory days by returning to campus. And we just need a reason. There are only a few “cathedrals” in modern sports anymore, but they’re magnificent – Fenway, Wrigley, Lambeau… Sports don’t matter in a vacuum; they matter in large part because they’ve always mattered. Go to a game at Fenway and you can feel the Curse of the Bambino, the almost-but-not-quite games of the 70s and of 86, the Splendid Splinter and the comeback in 2004. Fenway is as much a part of Boston history as the Freedom Trail now, just as Wrigley is a part of the Chicago experience and every Wisconsinite or Yooper has a pilgrimage to make to Lambeau. And in that vein, almost every Michigan alum wants to get back to campus now and then and the Big House is a centerpiece of a visit, the reason to come home (um…homecoming).
And here’s my point – Dave Brandon has squeezed alumni and students both to maximize 2011-14 profits, but in doing so he’s taught us a very important lesson, even while he represents a nonprofit. We’re customers to the university, not stakeholders or members of a community. And like Eve biting the apple, I think most of us can’t un-learn that lesson.
Is it prices? Probably not specifically, but those straws have been building on our camellbacks.
Is it piped in music? Not really, but like Steve Harvey says about too many instructions at events “Get Louder? I spent $80 on these tickets…motherfucker you get louder.” The college experience has always been about the whole thing – the band, the students, the campus; if you want to be a pro experience, keep in mind that the pros are all better athletes. We like college for different reasons.
Is it the advertising? Again, not really, but I remember working with Brandon’s predecessor, Bill Martin, who told me casually one day in 2001 that the university had been offered “seven figures” for an “understated logo” on the scoreboard by one of the Big Three automakers. A recent business school grad I wondered why we wouldn’t take that, especially knowing that ads would someday come so the opportunity cost of that money was especially high in light of the fact that someday that no-ads policy would be broken. And he explained to me that the Michigan experience was about the whole experience and not just pimping out football, that financially that decision would make great sense but the goodwill it would burn with fans may not be worth it. And what I read into that was that it wasn’t about short-term revenues but more about long-term community. Dave Brandon’s motto – he’s said this – is “if it ain’t broke, break it.” Which is great if you’re a CEO looking for credit for a rebuilding project, but kind of awful if, four years later, you’ve alienated extremely loyal fans, ruined a waiting list to even buy your product, and all the while presided over the deterioration of that product itself.
And to the main point of this post itself – Brandon has burned an insane amount of loyalty. The amazing thing about “sports marketing” is that teams have to rank among most loyalty-driven brands in the world. There’s simply no replacement for Michigan for me – I either love and care about Michigan football or I don’t care about college football at all. I grew up in Michigan and went to Michigan…that’s it for me, and the same goes for Alabama fans with the Crimson Tide or Texas fans with the Longhorns. If I like cola and Coke pisses me off, there’s always Pepsi. If I like McDonald’s and they screw me over, hello Wendy’s. But I’ll never love Michigan State or Ohio State or even UCLA near where I live.
All we ask as fans is some loyalty in return, even if it’s loyalty masquerading as “customer retention protocol.” And I think we deserve it – Dave Brandon is (for the next couple weeks) using the name of the university where I earned two degrees and spent some of the best years of my life. Represent that name well. The Tigers, Lions, Pistons, and Red Wings are playing under the banner of the city where I grew up, the city that I love. Pretend you care about it too. Yeah, we fans are customers but as long as you let us think we’re community members we’ll provide you with every marketer’s dream – undying loyalty and zero probability of switching brands. A little loyalty in return, please. The ball’s in your court.
See Me Squeegee 