Michigan vs. Reality (1973)

Or, how to co-opt your own misbehavior

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I.

Fifty years ago, a man named Gerald Faye decided to take legal action against the Big Ten conference because he could not easily explain to his son how Michigan had been shut out of the Rose Bowl. Faye was an otherwise honorable man—the child of immigrants, a veteran of the Korean War, an advocate for civil rights, fair housing, and equal pay for women, a professor at Oakland Community College near Detroit, and a 43-year-old doctoral student at the University of Michigan. He was also an admittedly fanatical supporter of the Wolverines football program. And that fanaticism was what the lawsuit stemmed from, because Gerald Faye was convinced his team had gotten screwed over by a higher power.

That higher power’s name was Wayne Duke, the commissioner of the Big Ten, who, after undefeated Ohio State and undefeated Michigan had played to a 10-10 tie on November 24, 1973, convened a telephone call of the league’s athletic directors to determine the conference’s representative at the Rose Bowl. Admittedly, this was an opaque method of determining a champion, but these were the rules at the time. After six athletic directors voted in favor of Ohio State, Faye tried to sell it to the court as a violation of the due process rights guaranteed in the constitution.

Never mind that Michigan had failed to win this game in its own stadium; never mind that Michigan had missed two field-goal tries that could have won the game; never mind that Ohio State had entered the game as the higher-ranked team, or that Michigan quarterback Dennis Franklin had broken his collarbone, and never mind that five of those Big Ten athletic directors had either played or coached at Michigan. This was, to men like Gerald Faye and Michigan coach Bo Schembechler, an injustice on par with all the injustices that plagued a generation of young people in the early 1970s.

“A great wrong has been done to these kids,” Schembechler said in a speech to the Ann Arbor Quarterback Club, according to Michael Rosenberg’s excellent book, War As They Knew It. “I wouldn’t trust the older generation either. All they do is scurry around worrying about themselves.”

And in another speech, Schembechler said, “I have a football team that is almost totally disillusioned with college football.”

All of this now seems patently absurd. And no one knew that better than Michigan athletic director Don Canham, who had spent years attempting to market Michigan football as a pure product that transcended wins and losses. Canham understood that the more complaining his irascible coach and fan base did, the worse Michigan would look—and the more that Michigan created a rift within their own conference, the worse things to could get. Asked to comment on Faye’s lawsuit (which ultimately amounted to little more than a line in Faye’s obituary when he died at the age of 93 in October), Canham called it “ridiculous.”

And fifty years later, here we are again.

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II.

I have already written about the the infuriating nature of Michigan’s latest scandal, and about the even more infuriating reaction to this scandal by otherwise respectable pundits, and about how this whole thing has twisted a fan base that so often prided itself on haughty integrity into a fan base that has now married that haughtiness with the loopy and paranoid martyrdom of its current head coach…

…but now we find ourselves at an inflection point. On Monday, Michigan will play Washington for the national championship, and if the Wolverines win, college football will find itself at yet another ridiculous juncture. The investigation of the sign-stealing scandal that got coach Jim Harbaugh suspended for three key games during the regular season could very well lead to this championship being officially vacated, which is one of those things that college sports does in an attempt to shove time back into a bottle and reverse the course of history itself. No Michigan supporter will care about this; meanwhile, Harbaugh, seeing the writing on the wall, could very well leave for a job in the National Football League, thereby skirting any long-term consequences.

College football, of course, was built on this kind of blind partisanship. Hell, you might argue that I am guilty of blind partisanship right now; you might say that my own subjective personal experience as an alumnus of a rival Big Ten program has led me to the biased conclusion that no college football school’s alumni base embraces a spirit of intellectual arrogance quite like Michigan does. (Though I dare you to read this John Bacon piece about the enduring “honor” of the Michigan Man, in the context of the current moment, and try not to laugh.) Perhaps you might counter with the fact that a certain percentage of fans of my own alma mater are also partisan to the point of stupidity, to which I would say you are absolutely and completely correct, but at least we know we’re a state school.

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III.

Still, I do think this scandal feels different than past scandals. Normally, the response to a scandal is a cover-up: It took decades, for instance, for Eric Dickerson to admit where that gold Trans-Am came from.

Yet Michigan’s reaction to this scandal has kind of inverted the whole process. This is some Roy Cohn-type shit, in that they’ve actually co-opted their own (alleged) wrongdoing and used it to form an overwhelming persecution complex (the way a political candidate might co-opt, say, an attempt to overturn an election as a way to galvanize his supporters). They speak repeatedly of overcoming adversity, without accepting the fact that they brought this adversity on themselves; they excuse their own misbehavior by arguing they were reacting to others’ misbehavior, with little acknowledgment that they took it much further than anyone else did. By embracing that us-against-the-world mentality, they’ve turned the sign-stealing scandal into the essential identity of this team. It is the sheer height of arrogant self-regard, this sense that somehow the system is screwing you when you totally know, deep inside, that you’re the ones who screwed the system.

You can make the case that Gerald Faye wasn’t entirely wrong for questioning the process 50 years ago; you can make the case that Bo Schembechler had a right to make indignant statements that obliquely compared a Rose Bowl snub to a failed war in southeast Asia. You can even make the case that Michigan was unfairly victimized in 1973. But the only way to make a case for this 2023 Michigan team is bend over backward and insert your head in an orifice where it doesn’t belong in order to block out all sense of personal responsibility. I guess no matter what happens on Monday night, this team feels like they can live with the consequences. Because someday in the very near future, they’re going to look awfully ridiculous.

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