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The last time our Golden Gophers won a Big Ten football championship, none of this year’s players had been born. It’s possible that some of their parents hadn’t either. In 1967, we had a shifty quarterback named Curt Wilson, a bruising fullback from South St. Paul named Jim Carter, and an All-American defensive end in St. Louis Park’s Bob Stein. The team finished 8-2 and shared the conference title with Indiana and Purdue.

The Rose Bowl invitation went to the Hoosiers, even though the Gophers had trounced them 33-7 during the season (conference officials gave them the nod because Indiana had never won a conference championship). Even as a sixteen-year-old fan I was convinced that some sort of curse had been placed on my team, though I told myself hopefully it wouldn’t be long before the Gophers would rise again. They never did.

It’s been nearly forty-two years since the Gophers have been to Pasadena, California, home of the Rose Bowl, on New Year’s Day. Four decades have passed since that marvelous 1960 team—featuring the legendary Sandy Stephens, Tom Brown, and Bobby Bell—was crowned national champion. Since then, the University of Minnesota’s football program has wheezed its way through five coaches, a handful of minor bowl appearances, and an annual struggle with major college football reality.

Sure, there have been moments; but shockers like the 1977 upset of top-rated Michigan and the 1999 squeaker over second-ranked Penn State really only served to illustrate the futility of the team’s mission. And the periodic trips to places like Shreveport or Memphis for bowl games named after lawn-care equipment have done little to push the program toward respectability.

The sad fact is this: The economics of major college football essentially disqualifies the Gophers from competing with the Ohio States or the Michigans or the Penn States of the world. And to spend any time, energy, or money on this particular pipe dream is neither helpful to the university’s mission nor charitable to the dwindling number of Gopher football fans who still happen to care.

Since 1997 the University of Minnesota has invested more than $17 million on a football program that in a good year might generate $12 million, about what Michigan takes in from a couple of home games. And now there’s talk of building a new stadium on campus, a $100 million exercise in delusion that, coming on the heels of major budget cuts at the university, is guaranteed to generate more campus controversy than quality competition.

It is, in fact, a kind of neurotic enabling pattern, not unlike offering a drink to the guy right out of Hazelden. There’s nowhere to go but down. Yet here we are again this fall, hearing the perennial silliness about Rose Bowl prospects and the great young running backs and the improved defense and how, if things break just right, anything can happen.

You can argue, of course, that this is no different from any dreamy-eyed sporting delusion that strikes at the beginning of any season, but it’s different when you’re talking about Gopher football. Here the deck is stacked as it is nowhere else in sports. Not only do the Gophers have almost no chance to rise to the top of the Big Ten, they have almost no choice not to try.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine last year, Michael Sokolove described the trap that is major college football thus: “Football is the SUV of the college campus: aggressively big, resource-guzzling, lots and lots of fun and potentially destructive of everything around it.” To Sokolove and other critics, big-time college football is a no-win situation for all but a handful of schools whose gridiron tradition easily lures the top high school recruits, rakes in millions in endorsement and TV money, and supports a lavish athletic department. None of these apply at the University of Minnesota. The football team averages barely 40,000 fans at its home games and generates less revenue in a season than the University of Michigan rakes in during a couple of home games.

Gophers athletic director Joel Maturi understands the ultimate futility of this pursuit probably better than anyone else in town. His arrival last year coincided with the near-death experience of three Gopher teams during a massive athletic department budget deficit. The men’s and women’s golf teams and the men’s gymnastics team eventually cobbled together enough donations to survive another year, but the cup-in-hand episode (which included a uniquely humbling telethon) had to inspire some doubts about the viability of Gopher sports in general and the football program in particular.But when I ask Maturi why the university should continue to invest millions in a quest to compete against football programs that even he admits are a cut above his own, he sprints rhetorically to the very territory that seems to argue against it. “I’ve always been a believer in the idea that intercollegiate athletics should be an extension of the mission of an institution,” he says. “We are a major research institution, the flagship institution in the state of Minnesota. We certainly have a goal for our research programs to be nationally ranked. The goal of the athletic department is to be nationally ranked. We shouldn’t have intercollegiate athletics at this level without trying to be the best we can be.”

The trouble with this argument is that despite the hiring of million-dollar-a-year football coaches, the building of state-of-the-art facilities, and the spending of millions on recruiting, tutors, dormitories, and promotion—in other words, making a total commitment to a winning football program—Maturi himself acknowledges that the Gophers will never become a top-tier Big Ten football program. Like the Iowas and Purdues and Michigan States and Wisconsins, they might compete for a year or two or three or four, but they’ll never approach the sustained excellence of the Michigans and Ohio States and Penn States. The Wolverines football team, for example, will generate some $25 million this year, more than twice what the Gophers can muster.

“They’re a different breed than the rest of us,” Maturi explains. “There are more quality football players that come out of Ohio high schools in a year than come out of Minnesota high schools in five or ten years.”

Ohio State gets the best of those players, while the Gophers can’t even recruit all the decent players in Minnesota. The same is true in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, and in every football-mad hotbed around the country. The top football players will gravitate to those programs with the best reputations, the swankest facilities, the greatest opportunities for success. In a way, it’s no different from the National Merit Scholars yearning for the chance to climb the academic ladder at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford. It’s the kind of prestige that self-generates, the kind of prestige Minnesota cannot claim.

And though Maturi admits that the industry is barely sustainable, what with academic scandals, ridiculous amounts of TV money, and generally out-of-whack priorities, he knows the university can’t afford to abandon the chase. “There’s too much money in college athletics, way too much reward in winning,” he says. “But none of us can have it any other way, because the train’s already left the station.”

And the Gophers are on board because, without even the relatively meager revenues the football program generates, twenty-two of the university’s twenty-five intercollegiate sports— from track and field to volleyball—would most likely have to fold up their tents. Only men’s basketball and hockey pay their own way.

These programs have actually competed for national championships in recent seasons—the hockey team took home NCAA titles the last two years and the basketball team rose to the Final Four in 1997 (an achievement admittedly stained by a massive academic-fraud scandal). Still, only football has the economic power to fuel an entire athletic department.

Besides, in our sports-crazed society, it turns out that there are few more effective marketing tools than an appearance by your football team on national TV. When I ask Maturi to consider the unthinkable—a University of Minnesota without a Big Ten football team—he points to Northwestern University, whose own struggles with gridiron mediocrity in the seventies and eighties had officials there contemplating an end to the program.

“You go ask Northwestern what happened to them after going to the Rose Bowl,” he says. “Their pool of applications was its greatest in history after the Rose Bowl, so there must be something to this.”

It is, I suppose, a sad commentary on the American academy that an elite university like Northwestern has to rely on the success of unpaid, shoulder-padded students to entice each new class of freshmen onto campus. And it’s ironic that college athletics’ so-called arms race seems to be escalating at a time when so many universities are reeling from cuts in state funding.

The U of M took a $185 million hit from the legislature this year and responded with layoffs, massive tuition hikes, and general belt-tightening. Meanwhile, when a grateful alumnus recently pledged $35 million toward a new Gopher football stadium, it sparked a flurry of exuberance that seemed curiously oblivious to the absurdity of it all.There is among football boosters and delusional sportswriters a sense that the Gophers can somehow build themselves into a football powerhouse, that a new stadium, or a new weight room, or a new coach will somehow erase the immense disadvantages under which this program operates. With discussion of a new stadium comes all sorts of hopeful calculations of parking revenue and concessions and signage cash. There’s talk of rebuilding student interest in the team and visions of sold-out games on crisp autumn afternoons. Championships will surely follow. Maturi can’t help encouraging this line of thinking; he’d love to see a new stadium built on campus. But he freely admits that winning is not connected to fresh brick and mortar. “Buildings aren’t going to make a difference,” he says.

The University of Michigan football team, playing in an ancient stadium that will contain 107,000 fans each of seven Saturday afternoons this fall, will generate more than $21 million in ticket sales this year; the Gophers will be overjoyed if they pull in half that. The University of Tennessee will earn something in the vicinity of $35 million. And yet Maturi remains oddly optimistic that the Gophers can rise to great heights.

“I spent a lot of years at Wisconsin,” he notes. “In my estimation, their football program in the eighties and early nineties was a lot worse than the Gophers. It was not a respectable program; it was a bad program. But somehow they went to the Rose Bowl.” He pauses for effect. “Three times.”

And despite the cost of building such a program and the skewed institutional priorities it promotes, a Rose Bowl football team will draw more attention to the university, fill its coffers with alumni donations, and attract more students. Meanwhile, it will allow the golf teams, and the gymnastics team and all the other amateurs to go on practicing and competing in their own little world of minor-league sports, a world so foreign to the high-stakes reality of college football that it can only be properly conveyed with numbers.

In 2001, the Gopher football team generated $11.8 million in revenue; men’s basketball earned about $10.3 million. The other twenty-three teams together brought in less than $6.8 million, about $300,000 each—enough to cover about a quarter of football coach Glen Mason’s annual paycheck.

Still, those teams aren’t going anywhere; Title IX laws mandate equality of opportunity for women athletes (ever wonder why the Gophers have an eighty-five-member women’s crew team?) and influential boosters keep the pressure on the university to maintain their favorite sports at a competitive level. It’s a perfectly reasonable argument, especially when you see the Gopher wrestlers or golfers win national championships and watch women’s basketball and volleyball teams vie for Big Ten titles. They certainly have as much right to the university’s support as the football team.

Football pays the bills, though, and that unites the haves and the have-nots of campus sports in an intimacy that may be a lot more dysfunctional than anyone is prepared to admit.

Mary Jo Kane, director of the university’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport and a member of the committee that recommended Maturi’s hiring last year, is a huge football fan. She also thinks Joel Maturi is the best thing that’s happened to the university’s athletic department in quite a while. But she also understands that the numbers don’t always add up, that even if the university’s investment in a winning football program eventually pays dividends, they won’t necessarily trickle down to the non-moneymakers.

“Even in those programs that do make a profit, do we have any data that that extra profit benefits the entire athletic department? Or is it reinvested into the football program?” she asks. “Profit doesn’t necessarily save everything else.”

Nor does it adequately calculate the value of college sports, which with relatively few exceptions (BCS football and Final Four basketball being the most notable) once happily resided in the bland netherworld of amateur athletics, unsullied by bottom-line economics. Here it was enough to field a team and compete for the sake of competition, far from network TV cameras and cynical sportswriters. Athletes came away from the experience not with agents, endorsements, and seven-figure pro contracts, but with fond memories, good friends, and, as they used to say, the satisfaction of a job well done.

But the star power of major college football and basketball increasingly is skewing the priorities of the amateurs. Witness the push at the U of M in recent years for new women’s basketball and hockey facilities, the baseball team’s annual plea for a new ballpark, and the recent hubbub raised by the U of M women’s crew team, which countered talk of a new football stadium with appeals for a top-of-the-line boat house. Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of the action.

The bottom-line approach has also sparked bitterness among some in the university’s athletic department over Title IX—the cause, they say, of the unsettled state of college athletics. Wrestling coach J Robinson has made a name for himself nationally among these critics with his outspoken attacks on the federal mandate, which he says threatens the existence of non-revenue sports on every major college campus.It’s easy to make that connection, I suppose, if you look only at the numbers (women’s sports at the university generated less than a half million dollars in 2001, while the men earned more than $28 million). But if Robinson were to take that argument out of the gender arena, he’d have a hard time justifying a wrestling program that doesn’t come close to paying its own way. Besides, as Kane points out, there’s nothing in the law that says athletic departments must shut down wrestling teams—or any other non-revenue sport—to comply with Title IX. “It’s not about Title IX,” she says. “It’s about how football sucks up all the oxygen.”

Maturi, for his part, is almost apologetic when he explains how much he’s spending this fall to promote the football team. And though he says he expects every Gopher team to compete “at the highest level,” he allows that “nobody’s pressuring me to spend more money on the tennis team.”

But pressure of another sort may soon be on its way. Last year, partially in response to criticism by faculty and students, who were absorbing yet another in a series of hiring freezes and tuition hikes, university regents approved a moratorium on new construction of sports facilities. The move quieted some critics, who bristled at the $17 million the university had invested in the football program since 1997, but last month’s flurry of excitement over the prospect of raising $100 million or more for a new football stadium and the Board of Regents’ decision to drop the moratorium is likely to raise new questions about the university’s priorities. “There’s a real tension between the academic mission and big-time football,” says university political science professor Larry Jacobs. “It is very glaring from a faculty perspective to see very significant cuts in programs, increased class sizes, and erosion of services at the same time that you’re seeing huge sums put into the football program.”

And even if Maturi and company are able to convince critics that the investment in the stadium is worth the buzz it will create around the state, Jacobs says, the economics of college football provide no guarantee that it will pay off—for Glen Mason’s football team or for the rest of campus. “It’s like the Gordian knot,” he says. “To play major college football at the university level costs a huge amount, and the potential for making back what you invest is far from certain.”

From 1900 to 1920, the University of Chicago dominated Big Ten football. In 1939, they decisively and unceremoniously dropped football forever. (And three years later, Enrico Fermi built the world’s first manmade nuclear reactor underneath the football stadium itself.) Not coincidentally, their shift in values had a dramatic effect: They became an academic institution that suddenly competed with Harvard and Yale for the best students in the world. The story back then seems eerily familiar: a big drop in student attendance, increasing difficulty in competing with the larger state universities for the best players, a steady erosion in the win-loss column. Finally, after an 85-0 loss to Michigan, the university’s trustees voted to put the program out of its misery.

Curiously, the fall of the University of Chicago Maroons coincided with the rise of the Golden Gophers, who between 1934 and 1941 fielded some of the best college football teams of all time. The Gophers under coach Bernie Bierman won three consecutive national championships from 1934 to 1936 and another two in 1940 and 1941. But it would be another twenty years before the Gophers once again sat atop the national rankings, and they haven’t been heard from since.

Still, nobody’s buying my idea of letting the air out of the ball. Nobody wants to succumb to what seems to me to be a completely logical conclusion: that enough time has passed, enough approaches have been tried, and a return to the Gophers’ former dominance (or even some semblance of sustainable competitiveness) is simply not going to happen.

Jacobs calls such a path “unthinkable.” And Kane suggests it would be downright un-American: “We are going to have a football team at the University of Minnesota, but we don’t care if we’re mediocre? That is the antithesis to everything that we’re about.”

And yet Kane is not willing to pursue football excellence at all costs, either. Indeed, she’s convinced that there can be a sustainable future for the Gophers and the rest of major college football if only the industry was willing to do a little downsizing. Drop the number of players on a team from the ludicrous 103 that currently suit up for each game to a more reasonable 75. (NFL teams, she points out, are limited to a mere fifty-three players.) That, she says, would allow the schools to drop the number of scholarships from eighty-five to maybe as few as sixty-five, saving each program a bundle of money without sacrificing any revenue.“It requires an enormous staff and infrastructure to keep that large number of personnel afloat,” she explains. “And I would argue that the saving from that and the other unnecessary expenditures from recruiting, et cetera, would move you to compliance with Title IX and you’d never have to eliminate another men’s sport.” And most programs could do all this without sacrificing revenue. “The beauty of downsizing is that you’re still going to sell out every home game if you’re a place like Notre Dame or Michigan, and you’re still going to get conference revenues, you’re still going to get TV revenues,” Kane explains. “So your input is going to be unchanged, but your output will be significantly reduced.”

If that seems like an obvious solution, it’s similarly obvious why there’s no movement toward such a reform at the NCAA level. Clearly, the status quo serves the dominant schools very well. “It’s not in their self-interest to change,” she says. But that’s not to say that the status quo will survive, says Prof. Dan Fulks of Transylvania University, who authored a recent study on the economics of college athletics for the NCAA. Fulks points to Vanderbilt’s decision last month to fold its athletic department into the university’s central administration and Tulane’s threat to drop football as signs that change is on the horizon. “Although I really do not see many Division I-A schools seriously considering eliminating football—and I’m not altogether certain the Tulane threat was sincere—I do believe changes are forthcoming,” he says. “While we will soon hit a ceiling for revenues, no such ceiling for expenses exists.”

Fulks also believes that the current Bowl Championship Series format, which exacerbates the disparity between the haves and the have-nots of college football, will be changed when the current contract expires. “Although there are no easy answers for individual schools,” he says, “I am confident that, as a group, NCAA member schools are ready for some significant changes.”

Back in the Dome’s cheap seats, I’m not devoting a lot of energy to the issue of the Gophers’ competitive disadvantage because the Maroon and Gold are stomping all over the overmatched Hurricane. Still, by the start of the fourth quarter, the crowd in the lower bowl has dwindled sufficiently for my son and me to sneak down among the season-ticket holders around the thirty-yard line, and we enjoy fifteen minutes of sloppy college football, as each team gives its scrubs a chance to bring home a rug burn or two.

“Everybody’s really old down here,” Martin points out a little too loudly, as the clock ticks down. And as I look around, I can’t help noticing that we’ve landed among what looks to be a collection of fans transported directly from the old brickyard, circa 1960. And I can’t help wondering whether this is the crux of the issue: The Gophers are still playing football because their core audience (students have long since stopped buying tickets) is old enough to remember that great 1960 team and young enough to flirt with the possibility that it could happen again.

These are the folks who donate to the scholarship funds. These are the diehards who buy the season tickets, the fans who come back year after year in search of some magic. Nobody here is losing any sleep over Title IX or athletic department budget deficits or institutional priorities. They’re here to watch football. And it doesn’t matter if it’s Tulsa or Troy State or Purdue or Michigan: The dream remains the same. The cynic in me wants to tell them that those dreams are destined to be smashed in places like Columbus and Ann Arbor, where the stadiums reek of history in ways the Dome never will. I want to tell them that none of this ultimately is sustainable, that college football is broke. But my son is standing and trying his best to mouth the words of the Minnesota Rouser, and the ancient maroon-and-gold-clad alumni in the row ahead of us are doing the same. And it gradually begins to dawn on me that maybe it’s not the Golden Gophers who are the lost cause—maybe it’s me.

Craig Cox is executive editor of
Utne magazine and editor of the Minneapolis Observer, a weekly email digest of all things Minneapolitan.