Game Savers (post of my new article on espn.com)
In the world of college football, there are games … and then there are Big Games.
Year in and year out, annual contests between certain pairs of gridiron rivals produce a special aura of divine madness. You know the games I mean. When a contest against a particular, historically inevitable rival school rolls around, students, alumni, the media and, of course, the members of the team all start to get a strange look in their eyes. It’s a look that says, “Get out of my way. This is serious.”
Take that intense look and multiply it by several hundred thousand people, all gathered in the same place at the same time, and you have the special combination of Mardi Gras, tribal pilgrimage and military combat that is a Big Game.
I wondered: With rival groups of partisans all converging on the same stadium, with spirits high and with media types swarming all over the place, why don’t we see more things going disastrously wrong on game day?
The answer, I found out, lies in the efforts of a special breed of people I call Game Savers. They have many different job titles, but all have one common mission: to keep the pregame, game and postgame revelry from descending into chaos.
I tracked down four people, each responsible for bringing sanity and order to a little corner of one Big Game, and asked each, “How on earth do you do it? And has anything weird happened while you were trying to do it?”
You probably have never heard of these folks before or thought about all the stuff they have to do to prepare for a Big Game. My sense from talking to them is they like it that way.
The Big Game: Ohio State vs. Michigan
The Game Saver: Larry Romanoff, director of football external relations, Ohio State
“Michigan Week is different, that’s for sure,” Romanoff said when I reached him by phone. “The week before that game, we close everything down. Normally, if there’s a former player or a major donor or an alumni from one of the military services or some other kind of special guest who wants to get in and sit in on a practice and watch the players, we can arrange that. But during Michigan Week, we always say no. That week, there are to be no distractions.”
Romanoff, who’s been with Ohio State for decades, has the presumably thankless job of handling security and other logistical issues for Michigan players.
“It’s my responsibility,” he said, “to make sure every visiting team is safe and is treated with respect and dignity, but we do take a lot more precautions with regard to the visiting team when we’re planning for Michigan Week. I have to make sure that there aren’t crazies out there yelling and screaming at them the night before the game.”
Like all of the Game Savers I spoke to for this article, Romanoff seemed wary about revealing too many details in print, which makes sense, given the maniacal lengths to which some of the off-the-field participants in the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry have gone.
Back in the mid-1970s, Romanoff watched at ground level as a Michigan fan tried to run out of the tunnel and onto the field in the stolen costume of Ohio State mascot Brutus Buckeye, which had been painted Michigan blue.
“Our security people saw him and pretty much destroyed the guy before he got on the field,” Romanoff said. “Not a pleasant experience for that young man, I’m sure. That’s the kind of thing we keep from happening.
“It’s always a bigger challenge when the game is against Michigan,” he continued, “because a lot of the fans have such very strong emotions. But those are the fans. It’s important to remember that the coaches and the players and the security people all have enormous respect for each other.”
Even on game day?
“It’s just like Woody and Bo,” he said. (They would be the legendary coaches Hayes and Schembechler, of course.) “On game day, they weren’t going to be best buddies, but as soon as the game was over, they were the best of friends.”
The Big Game: Florida vs. Georgia
The Game Saver: Greg McGarity, executive associate athletic director,
University of Florida
McGarity helps coordinate a game that is held in neutral territory — Jacksonville Municipal Stadium, home of the NFL’s Jaguars. That means he works with his Georgia counterparts and with a private contractor for each and every year’s Big Game — although much of the logistical responsibility for the Big Game falls to Florida’s people.
“The good thing about our two institutions,” McGarity said, “is that our administrative staffs have always been very close. We’ve worked well with each other, because that’s been necessary to make a neutral-site game happen each year. Both sides have always had a tremendous amount of respect for each other.”
Working at an NFL stadium to set up a major college game carries both challenges and opportunities; the organizational template is different.
“There’s much more of a tailgating environment for our game as opposed to an NFL game,” said McGarity, who worked at archrival Georgia back in the late ’70s. “So you’ve got to coordinate the parking and you’ve got to coordinate when the gates open, that kind of thing. When do the teams get to practice? When do the referees come in?”
There’s also the question of what to do about tailgate participants continuing the party once inside the stadium.
“If I could make one of my game day problems just go away,” McGarity said, “it would be the problem of underage drinking. We’ve made some progress in that area on game day, but we’ve still got a long way to go.”
Game organizers have taken a big step toward addressing the drinking problem by harnessing the texting powers of modern cell phones.
“If you experience a problem in the stands with someone who’s had too much to drink and is being abusive or bothering you, you can just send a text message to a stadium number, and then law enforcement or someone from game operations is going to respond to that,” McGarity said.
“So if someone who’s sitting behind you will not sit down and you feel threatened, or if someone is using vulgar language you don’t want your kids to hear or you don’t want to hear, you even don’t have to talk into the phone in order to get some help.”
The Big Game: Army vs. Navy
The Game Saver: Jason Boothe, associate athletic director of operations,
United States Naval Academy
“We don’t have a lot of problems like that,” Boothe said politely when I told him about the occasional challenges some schools had reported with pranks and excessive, alcohol-driven exuberance in the stands. “Our concerns are a whole lot bigger.”
For this Big Game, more than 4,000 Navy midshipmen and an equal number of Army cadets — the future military elite of the country — are bussed in the morning of the contest. The biggest logistical hurdle Boothe could recall was a big snowstorm in 2003 that briefly appeared to threaten the arrival of both student bodies to the tilt, which was held at a neutral site that year.
Those 8,000-plus students are pretty well behaved before, during and after the game, Boothe said, thanks to a disciplinary system at both academies that operates with military precision.
He was understandably reticent when it came to discussing the most interesting security problems he faces. You would be, too, if your work regularly intersected with the Department of Defense and the Secret Service. Attendees typically include 4,000 senior military officers, assorted VIPs, the secretaries of both the Army and the Navy, and, “every couple of years,” the president of the United States.
“It’s pretty obvious what the game is and who’s going to be here,” Boothe said, “so it’s fair to say that the security for Army-Navy is a step above some of the other college games.”
I asked him to think of a time when something unexpected happened at one of these contests; he had to think for a while. Eventually, he recalled an incident involving President George W. Bush at the 2004 game, which was played in Philadelphia.
“He deviated from his schedule and went onto the field pregame to mingle with the players, cheerleaders, fans and so on,” Boothe said. “It didn’t affect us so much, but the Secret Service went nuts.”
The Big Game: Harvard vs. Yale
The Game Saver: Ryan Bamford, senior associate athletic director, Yale University
The annual Harvard-Yale contest might well be the Big Game with the longest, most illustrious pedigree in American sport. Bamford estimated it drew 100,000 attendees in 2007, when both teams were in contention for the Ivy League title.
That’s a pretty impressive number, especially when you consider the Yale Bowl holds only about 60,000 people. (An estimated 40,000 people crowded the parking lot, a situation presenting significant security challenges.)
I asked Bamford about the weirdest thing that has ever happened on his watch, and he immediately started talking about student pranks. The chief instigators on his list, though, were not Harvard students or Yale students, but MIT students, who have a proud tradition of launching complex, engineering-driven stunts to disrupt the Harvard-Yale game.
“In 1982, the MIT kids somehow found a way to embed a big weather balloon at the 50-yard line,” he said. “It inflated automatically during the game. For the 2003 game, they placed a mechanism on the Yale Bowl scoreboard, but our security personnel took it down before it could be activated.”
The strange device was supposed to display a huge message on the scoreboard: “SCHOOL ON MONDAY.” This apparently was designed to taunt the Harvard and Yale students, who didn’t have the Monday after Thanksgiving off, while MIT students did.
It gets worse. In 2006, two male MIT students executed a comparatively low-tech prank: streaking across the playing field naked during the Big Game, each with “MIT” painted on his back.
Bamford, a devoted student of MIT shenanigans, was circumspect when I asked him what steps he’s taken to intercept the next wacky disruption of the Big Game.
“I wouldn’t want it to be part of the article,” he said, “but let’s just say we have safeguards in place.”
It must be noted that Bamford’s counterparts at Harvard have had to deal with pranks as well. At the 2004 game at Harvard Stadium, Yale students disguised as the non-existent Harvard Pep Squad handed out white and crimson placards to fans on the Harvard side of the stadium, which was comprised primarily of Harvard alumni.
The group told the crowd that by displaying the placards at the same time, they would spell “Go Harvard.” The placards actually were arranged to spell “We Suck.” Harvard got the last laugh, however, by beating Yale 35-3.
This article can be found on ESPN.com
