Those Who Stay Will Be Champions

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Persistence is a known virtue in marketing. It’s the whole premise behind publishing content and doing other forms of advertising. You need to interact with your clients and prospects again and again in a low-stakes way to earn their trust, stay on their radar and build a reputation, if you want to have any chance of winning their business. Step one is: don’t quit.

The maize and blue flag waving proudly on my stoop

If you pass by our house in DC, you’ll see our University of Michigan flag flapping in the January winds. My and my husband’s alma mater won the football national championship title this month in a feat of glory that I keep reliving daily, saying to him, “Remember when we won the national championship title?!”

Of course it wasn’t us who won it – it was the incredibly hardworking college athletes, coaching staff and all their families who put in thousands of hours of blood, sweat and tears.

But the victory feels like ours to cherish, too. People loooooove to hate Michigan fans, I know. There are too many of us, and we are too smug and impressed with ourselves. It’s too enjoyable to watch us taken down a notch, a primary theme of our fandom since the last title 26 years ago.

Showing up just in time for the decline

When I arrived in Ann Arbor as a freshman in 1998, the ink was barely dry on the last National Championship banners. The 1997 University of Michigan football team had won the Rose Bowl title, and all of us local Wolverine families were basking in the glow. I thought the reign was just beginning and that the new crop of students, myself included, would enjoy a golden age for many years to come.

It didn’t go that way. Since that 1997 title, Michigan’s record was spotty – especially against our most vengeful rivals. Most years, we would watch our rankings start high then tumble to a disappointing finish. Our competition reveled in our downfall, and it got ugly. There were some pitiful lows.

It’s just a football team, I know. But you have to be from there to get it – there was an edge of humiliation creeping in to this thing in our lives that was a source of pride. It started to seem like our old-school Midwestern-style program was a relic, something destined to rust like the empty factories dotting the state. Perhaps the program was outdated, when other schools had moved on to faster, pass-driven NFL-style games. We tried that way but it didn’t fit. Like a world shifting from manufacturing to services, from analog to digital, from humans to AI, the quaint tenets of “the Michigan way” might not ever work again, we all secretly worried.

Happily, it didn’t go that way.

What Bo, the marketer, knows

Bo Schembechler is a legendary Michigan coach from the 1970s. It doesn’t seem that there was all that much excitement for his arrival in 1969. Football was not the main event in Ann Arbor at the time; reportedly, you could just walk into the 100,000+ seat stadium ticketless at halftime and grab yourself an empty seat. The stadium was never close to full.

Apparently, when Bo showed up with a newfangled style, he ran the team ragged in training. He doubled and tripled the workload on the players, generating plenty of grumbling and bad blood. The guys began quitting the team – who wants to be crushed for a not-that-popular sport when they’re trying to enjoy their last bits of college and move on to adulthood?

That’s when Bo slapped the now-famous sign up in the locker room: Those who stay will be champions.

Indeed, they had a very decent season. Bo’s fiery persistence was catching. It culminated in a four-game rager at the season’s end, capped with an underdog win against all-time rival Ohio State in a packed stadium.

Those who stay will be champions

Schembechler turned out to be an era unto himself, and his message of persistence lives on today in the Wolverine’s locker room. Honestly, it gives me a shiver whenever I think about it. We never know what era we are in until it’s all said and done – if it’s the beginning of a reign or the beginning of a long, terrible time between victories.

But it’s clear we’re only present for the winning moments if we follow step one: don’t quit.

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