Decadence
By 
The number of rationalizations for this kind of thing are nearly endless, and I’ve probably heard almost all of them at one time or another:
– The University of Michigan Football program is engaged in ongoing discussions to kick off the 2026 season on foreign soil, playing host to Western Michigan at Deutsche Bank Park in Frankfurt, Hesse, Germany, on Saturday, Aug. 29. This non-conference matchup would become the first game played by the Wolverines outside of North America.
Also known as Waldstadion, Deutsche Bank Park is the home field for Eintracht Frankfurt of the Bundesliga, which is the top tier of the German football (soccer) league. The retractable roof stadium has a capacity of 55,000 seats and was opened in 1925. Germany has hosted five previous NFL games in the country, with Deutsche Bank Park hosting two regular-season games during the 2023 season: Kansas City Chiefs 21, Miami Dolphins 14 (Nov. 5) and Indianapolis Colts 10, New England Patriots 6 (Nov. 12).
“We are in advanced discussions to create this first-of-its-kind opportunity for our student-athletes and fans,” said Warde Manuel, the Donald R. Shepherd Director of Athletics. “The University of Michigan is one of the few worldwide brands in college athletics and the interest in playing an international game would be unique. This would be a great opportunity to teach ‘Go Blue’ to a new group of fans in Germany.”
“I am excited about the football and educational experience this game could provide for our players,” said Sherrone Moore, U-M’s J. Ira and Nicki Harris Family Head Football Coach. “We are always looking for unique opportunities to expose our student-athletes to other cultures. In the last 10 years, our program has been to Italy, France and South Africa, and this game would provide another chance to grow our international fanbase.”
The matchup with the Broncos was originally scheduled to be played at Michigan Stadium on Sept. 5. This would become the first time that Michigan has played a Mid-American Conference school at a location other than Michigan Stadium.
Western Michigan University is in Kalamazoo, which is a 90-minute bus ride down I-94 from Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. Detroit to Frankfurt is an 8,300-mile roundtrip via air, and probably a lot more by bus.
Leaving aside the whole “moral atrocity” frame of analysis — I suggested on the Michigan football message board that I frequent that this will probably end up being branded The Climate Change Awareness Classic, Sponsored by Exxon and Lufthansa — I don’t understand how this is even supposed to make sense in terms of simple filthy lucre, as each Michigan home game generates around $5 million in direct revenue and related local economic activity, without even counting the pro rata share of the media rights the games account for.
Typically Michigan pays teams like WMU — that is, smaller conference teams that aren’t realistically competitive with Michigan under normal circumstances — several hundred thousand dollars, to help them pay their bills, plus now you’ve got several hundred thousand dollars in extra travel costs for each team (A part of these griftathons is that the team has to bring a whole retinue of administrators and their families along, for reasons that hardly need explanation.)
Now I of course realize that a game like this is just a drop in the bucket in terms of climate change, and that from a practical perspective expanding the Big 10 conference so that Michigan and USC and UCLA and Washington and Oregon and Rutgers and Maryland fly back and forth to play each other in 30 different sports is a much bigger problem than this one particular bit of moral absurdity.
But that’s always the possible response to any particular bit of moral absurdity isn’t it?
The message this sends to the hundreds of thousands of students being educated at Big 10 schools is that the posturing all these institutions do every single day about climate change is just that and nothing more.
It’s the dismal tide.