In October, someone called “Wolverine Devotee” posted an email message on mgoblog.com. Supposedly sent by U-M athletic director Dave Brandon to a fan, it ended curtly: “I suggest you find a new team to support. We will be fine without you.”
Brian Cook, MGoBlog’s founder and owner, pays people to monitor its discussion boards. Concerned the email might be a fake, one of them removed Wolverine Devotee’s post. Would the embattled AD really blow off a fan so brusquely?
Cook put the email back online. Though he’d never published them, he’d seen other emails attributed to Brandon, and this one matched their style, punctuation, and content. Computer consultants also concluded the message was likely to be real.
For a day, Cook was nervous that maybe, just maybe, the post wasn’t legitimate. But it was. MGoBlog readers began to send in other rude messages from the athletic director. In one, Brandon told a fan to “quit drinking and go to bed.”
“Emailgate” went national. Keith Olbermann picked up the story on ESPN–and credited Cook’s site.
Brandon had problems bigger than MGoBlog (see “Football in Chaos,” Inside Ann Arbor, November 2014). But so many people visit the site – more than 300,000 a month, according to quantcast.com – that it focused fans’ anger in a way no newspaper could. Many of the concerns about Brandon were either esoteric (the every-game-a-Super Bowl hype) or more or less rumor (micromanagement or interference with coaches). The emails, however, were palpable.
Only Brandon can say for sure why he resigned at the end of October, and he’s not talking. But if Cook’s site didn’t exist, the former AD’s tenure at Michigan might have been longer–and certainly would have been easier.
On Slate.com, Ben Mathis-Lilley celebrated Brandon’s departure as a rare victory for college football fans: “[T]he fact that the community around college teams is an actual grassroots community does account for much of those teams’ appeal …,” he wrote. “Over the last few months in Ann Arbor, the fans spoke and a team listened. When’s the last time you could say that?”
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Few people are able to make a living at what they love. Fewer still can do it in an endeavor that bears little connection to their professional training.
Cook, thirty-five, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the U-M. But he soon found the corporate world stifling and work as a software engineer “less than meaningful.” So in the spring of 2006 he parted ways with his employer–a denouement he suspects was “mutually satisfactory.”
Instead, he turned to MGoBlog, which he’d started in 2004 to share his passion for U-M sports. Though then more or less a hobby, the site gave him the legitimacy to start writing for pay, at AOL’s FanHouse. By the close of 2006, he figures, he’d made as much as $12,000 online, counting a few stray bucks he made playing Internet poker. And he was happier living in a “crappy apartment” and doing what he cared about than being stuck in the nine-to-five corporate shuffle.
Though Cook’s is only one of twenty or so U-M sports blogs, its combination of geeky intensity, good writing, and impolitic bluntness stood out. Soon, readers were showing up in growing numbers.
Cook is a fine skier and played some soccer as a kid, but he wouldn’t call himself a jock. He was born in Saudi Arabia (his father is an oil engineer), not exactly the hotbed of American football. But by the time he was in high school, his family had moved to the Detroit ‘burbs. Cook’s grandfather, a U-M grad, has held season tickets to Michigan football since 1958, and the family has tailgated near the stadium for fifty years. Cook caught the Michigan sports bug.
For him, though, just watching games wasn’t enough; he wanted to understand what he was watching. And that meant work. Watching film. Reading technical analyses. Going to coaching clinics. “Football is hard,” he explained on his WTKA radio morning show “MGoBlog Roundtable” (where I’m one of his regulars). Learning to really understand football, it turns out, wasn’t too different from becoming a software engineer.
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Unlike most journalists, Cook isn’t interested in an inside view of the sports he covers. He has turned down offers to sit in the press box at football games (“That’s how they get their claws into you,” he recently told Men’s Journal). He doesn’t attend press conferences or seek interviews with players or coaches. He wants to be able to criticize or compliment without getting personal.
MGoBlog makes analysis an art. During the football season, Cook analyzes every play of the prior week’s game. Not just “what happened” but the formation, the defense, why a play worked or why it didn’t.
This can be tricky for someone who has never played or coached football. And the readers showing up en masse inevitably include some coaches and ex-players. They sometimes respond by critiquing Cook’s analysis–debating, for example, whether the middle linebacker or a defensive tackle was responsible for a particular gap on a particular play. Those arguments can get edgy, even nasty. But from them, Cook has learned–and given his readers a chance to learn as well.
Engineers aren’t known, stereotypically, as elegant wordsmiths, but Cook has a fresh and original voice–influenced, he says, by certain strains of iconoclastic science fiction. (A November post, for example, described driving at night through northern Indiana, where “the flat American expanse of a pitch-black highway makes prime brooding habitat.”) Fans often refer to his site as “the blog,” and it is a rare Michigan sports event where you won’t hear some reference to it in the stands. People ask one another “what Brian is like” or where he sits at games. Never has celebrity been so connected to a bleacher seat shared in cyberspace.
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Cook had mixed feelings about Jim Hackett as interim AD. On one hand, he wasn’t Brandon. On the other hand, Cook wrote, “The chances that the best available athletic director is a retired CEO who hasn’t worked as an AD ever are about 1%.”
But as Hackett took charge–firing Brady Hoke with as much compassion as possible and then launching a surprisingly discreet search for a new head coach–Cook began to warm to him. Cook liked that nothing was leaking into the media and that what did “leak” turned out to be fake. (When Hoke was fired, one insider called to assure me that Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops had the job. Thankfully, I kept the “scoop” to myself.) And when Michigan made a genuine offer to Jim Harbaugh, Cook gave Hackett his props: “Michigan assembled a kickass offer to come back to Ann Arbor and run the town,” he wrote. “It is now highly public. If Harbaugh doesn’t come, that’s on him … If it doesn’t work out, okay. Jim Hackett still did this as well as he could, and if Michigan does have to move on to Plan B they can at least do so as a unit, knowing that they did their level best here.”
But it did work out–and not just for Michigan football fans. When I talked to him in early December, Cook told me that MGoBlog was logging eight million page views per month. As Hoke’s Michigan career ended and the search for his successor played out, that number kept climbing–from mid-December through mid-January, Quantcast counted more than twelve million page views. Cook’s income is now comparable to what he earned as a software engineer. Most of MGoBlog’s revenue comes from Google ads and sales of MGoBlog merchandise–including a T-shirt that reads, “Stop drinking and go to bed.”
