Instead, Kopald spent the weekend hanging out at her boyfriend’s house–while a group of out-of-town fans used her home near the stadium as their base for the Wolverines’ football home opener.

Kopald is one of about fifty local home owners who have signed up with Rent Like a Champion, a self-described “vacation rental platform” that pairs renters and visitors in twenty-one towns with top-tier college programs.

Kopald says that when she attended a breakfast seminar at Zingerman’s Roadhouse to introduce the program, “I asked some hardball questions, because I’m in business, about taxation, marketing practices, what ideal renters looked like. Obviously, if I’m opening up my house to strangers, it’s important to have some sense of security that the type of individuals renting my house won’t destroy it.”

“We definitely get those kinds of questions,” says Mike Doyle, Rent Like a Champion’s twenty-something CEO. He says the company collects a $1,000 security deposit from renters and insures homes for $1 million in liability claims or property damage. But in tens of thousands of rentals, he says, “We’ve had claims against the security deposit in less than two percent of them, and the average charge is ninety-seven dollars. We’ve had home owners who said their home was in better shape when they returned than when they left it.

“Once people do their first rental and it goes smoothly, and they get their check in the mail, the fear kind of goes away at that point.”

Kopald first rented her home for last spring’s commencement. That went just fine, but would a football game attract a different breed of tenant? “Everything was perfect,” she says. “There were six or eight people, I’m not quite sure how many, and it was almost like they’d never been there.”

“We see ourselves as filling a similar role to eBay,” Doyle says. “The home owner and renter are actually transacting with each other, and we provide the infrastructure to make that as smooth as possible.”

Each owner decides how much to charge. “Some want to rent as often as they can, so they price pretty aggressively,” Doyle says. “To others, who maybe have kids, it’s more of a hassle to get out of the house for a weekend, so it’s only worth it to them if they can make a high dollar amount.” He says the range so far has been from $500 to $2,500, with the average being $1,600. The company’s cut is just under 18 percent.

“We get a lot of families and people meeting up with college classmates,” says Doyle. “We hear great stories about people going to their first game in thirty years to surprise their grandfather. The average group size is eight people, and having a house lends itself much better to having a reunion weekend; it takes away from the experience if you can’t all be together under one roof.”

The quality of the experience is what sold Adam Bzura, Michigan ’03, who now lives in New York City. He and a group of fellow alums have rented twice in Ann Arbor and once in State College, Pennsylvania, when the Wolverines played at Penn State in 2013.

“We had stayed in Ann Arbor a number of times at motels and kind of felt we were away from the action,” Bzura says. “Once you leave the hotel, you’re kind of done for the day; there’s no place to hang out. I googled ‘Michigan football rentals,’ and this site came up. I looked at the houses and thought, ‘You know what, we can get a four-bedroom house with three bathrooms that’s four blocks away from the stadium, for a somewhat reasonable price.’ The first time we did it, we were kind of hooked.”

“When we started the business, our thought was people are going to need to use this service because hotels are sold out,” Doyle says. “We found out that’s not necessarily a driving factor. A lot of times, this is just a better way to experience a football weekend.”

For Kopald, it’s so far, so good. “The caliber of the people has been what they told me it would be,” she says, “and their fee is reasonable, given the fact that I don’t have to do anything and everyone’s vetted. It’s an easy way to make a couple thousand dollars.”

The fact that strangers were in her house celebrating the Wolverines’ trouncing of her alma mater didn’t produce even slightly mixed emotions. “I’m a fan of whatever’s good for Ann Arbor,” she says, “and Harbaugh winning is good for Ann Arbor.”