Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football

One of the most fascinating sports books I have read. It gives you a blow-by-blow of the inside of sports management and sports marketing at a major college. This provides valuable information and insight for anyone in sports management and I recommend it to anyone in the field or any field closely related to it. You cannot learn everything in the classroom and this book goes behind the facade of college sports to show you how and why decisions are made, sometimes correct, often not. It's a valuable tool for my sports & entertainment business as well. You've heard the line: All that glitters is not gold! So true here! The fan is the most important commodity in sports and should be catered to and if Dave Brandon, former Michigan Athletic Director had catered more to the fans than to his own ego, he'd probably still be at Michigan.

Riveting behind the scenes story telling. I can relate to Prof. Bacon's research. A couple of times in my life I had the good fortune to spend personal time with Bo and this book captured what I experienced while with him and much more. While my time with the Coach was limited, you sensed that the words spoken would not be lost on the many, but the few. Many characters in play here. Ugly and exciting at the same time. The net of all this, Brandon's motifs were about Brandon and not "The Team, The Team, The Team". His true character played out from the beginning to the end. Surely the antithesis of Bo's other saying above the door to his office, "Those Who Stay Will Be Champions." Brandon's imperious attitude and motivation could never be his salvation in the eyes of those with maze and blue blood. Go Blue!

Great story, cohesively and well written. Despite having lived in Ann Arbor since 1977, I've never read any books about the Wolverines, and like so many M fans I got dismayed with the whole program, especially when things started going (real) bad with RichRod (who doesn't draw much attention in this book) and Brady Hoke. I also watched with amazement as former president Bollinger stupidly put the "halo" around the Big House, and then Dave Brandon started messing up so many more things. It was enlightening, and ultimately disturbing, to find out how Brandon was so out of touch with the fans, and so centered on himself. For those of you who, like me, haven't had the inclination to read about Michigan sports, and the football team/former AD in particular, give this one a try. It was a great read by a great author, and now I want to read more. (But, umm, Go Bucks.)

The story told in Endzone begins in 2007 when tiny Appalachian State shocked the college football world by coming into Michigan Stadium and knocking off the storied Michigan Wolverines. Although they would finish 9-4 with a Citrus Bowl victory, coach Lloyd Carr was done. Controversy then ensued when Michigan recruited away ("stole") West Virginia's Rich Rodriquez. But under "RichRod" and successor Brady Hoke, Michigan would average less than seven wins a season from 2008-2014.The results on the football field, however, were only the manifestation of years of decline in the university’s athletic department. John Bacon, author of numerous books on Michigan athletics, describes how and why Michigan Football declined on-field and off, what it meant to the University and those who are part of it, and finally how it "returned." To do this, Bacon takes his reader back to the founding of the Michigan athletics program, explaining the enigmatic concept of the "Michigan Man” and its place in Michigan lore.The book largely centers on the many changes brought by Athletic Director Dave Brandon, and how they systematically undermined the university’s values to the point where virtually every constituent group was alienated and angry. As Bacon astutely notes, when students angrily marched over to President Mary Sue Coleman's House, they were after Brandon’s job, not head coach Brady Hoke’s.Of his many mistakes, the biggest was Brandon’s failure to recruit former Michigan QB and Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh to replace Rodriguez in 2011. Brandon’s ego was a major factor, as it was in many other decisions that led the athletic department astray. Bacon chronicles Brandon’s eventual downfall and the subsequent process that would lead to that failure’s reversal in 2014, a process largely driven by outsiders who had had enough.It's telling that Bacon's declared that Michigan football had "returned" occurred before playing a single down under Harbaugh. Michigan football isn't about wins, but doing things a certain way, the "Michigan way" with the belief that the wins will eventually follow. Bringing in a coach who understood this and embodied the school's values was all that was needed to constitute "return” in the eyes of the program’s fans.Endzone is really "must reading" for anyone who wants to understand what happened at the University of Michigan between 2007 and 2014. Alums and fans will find it indispensable. But many others with no connection to the University will be fascinated with the story of how a great institution loses it way and what it must do to restore itself by remaining true to its values.

I got this one because I read "Three and Out" and love that one. I am from Michigan, a Michigan football fan, and work at the University, so I feel I am familiar with a least more-than-less of the names running through this narrative, but even so, I found it hard to keep the story straight at times, and very hard to keep all the many people involved straight. While the other book, "Three and Out" followed a mostly linear story line, "Endzone" tends to zig zag between current events, past events, and trying to also give the readers some background about each person that is introduced into the story as they are introduced, meaning you might be reading about a gathering of a handful of people happening and then two sentences later you are deep into a particular person's past ties with the University, then just as quickly you are back at the gathering again with someone else speaking and then plunging into their history. I bought the Kindle version of this and the few times I accidentally lost my page with an unintended swipe, I found myself swiping back and forth several pages trying to figure out 'is this the 'person's past' story I was on, or is this other person the one I was reading about just now?' I think there were just so many people involved in this particular event, and the author wanting to inform the readers how they each came to be an important part of the University, that it made for a little bit of a jumbled story to try and follow. I would still highly recommend the other Bacon book I read, but this one I'd say is only going to be a good read if you absolutely love Michigan football and so can overlook both the boring aspect of exclusively reading about 'suits', and the jumbly-ness of jumping around in time to try to give each person their five minutes with regard to their ties to the University.