University of Minnesota Athletics Director Joel Maturi [3] is a triple-A battery of a man. Walk into his office at the Bierman Athletic Building on the East Bank and he leaps out of his chair and shakes your hand as if you’re about to parachute out of an airplane together. Trim and fit at 62, Maturi is glib and empathetic. He’ll spread his hands in a “that’s all there is,” or “what are ya gonna do” fashion, but he searches for eye contact and listens carefully. Even under the best of circumstances, he’s not the kind of guy who relaxes easily.

Personality aside, Maturi has had plenty of other reasons to be moving through life on the balls of his feet lately. The ramifications from the most turbulent thirty-five-day period in Gopher sports history are still in flux. Over the next three or four years, however, the fallout from the chain of events Maturi helped set in motion last winter will not only define his legacy as the University’s athletic director, but will have a huge bearing on the health and vitality of U of M sports for decades to come.

Of the twenty-five varsity sports programs at the U, only three–football, men’s basketball, and men’s hockey–operate at a profit. Consequently, these programs are enormously influential, helping absorb the red ink created by other sports. On the last day of November last year, Maturi pushed his men’s basketball coach to resign just seven games into the coach’s eighth season. On the final day of December, Maturi fired a football coach who had compiled the best career winning percentage at the U since 1950 and taken the team to five straight bowl games. “I am probably the only AD in the history of NCAA sports who has dismissed the men’s basketball coach and men’s football coach within thirty days,” Maturi says. “I am not proud of that.”

Three days after the football coach was canned, a special meeting of the University’s Board of Regents was convened to deal with the rising cost of a new on-campus football stadium scheduled to open in September 2009. In May 2006, the state Legislature had approved a funding package that had taxpayers forking over nearly fifty-five percent of the tab on a $248.7 million stadium. Since then, for a variety of reasons, the price tag had risen to $288.5 million. The revised budget approved by the regents precludes the U from going back to the Legislature or increasing the $25 annual fee levied on University students. Instead, the additional $40 million will have to come from an existing stadium fundraising campaign that was initially charged with soliciting $86.5 million from private donors. If local corporations and well-heeled alumni can’t hit this much more ambitious target, profits generated by the stadium will have to make up the difference. Either way, to sufficiently excite would-be donors or fill the stadium beyond the two- or three-year novelty period, the Gophers must field a quality football team.

The faith healer
Maturi is standing at the back of a small room in the bowels of the Metrodome. The Gopher football team has just been pasted, 30-7, by Ohio State, Minnesota’s fourth loss in five games thus far this season. Reporters and University personnel are filing into the room for new coach Tim Brewster’s [6] postgame press conference, and Maturi offers them a curt nod or a tight grin. He is trying to strike an impossible pose, combining the ire a competitor is supposed to feel after his squad gets whupped by more than three touchdowns, and the brazen nonchalance required to quell panic or derision over what has become a spectacularly dreadful football season.

About the only saving grace for Brewster and Maturi was that nobody seemed to be pining for the return of Glen Mason [7], an uncharismatic man who had come from the University of Kansas. Mason wielded his comparatively successful Minnesota won-loss record (64-57) like a cudgel, implying at every turn that without his extraordinary skills and savvy the football program would return to its previously dire straits.

Mason’s critics—including many members of the media and influential alumni—contended that his “success” was merely the result of a devious formula for mediocrity. They noted that Mason padded his record by front-loading the schedule with a succession of nonconference patsies. Those easy victories, combined with an undistinguished record in the rugged Big 10—where Mason’s career record was 32-48 and his teams never finished higher than a tie for fourth—would be enough to secure an invitation to one of the minor, inconsequential bowl games that glut the calendar in December. This pattern played itself out in Mason’s last five seasons, ossifying the positions of both sides. After the Gophers pulled off the largest collapse in the history of NCAA Division I-A bowl games, blowing a 31-point lead in the 2006 Insight Bowl, Maturi saw his chance to pull the plug.

Less than three weeks later, on January 17, Maturi made the stunning announcement that he was replacing Mason with Brewster, a 46-year old with no head coaching experience above the high school level. But Brewster was a successful recruiter for coach Mack Brown at both North Carolina and Texas, and rose to the rank of assistant head coach with the San Diego Chargers in the NFL. “When I started the search process, I had never heard of Tim Brewster,” Maturi admits, launching into a twenty-minute recitation of all the steps he took before settling on Brewster. What follows is the severely abridged version.

“I believe we needed someone really thirsty, really anxious to be the head coach of the University of Minnesota,” Maturi says. Translation: Someone who won’t try to jump to a bigger program if he’s successful. “We needed someone who would turn the state on again for Gopher football, rekindle the relationship with former players and alumni and with our high school football players and coaches. Someone who would be willing to go out and assist in raising money for the stadium, and who had a passion for the game and the program,” Maturi says. Translation: Someone willing and able to undo the damage and alienation wrought by Mason among influential sectors of the Gopher sports community. “Very importantly, I needed to hire someone who had a strong history as a recruiter, because the fact of the matter is we need to get better players in order for us to win,” Maturi says. Translation: No more mediocrity.

From the beginning, Brewster has been a human cannonball in the Gopher pond. Of course, that’s not difficult when you’re busy inserting both feet into your mouth. “My expectations from Day One are going to be to win the Big 10 championship,” he pledged at his first press conference. “We’re going to take the Gopher Nation to Pasadena [site of the Rose Bowl].” No matter that Minnesota’s last Big 10 crown was in 1967 and its last Rose Bowl appearance was seven years before that. “I’m ready to get on the road and recruit,” he added. “This is going to be an easy sell.”

The season then began with a trio of Mason’s patsy opponents. Brewster’s squad lost to two of them and, by the third, needed a missed field goal to win in overtime. The Big 10 part of the schedule has, predictably, been a train wreck. Still, Brewster’s spirit has remained indomitable. “I thought there was great improvement from our defense today,” he claimed after the Big 10 opener, praising a unit that yielded 504 yards of offense in a 45-31 loss to Purdue. Now here he was after the 23-point loss to Ohio State, saying, “I told our kids in the locker room I feel proud of our effort … And I told them: Stick to the plan. The plan is working.”

After two innocuous questions from the press, the suspense began to build as those present wondered whether anyone would point out that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. Finally, somebody politely asked, “Coach, when you say the plan is working, what specific areas are you talking about?” “I just feel good about the direction we are going,” Brewster replied, without missing a beat. “I feel good about the direction of our offense, I feel good about what we are doing defensively and we’ll continue to work.” Another member of the press corps noted that the following week’s game against Indiana would mark the midpoint of the season. Without specifically mentioning all that Rose Bowl and conference championship talk, he asked Brewster if he wanted to reassess, and perhaps make new goals for the second half. “No, we just want to continue to get better each and every week,” Brewster said calmly. “Stay with the plan.”

While Brewster has become the butt of jokes from columnists and the general public, his nonstop salesmanship and reputation as a top-notch recruiter have engendered loyalty from the people he needs the most. “Trust me, we are in the middle of a renaissance with Gopher football,” insists Harvey Mackay [10], the founder and chairman of the board of the MackayMitchell Envelope Company [11], and a prominent U of M booster renowned for bringing his friend Lou Holtz [12] in to coach the Gophers before Holtz went on to win a national championship at Notre Dame. “If Brewster was a publicly held stock I would hang up on you, call my broker, and get all the Brewster stock I could get my hands on. I would love to be talking to you in five years. Brewster has been extraordinarily creative about building this brand, and he knows he’s got a great product to sell. I think this year will be very rough. But with his recruiting skill, there is no question that he will be successful by year three. And if he isn’t, I bet he fires himself.”

Okay, maybe Mackay and Brewster are two excitable peas in a pod. But Ron Stolski [13] is a plainspoken guy who has spent 46 years working with high school kids and is currently executive director of the Minnesota High School Football Coaches Association. “I don’t have a wait-and-see attitude about Tim Brewster,” Stolski says. “I think he is a genuine man of passion and integrity who has reached out to coaches across the state. They got the right guy.” “When it comes to recruiting a high school kid, the head coach is the one who has to be able to close the deal,” says Mike Grant, son of former Vikings coach Bud Grant [14]; father of Ryan Grant, who has committed to playing for the Gophers next year; and, as the longtime coach of the highly successful Eden Prairie High football team, a person very familiar with the major college recruiting process. “I have talked to Brewster and I think he has that ability to close the deal. It is not a rah-rah thing at the end; it is taking the time to know who you are and looking you in the eye. That’s recruiting and that’s a big part of it. Now the other big part of it is coaching. And that’s what Brewster has to prove he can do.”

Maturi couldn’t agree more. “I have told Tim on more than one occasion, ‘If you can coach then you’re the real deal, because you’ve done everything else right.’ I’m impressed with his entire approach, frankly, even the way he has responded to the losing.” Asked if he took a deep breath on the day he hired this inexperienced faith healer, Maturi replies, “I still take a deep breath. Every day.”

Two bricks shy of a load?
Maturi is breathing deeply because he and University President Robert Bruininks have raised the stakes considerably for Gopher sports during their five years together. Before they arrived in 2002 (the hiring of Maturi began with then-President Mark Yudof and concluded with Bruininks), Gopher athletics was split between feuding men’s and women’s departments and facing a projected $31 million operating deficit over the next five years. Maturi presided over the gender consolidation into a single athletic department and hired a CFO named Elizabeth Eull who helped eliminate the debt. “We said ‘no’ a lot,” Maturi explains. “It was a lot of little things,” adds Eull. “Getting a deal on travel, better use of office equipment, that kind of thing.” Ironically, the only significant deficit occurred this fiscal year, when the University had to loan the athletic department $5.2 million to pay off the contracts of the two fired coaches and their staffs.

Meanwhile, Maturi and Bruininks were leveraging the goodwill gleaned from the successful merger and their fiscal austerity into a push for a new on-campus football stadium. After making only minimal headway at the state Capitol for a couple of years, University lobbyists were able to cobble together a bipartisan majority and push through a funding plan in the spring of 2006.

But one look at the myriad financing mechanisms required to build the new Gopher stadium makes it apparent that it is going to cost dearly in more ways than one. For the next quarter-century, more than $10 million per year will be taken out of the general fund, the same pot of money used to pay for other state obligations such as health care and, ironically, education. It’s also probable that the stadium bill, at least temporarily, derailed more urgent funding priorities for the U at the Capitol. In the same session that the stadium legislation was passed, the U was also asking for $360 million to build a complex of five biomedical research buildings. This was, and remains, the centerpiece of the University’s grand plan to become one of the country’s top three public research institutions. But lawmakers approved funding for only one of the five buildings.

Another victim of the need for stadium dollars was a plan to resurrect the name of the last on-campus football field, Veterans Memorial Stadium. That idea was jettisoned in favor of an arrangement with TCF Bank that gives the bank naming rights for twenty-five years in exchange for $35 million. Thus TCF Stadium will become only the fourth college football facility in the country named after a corporation. And even with TCF’s lucre, the U needs to raise another $26.5 million by levying a $12.50 fee each semester from every student enrolled at the school. (The fee will be phased in to exempt students scheduled to graduate before the stadium opens in the fall of 2009.) The University also sold nearly 3,000 acres of land to the state in exchange for another $10 million; and $13 million more will be garnered from parking revenues around the stadium site.

Last but literally not least is the U’s private-sector fundraising drive. When the stadium’s price tag was $248 million, $86 million in donations from corporations and alumni was required to make ends meet—$51 million if you discount TCF’s $35 million contribution for naming rights. But now that the cost has swelled to $288 million, the private sector is the donor of first resort for the additional $40 million.

That will be a daunting task. The strategy for raising private funding has always been three-phased. First was the Legends Phase, soliciting contributions of a million dollars or more. Along with TCF’s big payment, Best Buy has donated $3 million, Target $2 million, and a few others $1 million. The U is currently near the end of its Champions Phase, which asks for donations of $100,000 or more. As of October 8, the U says it has received $63 million from the first two phases, including the TCF naming rights, which would put it ahead of projections if the stadium cost were still only $248 million. But that extra $40 million is a huge hurdle, especially with only one phase to go. That phase will be initiated sometime in 2008, targeting “small” donors who will be asked to buy a brick for the stadium at a cost of $1,000. “Phase three is frankly more labor intensive,” Maturi admits in earnest understatement. “You need a lot more $,1000 gifts to match what just one person or corporation gave.”

So what happens if the U doesn’t sell the thousands of costly bricks necessary to make up the multimillion fundraising deficit? “We expect to make $5 million per year in additional profit once the stadium is open,” Maturi replies. “I’m hoping to use that money to enhance the twenty-five sports in our athletic program, but if I have to use it to pay off the additional debt service then that’s what I have to do.”

But those $5 million in additional annual profit are based on a very rosy scenario. It assumes that the U will draw capacity crowds of 50,000 people, filling its thirty-six suites, fifty-nine loge boxes, and 300 indoor club seats. That’s a realistic expectation for the first year or two, when the outdoor football experience will still be fresh. But what happens if Tim Brewster really can’t coach, or, God forbid, recruit? What if there is not enough profit being generated to satisfy the debt service? What if the brand-new stadium everyone is so excited about turns out to be a financial albatross?

Tubby Smith: Economic savior or placebo?
While plausible concerns can be raised about Tim Brewster and the funding for the TCF Stadium [17], Maturi’s hiring of Orlando “Tubby” Smith [18] to be the new Gopher men’s basketball coach is universally regarded as a masterstroke. Now 56, Smith has been the head coach of three different major college programs over the past fifteen seasons, and led his teams to at least twenty victories in all but two of those years. He won a national championship in 1998, and his career winning percentage, .733, places him in the top ten among active college basketball coaches. He came to Minnesota from the University of Kentucky, the winningest college basketball program in NCAA history. Gopher hoops fans are still pinching themselves over the notion that he will be roaming the sidelines at Williams Arena.

It was certainly no secret that after more than seven years, Dan Monson had the once-proud Gopher basketball program headed in the wrong direction. Last November 29, Clemson came into Williams and walloped Minnesota, 90-68, the Gophers’ fifth straight loss of the young season. Less than forty-eight hours later, Monson was fired. “As a big-time college athletic director I struggle between being an educator, which is my training and background, and being a businessman, which is a necessary part of this job,” Maturi says. “I kept Dan Monson on the job because I am an educator. I fired him because I am a businessman, and if I was a better businessman I would have fired him a year earlier.”

Given the more established and discerning fan base for Gopher basketball, Maturi decided he needed a “recognizable, big-name coach,” and trained his sights on former Gopher player and Timberwolves coach Flip Saunders [21], now the head coach of the NBA’s Detroit Pistons. But Saunders pulls down $5 million a year in Detroit, dwarfing Monson’s $750,000 annual salary. Maturi says he got permission from President Bruininks to offer Saunders a ten-year contract at $1.5 million a year. When Saunders eventually decided to stay put, Maturi realized he had a healthy chunk of change with which to pursue high-profile candidates. And he was hearing rumors that Smith was growing weary of constant criticism from Kentucky boosters.

At Kentucky, attaining twenty wins and an NCAA tournament appearance simply isn’t sufficient; only a serious national championship run will placate boosters. Through Smith’s agent, Maturi let it be known that if Tubby could simply keep doing in Minnesota what he has always done elsewhere, he would be hailed as a hero and fˆeted instead of flamed by the media and the alumni. The response from the agent was encouraging: Tubby was making $2.1 million in Kentucky and wasn’t going to take a $600,000 pay cut to come to Minnesota. Translation: Sweeten the pot and you just might land a whale of a basketball coach. In March, Smith signed a deal guaranteeing him $1.75 million a season for seven years; with additional incentives he can earn more than $2 million for a Big 10 championship and nearly $2.5 million if he bags a national championship.

Where Brewster glad-hands all comers and makes bold, overblown pronouncements in an effort to sell his program, Smith has maintained a decidedly low profile while preparing for his first season at the U. Reached by phone, he talks of the discipline, dedication, and sense of community that comes with being raised on a farm as one of seventeen children. “I think that discipline is the part that attracts people to want to play for me. They say, ‘Coach, how did you do it?’ And I say, ‘Son, it’s not easy, but if you are willing to pay the price and make sacrifices I can show you.’ I don’t worry about pressure from the community,” Smith snorts. “The person I have to satisfy is Tubby Smith and my expectations for myself are probably higher than anyone else’s.”

Maturi’s revamped athletic department should at the very least be dynamic enough to keep fans engaged in the short term. What Gopher fan doesn’t want to watch a confident coaching maestro like Smith ply his craft on the basketball court, or pull on a poncho and go cheer for the hometown maroon and gold in a brand-new outdoor stadium on a crisp autumn afternoon?

Yet there is a corollary that in its own way is equally beguiling: Would the University be better off, financially and perhaps even morally, if it scaled back its athletic ambitions and settled more often for the boring, the mediocre, the status quo? For example, Maturi pushed Dan Monson out the door in large part, he says, because revenues are down “a little more than a million dollars, [for Gopher basketball].” OK, but if Tubby Smith can earn nearly $2 million per season with attainable incentives and Monson was making only $750,000, doesn’t Tubby have to return the revenue streams back to the full-spigot levels they enjoyed under coach Clem Haskins [22] or Jim Dutcher [23] simply to break even with the Monson-era bottom line? Similarly, on the football front, the Metrodome is a horrible place to watch a sporting event and doesn’t provide the Gophers with any revenues from its suites, luxury boxes, parking ramps, and so forth. But it’s also rent- and debt-free. It doesn’t require students to pony up a fee every semester, or siphoning away $10 million each year from the general fund that might otherwise go toward health care or a new biomedical research complex on campus.

The profit-sharing arrangement used by the Big 10 Conference actually provides an even greater incentive for athletic departments to be conservative. Even if Brewster makes good on his vow to lead the Gophers to the Rose Bowl, Minnesota won’t receive the financial windfall you might expect. Bowl monies, like NCAA tournament monies, are pooled and divided up equally among the eleven Big 10 member schools. Thus Ohio State played for the national championship in both football and men’s basketball last season, but received the same payout as the Gophers in fiscal year 2006—$1,916,619 in pooled football bowl revenue, and $1,241,312 in men’s NCAA basketball tournament monies. (Ohio State probably realized a windfall by raising ticket prices at their facilities and selling more logo-festooned apparel, but that will be at least slightly undercut by the large raises the coaching staffs will receive.) Broadcast media revenue is also pooled. The U’s share of the Big 10 Network’s payouts this year is $7.5 million. That’s fifty percent more money than Maturi’s rosy stadium scenario—without the risks of cost overruns and empty seats.

You could probably argue that the weaker or middling teams in the conference have an obligation to maintain the strength and integrity (and thus the value) of the Big 10 brand by fielding competitive programs. But too much parity actually penalizes the conference by depriving its dominant teams of the unblemished win-loss records necessary to play in the most lucrative bowls and tournaments. “I don’t think in my tenure we will ever really compare ourselves to the big three,” Maturi says, explaining that Ohio State spends approximately $100 million a year on athletics, while Michigan and Penn State are “in the eighties.” The Gophers spent $66 million in their last fiscal year, putting them sixth or seventh in the conference.

In the end, collegiate athletics offer a great opportunity for a variety of people to get on their high horses and bemoan the corruption, commercialization, exploitation and/or coddling of student athletes. Ultimately, it is a tightrope walk between good, clean fun and cutthroat business using slave labor. By successfully lobbying for a new stadium and hiring Tim Brewster and Tubby Smith, Maturi has raised the profile, and the stakes, by which his department operates.

“I look at these every morning,” Maturi says, picking up the funeral programs of three of his former associates from beside his computer. “It helps to remind me that what I’m doing is not life or death. That’s the educator in me, saying that if I’m right, we’ll all have a lot more fun. But we need to keep finding new ways of generating revenue, because expenses aren’t going down. The businessman in me knows the stakes, and the stakes are huge.”

AUTHOR'S NOTE (added on October 19th, 2007):

An October 19th front-page story in the Strib -- U of M gets $10 million tribal gift for stadium [26] -- seems to factually contradict our story, but we're sticking to our guns on this one.

Specifically, in referring to the $10 million gift for the new TCF Bank Stadium recently given the U by the Mdewakanton tribe, the Strib wrote, "Still, the gift is significant for several reasons. As of Thursday, the university had raised $63 million of the $86 million it needs in private gifts and sponsorships to help pay for the $288.5 million stadium. "The remainder of the money is coming from the state and through student service fees."

Documents provided to state legislators voting on what was then a $248 million stadium stipulated that private contributors had to come up with $86 million. I have a copy of such a document. As my story reported, on January 3 of 2007, the regents voted to rebudget the stadium for an additional $40 million in cost--up to $288 million--due to a variety of factors (inflation, environmental and sustainability factors plus wider, more comfortable seats for patrons). U of M Athletic Director Joel Maturi specifically told me that the decision was made to bear that extra $40 million cost without going back to the Legislature and without raising the $12.50 per semester fee on students.

In essence, then, the private contributor stake was boosted from $86 million to $126 million. This was confirmed when Maturi told me that the private fundraising was running ahead of projections. When I asked him if it was still running ahead of projections if the additional $40 million from the rebudgeting was factored in, he said, no, so we still have a lot of work ahead of us. When I asked him what would happen if the private fundraising didn't cover that entire $126 million, he mentioned that the anticipated $5 million per year in profit now estimated for a fully functioning stadium (meaning all the boxes, suites and club seats sold out) would have to go into the debt service rather than be plowed back into the 25 sports programs the U of M athletic department operates.

Put simply, the Strib story leaves the clear impression that approximately $202 million--the $288 million cost of the stadium minus $86 million in private contributions--would be paid for by the state (money appropriated by the legislature) and student fees. This is not accurate.