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LLloyd Carr was actively sabotaging RichRod's roster before he was officially announced. Granted, he would have done the same to Les Miles, but that's beside the point.
As for OSU/U-M? So what? Hate to break it to you, but that rivalry game has been irrelevant for a LONG time. It IS just another game at this point, and not even a particularly entertaining one.
Wolvy needs to stop living in the past. Then again, the past is all Wolvy's got at this point.
Well, there is a reason Carr did not support RR but, I can not site it, only there has to be one.
Why is it the rivalry remained alive while Cooper was loosing to Michigan but no longer became a rivalry when Tressel started beating them?
I long for a Lions team that is consistently competitive.
Well, there is a reason Carr did not support RR but, I can not site it, only there has to be one.
Why is it the rivalry remained alive while Cooper was loosing to Michigan but no longer became a rivalry when Tressel started beating them?
Carr didn't support RR because his name wasn't Ron English. Carr felt he had earned the right to name his successor. Martin said, "Uh... no." Then Martin went after Les Miles, which set off Carr like a roman candle.
There ya go. That's the reason.
And I would argue the OSU/U-M rivalry HASN'T been much of one for the last 15 years or so. At least during the Carr years, the Big Ten was relevant as a conference though. Nowadays... U-M/OSU is heading the way of Harvard/Yale... a nice historical rivalry that makes everyone go, "Oh, they're still playing each other? How quaint."
New President doesn't care as long as they keep bringing in the $$'.
......and Brandon has monitized it but it will take another couple of years to learn where they went wrong after they realize the money they anticipated, is not there.
I long for a Lions team that is consistently competitive.
I don't admire a FUCKING thing about him. He thinks his passion is all he needs to win. He's a FUCKING IDIOT!!!!! I thought that from the beginning. He's a STUPID mother fucking piece of shit. My 12 yr old son has more intelligence than he does. He thinks his Rah Rah Clap Clap bullshit is all he needs. HE"S A FUCKING MORON!!!!
maybe admire was a strong word lol... on a side note:
this is the first time Michigan has 3 losses in a season by end of September in its 135-year football history
"I eat a lot of corn, so it's actually fairly easy for me to find kernels in my shits."-fontes91
An Open Letter to Dave Brandon (and President Schlissel) September 27, 2014
Posted by Charles in Uncategorized.
Tags: athletic director, Dave Brandon, Go Blue, Michigan Athletics, Michigan football, Michigan tradition, University of Michigan
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Dear Athletic Director Brandon,
You have no idea who I am, and you probably don’t care. Why do I know that? Because you clearly don’t care about the opinions of the generations of loyal Michigan fans that have come before me, and the generation of lifelong fans that you should be trying to create right now.
With the team’s poor performance in recent games, many people are calling for Coach Hoke to be fired. I am not one of those people, and those losses are in no way your fault. However, there needs to be a fundamental change in the Athletics Department, and that begins with you. Your job is safe for now because Dr. Schlissel, while a capable administrator, cannot claim to come from a tradition of athletics, regardless of what anybody says. That’s perfectly fine—he went to Princeton and Johns Hopkins and a tradition of athletics doesn’t exactly run through the veins of every student at those institutions. However, a president who studied at Michigan or another perennial athletics powerhouse such as Oklahoma, Alabama, or Michigan State would have fired you a long time ago.
What I don’t understand is your utter disregard for Michigan’s traditions. You and I are more alike than you realize—we were both part of the gameday experience, you as a football player and I as a member of the band. However, Michigan fans who had watched you play in Bo’s early years would sense a definite difference in the atmosphere had they attended a recent game. The blame for that, I believe, falls squarely on your shoulders.
Surely you remember what it was like to play under Bo, how the Big House was a sacred place on Saturdays. Without piped-in music. Without inexplicably long media time outs. Without advertising galore. One of your great predecessors, former AD Fielding Yost (who originally bought the Little Brown Jug that Michigan lost today), would be rolling in his grave right now. You may have heard the story where he called up Dr. Revelli, then director of the Marching Band, and chastised him for using the band to advertise Buick on the field.
I’ll put it bluntly. You’re out of touch. You don’t have a clue about what your fans, alumni, and students want. If you do, you clearly don’t care. We couldn’t care less whether we get cell phone reception in the Big House or not. However, students do want to be rewarded for their loyalty to Michigan Football. Raising prices and instituting a first-come-first-serve seating system last year was not the way to do that, and it wasn’t a good way to get them to show up on time, either. You lost more than a third of your student season ticket holders just to make a bit more money.
You do deserve credit for one thing: for turning the Athletics Department into a very fat cash cow. While the two dozen plus varsity teams are almost completely supported from football revenue, they were doing fine before you came along and turned Michigan Athletics into a business. The gymnastics team probably would’ve still won their 4 national championships in a row if the Athletics department pulled in $100 million instead of $130 million.
It’s as if you make excuses to justify bad decisions. At the end of the day, they’re still bad decisions, and you’ll see consequences that can’t be covered up. If the attendance streak of 100,000+ that stretches back to 1975 ends this season, how will you explain that? When there is no longer a waitlist for non-student season tickets because the price is so prohibitive and because you alienated several years of current students, how will you explain that? You seem to forget the basics of investing—that today’s students are tomorrow’s season ticket holders.
I want you to think about a very serious question. Is selling the soul of a 135-year-old tradition worth any amount of money in the world?
We want football games to not last four hours. We want to listen to the band, not canned pop music. We want to pay a reasonable price for student season tickets. And we don’t want to hear about tickets sold under face value to get over 100,000 people to go to a game—even if the promotion wasn’t approved, what a slap in the face to loyal fans.
We want to impatiently count down to football season in January. We want to be quivering with excitement because we have tickets to Saturday’s game. We want to be ecstatic after attending a game at the Big House, even when we lose. We want to inherit a tradition that we can be proud of.
I love the University of Michigan. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have come back for graduate school (and there were four others who were happy to take me). I will bleed maize and blue until I die, and support the football program through thick and thin, but I cannot support you as Athletic Director.
Forever Go Blue.
Sincerely,
Charles Zhou
University of Michigan student, alumnus, and faculty/staff
Spot on; pretty much sums it up. Someone from the M side said they were handing out jello molds to fans following the game; you just can't make this shit up. Jello molds.
Diamond Dave just continues to amaze with his stellar marketing acumen.
Repugnant is the creature who would squander the ability to lift an eye to heaven, conscious of his fleeting time here.
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