You would think that a program struggling to sell tickets would do whatever it could to attract new fans and maintain their current ones, but that apparently is not the case with Michigan AD Dave Brandon.
Brandon has been receiving tons of criticism over the past few weeks for two stunts. The first came last week when Michigan had a promotion where fans only needed to purchase two Cokes to get two tickets to the Wolverines’ home game against Minnesota. After the promotion received tons of attention — mostly negative — Michigan’s athletic department issued a statement saying there was a mistake and that they were pulling it.
The second issue received even more national attention, and it came as a result of Michigan playing quarterback Shane Morris despite his obvious concussion symptoms. Brandon issued a statement a few days later saying Morris had a probable mild concussion, which only outraged people even more.
[Related: Michigan students hold ‘Fire Dave Brandon’ rally on campus]
This all brings us to an email response from Brandon to a fan who comes from a family of Michigan alums.
Michigan fan blog MGoBlog.com provides some context to the email sent to Brandon.
Just some background here, my friend comes from a family of Michigan alums. Her aunt who is an alum had enough of this garbage so she decided to speak up.
She sent a very respectful email to Dave Brandon that was well-written on their families’ opinion of the job he is doing and she said that they no longer were season ticket holders.
According to MGoBlog, here is the response she received:
That response from Brandon is not exactly out of character, if another person’s tale is to be believed. Someone who left a comment on The Michigan Daily Thursday relates this anecdote:
Dave Brandon, to my face, when I asked him his thoughts on the student outrage to last year’s GA seating policy, said “F*ck em.” Yes, that’s a direct quote from a 2013 Alumni event in NYC.
Oof. Given these two alleged examples of poor fan relations, Brandon’s poor handling of the past few weeks should not be surprising.
