“Chicago’s. Big. Ten. Team.”
Big Ten Network announcer Gus Johnson declared the four words emphatically as fans rushed the Welsh-Ryan Arena, 2705 Ashland Ave., court following the Northwestern men’s basketball team’s 81-74 upset of then-No. 7 Michigan State on Jan. 14.
“It definitely made a lot of us in the athletic department smile, and it made us think that it’s working, to see someone of Gus’s caliber saying that we really are Chicago’s Big Ten team and to have that go out on a regional and national level,” said Mike Polisky, NU’s senior associate athletic director for external affairs.
The slogan has been the keystone to the athletic department’s efforts in the past several years to capture a diverse market that lacks strong college sports teams. The department purchased seven billboards with the slogan in the Chicago area in the last two years, and it is emblazoned on one sideline of Welsh-Ryan’s new court design. But though NU is enjoying a period of modest athletic success, a number of challenges remain as the school aims to captivate the Windy City on and off the field.
‘This is your team, Chicago’
According to the athletic department, NU has the second-smallest number of Chicago-based alumni of any Big Ten school, ahead of only Penn State. With that in mind, the department hired Polisky in 2010 to spearhead the new campaign. Polisky said for him, the campaign was never about innovation.
“When we first began trying to create an identity outside of just ‘the prestigious Northwestern University,’ we didn’t really want to be creative,” he said. “What we simply wanted to do was raise our hand to the greater Chicagoland area and say, ‘We’re here and what we are is we’re Chicago’s Big Ten team,’ so it was really just a definition of who we are and it resonated well.”
Polisky said the small alumni base has forced the department to market outside of the NU community.
“We have such a small undergrad class and incredibly loyal alums but not a ton of them in the Chicagoland community because they really go all over the country and the world after they matriculate through here,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we were speaking to all Chicagoans: This isn’t just Northwestern’s team, this is your team, Chicago.”
One such NU fan is Western Springs, Ill., resident Tom Stack, who is not an alum but has been a football season ticket holder for 20 years.
“I enjoyed watching Big Ten football, and Northwestern was the place to go,” he said. “You could get tickets there, and it was closer, so that’s what I started doing. Over the years, I’ve become very much a Northwestern fan.”
Stack praised the NU athletic department for its willingness to extend beyond the school’s Chicago-area alumni.
“There’s people who are interested in watching big college football, and as far as Chicagoland is concerned, it’s the only game in town unless you want to get in your car and drive three hours down to Champaign or drive to West Lafayette or up to Madison,” Stack said.
Jon Davis (Weinberg ’06), a season ticket-holder for both football and men’s basketball, said he welcomed the new fans.
“The marketing has created a broader awareness in the area of Northwestern sports,” Davis said. “You don’t really see other Northwestern fans outside of campus that often, but that’s starting to change.”
Mixed results
Despite the new marketing initiatives, NU’s teams in the two marquee college sports – football and men’s basketball – are each dealing with decades-long streaks of disappointment. The football team has not won a bowl game since 1949, and the basketball team has never made the NCAA Tournament, which has existed since 1939.
Football head coach Pat Fitzgerald remains optimistic the program is headed in the right direction.
“We’re going to (be) a championship program, and if you don’t believe in that then go root for somebody else,” Fitzgerald told The Daily on Feb. 2. “You’re wasting my time, you’re wasting our players’ time and our program’s time. We’re as competitive as we’ve ever been in this program, and we’re darn close to where we want to be.”
One athletic program with a similar profile to NU is Stanford University, also a private, mid-sized institution with elite academics, which are traditionally thought of as a hindrance to recruiting high-level football talent. Though Stanford football struggled for much of the last decade, the program has experienced a resurgence, having played two straight BCS bowl games.
Jim Young, the senior assistant athletic director for communications and media relations at Stanford, credits former head coach Jim Harbaugh, now with the San Francisco 49ers, for the turnaround.
“Coach Harbaugh came in 2007 and saw many conference and national championship trophies all throughout our athletic building, and he said, ‘Well, why not football?'” Young said. “He really changed the culture and the mentality of the program from top to bottom.”
Polisky said he and the rest of the athletic department have seen a similar culture change under Fitzgerald, and they are confident that he can lead the program to the top of the Big Ten.
“I think anyone who has met Coach Fitzgerald knows what an amazing person he is and how he’s molding amazing young men,” Polisky said. “The fact that (NU Athletic Director) Jim Phillips was willing to reward him with a 10-year contract extension last year shows more than anything that he has the full confidence of the athletic department.”
There are reasons for both optimism and pessimism within the football program. On one hand, the team has made four consecutive bowl games under Fitzgerald for the first time in school history. On the other, it has lost all four, and the team’s win total has declined each year during the streak.
This year’s basketball team, meanwhile, is considered by many to be on the “bubble” of making the Tournament, and the team has seen strong attendance for the past few games. High attendance has been aided by John Shurna’s pursuit of the school scoring record, which he broke Saturday against Minnesota.
Alex Wilcox, president of the school spirit group Wildside, said having goals like making the NCAA Tournament for the first time can help to increase enthusiasm as the teams get closer.
“It creates a lot of excitement on campus and it gives us a tangible goal, which isn’t always there with sports,” the Weinberg junior said. “It makes it a lot easier to root for the teams, and it gives us something to be excited about throughout the year.”
Filling Ryan Field
In spite of the progress made on and off the field, NU still lags behind much of the conference in attendance. The school finished last in the Big Ten in average attendance as well as total attendance for the 2011 football season. While some of this can be attributed to the fact that Ryan Field’s capacity of about 47,130 pales in comparison to Michigan Stadium, Ohio Stadium and Penn State’s Beaver Stadium – all of which seat more than 100,000 – NU also finished last in the conference in attendance as a percentage of capacity.
However, there are positive signs for the department. From 2009 to 2010, average football attendance increased by more than 50 percent, rising from 24,190 to 36,449, the largest single-season increase in program history.
The attendance issue has plagued Stanford as well. In 2009, the
school ranked ninth in attendance in what was then the Pac-10, despite a bowl team that upset both then-No. 7 Oregon and then-No. 11 USC.
But this season, the team sold out all but one game, according to Young. He said Stanford has had to use similar marketing strategies in its attempts to fill Stanford Stadium.
“The challenge is that in the Bay Area there are so many different options for the entertainment dollar,” he said. “Over the years, our challenge has been attracting the fan that has no emotional ties to the university, that’s just a general sports fan.”
Young credited the team’s success and the star power of quarterback Andrew Luck as the reason for the attendance growth.
Jay Sharman (Comm ’95), who writes about NU sports for the blog Lake The Posts, has used the website as an outlet to attract NU fans to Ryan Field. He said winning must be consistent to keep attendance from dropping.
“We’ve been a top-five team in the last 20 years, and it hasn’t assured years and years of sellout crowds,” he said.
He cited his experience on campus during the 1995-96 season, when the football team went to the Rose Bowl for the first time since 1949, as his primary motivation for pushing NU fans to get to Ryan Field and Welsh-Ryan Arena.
“That’s the thing that’s so frustrating,” he said. “It’s not that it hasn’t been done before, it’s that it has been done and we’ve tasted it, and I think we as fans that were there just want that back. That packed home-field advantage that we had in 1996 was really something I thought I’d never see in my lifetime.”
Wilcox said even since he’s been on campus, he’s seen progress.
“The first football game I went to was against Minnesota two years ago, and the student section was probably half full. Northwestern lost, and it was just a really sad day,” he said. “Since then we’ve really made big strides, the Michigan football game this year was one of the best attended games at the school in a while.”
Coast to coast growth
On April 20, the school announced a four-game football series with Stanford, also set to begin in 2017, and the school announced Dec. 17 a comprehensive agreement with Under Armour to make the apparel company the school’s official athletic outfitter, the first such deal that a Big Ten school has made with the Baltimore-based sportswear company.
Young said NU and Stanford are a natural fit for an athletic rivalry.
“What we’ve tried to do historically in our non-conference scheduling has been to align ourself with sister institutions that mirror Stanford in a lot of ways,” Young said. “Northwestern falls right into that category, and it’s a series we’re very much looking forward to taking part in.”
Sharman said the Under Armour deal will be influential on the recruiting trail.
“The most direct impact will probably be on recruiting,” Sharman said. “When you’re talking about 17-year-old kids pledging their future, how can you not be persuaded by little things?”
A record class
Though the 2011 team failed to end the bowl-losing streak, falling 33-22 to Texas A&M in the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas, Fitzgerald has reason to be optimistic the streak will end soon. He recently inked the largest recruiting class in NU history, highlighted by Under Armour All-American Ifeadi Odenigbo. The school also announced the transfer of USC’s Kyle Prater, the No. 3-ranked player from the class of 2010, according to Rivals.com, a service that ranks recruits.
At a panel Wednesday on sports journalism hosted by Medill, Stewart Mandel (Medill ‘98), a college football writer for Sports Illustrated, said recruiting is a way for fans to follow the sport year-round.
“Why wouldn’t the fans be obsessed with it 365 days a year?” Mandel asked. “There’s no other way to pick up the players.”
Pete Thamel, a sports reporter for The New York Times, followed up with the point that recruiting increases the number of showdowns that occur between programs.
“It’s competition. Ohio State plays Michigan once a year, but on the recruiting trail, they go up against each other 30 or 40 times,” he said. “If you love Ohio State or you love Michigan, it’s just like another game and it’s where you channel your energy in those eight months a year where you don’t have games to follow.”
Recruiting is often perceived as more difficult for schools like NU that have more stringent admissions standards. Later in the panel, Thamel noted how few schools can claim high standards as a hindrance in recruiting.
“There’s about five out of 60 (BCS schools) that have that legitimately,” Thamel said. “It’s Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Stanford and Duke. It’s really hard to win at these schools when you’re recruiting from a much smaller pool.”
University President Morton Schapiro said he’s not willing to compromise the school’s academics for on-field success.
“The key to understanding athletics at Northwestern is that we’re not bringing in convicted felons,” he told The Daily. “We want to win with athletes who reflect the kids back in the dorms.”
Schapiro said he helps with recruiting as much as he can.
“I hear that there aren’t that many presidents who are (recruiting),” he said. “They might be for men’s basketball and football, but are they recruiting for fencing? Are they recruiting for cross country? Are they recruiting for women’s soccer? I do, and I’m proud of it.”
Sharman said Schapiro’s impact is clear when the state of the athletic department today is compared to when he was at NU.
“He has done a great job of making athletics become part of the student experience,” Sharman said. “When I was in college, there was a clear divide between athletics and academics from a student perspective. It seemed that there was not full-fledged support of athletics at that time.”
The bottom line, Sharman said, is even though the teams have not necessarily lived up to expectations, the new marketing can only mean good things to come.
“Twenty years ago, you couldn’t find Northwestern on any billboard, let alone seeing them on billboards all over the place,” he said. “It’s been an absolutely positive transformation.”
