Film producers should know not to “blow it” with college football nerds.

Reason 1: We might assume that the 1978 game was still fresh in the minds of Michigan fans for ’80 MSU game week. The 1978 was a home game for UM too, but not a particularly happy outcome for the Maize & Blue. Michigan (10-1) lost to the Spartans (8-3) 15-24. It was Michigan’s only regular season defeat. Had it not been for MSU’s continued NCAA probation that year, the Spartans would have been in Pasadena for a rematch with the Trojans, not Michigan.

Reason 2: In that in the ’80 game MSU (3-8) sort of played pretty well against Michigan (9-2), losing that game only by 4 pts 23-27.

Reason 3: In the 1980 game MSU was 1-3. Michigan was an unimpressive 2-2 (with 3 pt defeats to S. Carolina and Notre Dame) already. Goldblum’s character probably had lost a ton of dough on bets by now.

So I totally get the sour attitude from that dude.

What has people infuriated is Dave Brandon is bit by bit bringing the product’s value to the market’s value by increasing the price of everything, and reducing the cost of production. If it’s potato chips (or pizza) he was doing this with, well okay when the chips get too crappy or the bag gets too empty for the higher price, I’ll go buy different chips and then he’ll make them a little less expensive and I’ll buy them again and profit will be maximized.

The kneejerk reaction to doing this with Michigan football is that we feel like college football fandom is supposed to be exempt from the tug of war between provider and consumer. We can go back and forth on whether that argument is dead for all practical purposes, but ideologically college football is an amateur sport that’s supposed to leave a lot of money on the table. It’s meant to stay cheap and accessible, especially for students, because the hoi polloi can’t afford to spend $800 for one family afternoon sporting event, and are plum sick of advertising blaring at their faces in return for all of their entertainment. People who can afford to then provide the bulk of support by voluntarily giving huge sums in gratitude for when they too were able to enjoy this discount.

That is what we want from college football: the players play for free so you can provide a first-class sports experience without the subs standing in front of a huge ad for sub sandwiches, and you can attend a world-class game like Alabama-Michigan without having to step into the physical embodiment of Jerry Jones’s ego.

This is an ideal; we are perfectly willing to compromise. We can suffer the luxury boxes because the benefits outweigh the loss the aesthetics. We’ll pay more for Michigan State or Ohio State. And let’s be honest: we’ll all pay whatever, go wherever, and watch whatever so long as the helmets have wings. What the outrage is about is that every time we get one step further from the ideal, it’s playing that tug of war.

And the complaint now is that Dave Brandon, more than any previous AD, isn’t just stepping away from the ideal: he’s running from it. He sees that the brand has all of this value, that the fans are getting a way better deal than we would for any other sport, thus he feels like he has plenty of room to screw us while increasing the margins. In all of that the band getting hosed is just another jab, and one that in a vacuum isn’t as much of an outrage as the actual outrage. But like a union watching corporate consistently looking at labor concessions as its profitability strategy, the sum total of the dicking is reaching a point where any straw could break the camel. This time it’s the band not traveling to Jerryworld. It could easily have been ads in Michigan Stadium, or another $300 fee to reserve your points between seasons, or scheduling another game against Appalachian State when the University of Virginia was free, or whatever. Follow each decision and the fans are being asked to pay more for less. And if we’re less patient about that than we might be for Lions tickets or potato chips (or pizza), it’s because sometimes even the best capitalists need a friggin break once in awhile from everything being a market, and that one break in our society is supposed to be college football.