In anticipation of the upcoming event with the Ann Arbor District Library on August 29 at 6:30pm at the Downtown Library, Booksweet chatted with Nick Baumgardner about Michigan football, his start in sports journalism, and his book, The Program: Michigan, A Curated History of the Wolverines.
Find out more about the event on our Eventbrite page or the AADL event page.
Can you give us an introduction and tell us a bit about yourself?
My name is Nick Baumgardner. I live in Ann Arbor with my wife and two children. I’ve been covering football in some form or fashion for about 17 years. I covered Michigan for about a decade at MLive and the Free Press, and then a little bit at The Athletic as well. I currently still work at The Athletic. I write about the NFL Draft and I am a senior writer focused on mainly football. Also, I co-wrote another book called Mountaintop: The Inside Story of Michigan’s 1997 National Title Climb. I wrote that with Mark Snyder, who also covered the team for a long time for the Free Press.
How did you get into sports journalism?
Growing up my mom actually worked at the Flint Journal for years. She worked in marketing and ad sales and did education with the newspaper. I was around the newspaper constantly. My brother and I went into the office with her quite a bit. We would hang out with sports people sometimes, if they were around. Sports were always kind of a passion of mine. Then somewhere along the way, I had an English teacher tell me I was pretty good at writing. So I was like, OK, I don’t really like anything else, I’ll give this a shot. And it worked. And I’m still hanging on. It’s been a heck of a ride, but a lot of fun.
What is it like writing for a book versus writing for The Athletic or doing podcasting?
The book is like a magnifying glass. My other writing and podcasting is more like a 20,000 foot view of what’s going on. The book is going back and really trying to zoom in as much as you can on people, on dates, and on context and trying to find out why certain things happened on a deeper sense, as opposed to sort of chronicling what’s going on in real time.
I like to write, so for me, the process of sitting down and actually just banging away, I don’t mind that. I enjoy that part of it, although I understand that it can be a tall order for people as well. But most of a book is in the planning and the writing itself is really just the last thing that you do. In some ways, if you do it right, it’s probably the most fun part because everything else can be pretty hectic.
What does your writing and planning process look like?
I don’t like to split tasks down the middle. I’m not going to try to get all my research done first and then write after. I’ll forget. I like to do it as I go and figure out where I’m going once I get rolling. I pick a starting point and an ending point and a basic structure of where I’m trying to go with it, and then I will sit down and just see where the thing takes me. I do a little bit of both at the same time.
When it gets to the actual writing process, when I don’t have anything else to do and I can just sit down and write the book, I found it easier to get up early in the morning, like at four in the morning sometimes, way before my kids get up, and try to write for two hours or an hour and a half a day, every day, on the book. That was a really good trick somebody shared somewhere along the way. If you’re working on a book, it becomes far less daunting if you just say, “I’m going to write for an hour a day,” and by the time you look up after a couple of weeks, you’re pretty far along there.
Who is your favorite Michigan football player of all time?
Oh, boy, that’s a tough question. The guy that I like the best is Dan Dierdorf. Dan played offensive lineback in the sixties. He was on Bo Schembechler’s first team, the famous team. He’s in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame. He did Michigan radio forever, super nice guy. But the reason I love him is that Dan Dierdorf went on to become one of the biggest television analysts in sports for the NFL. He was on Monday Night Football for years. Dan Dierdorf and John Madden were two of the people that taught me the game when I was a kid. I’ve had the opportunity to tell Dan that, and that’s been really cool. He’s always got great stories. All those guys from back then, the 60s and 70s, always have great stories, but Dan might be my favorite overall. Dan or Jamie Morris, I don’t want to pick out any other one.
As an insider, how are you feeling about this football season?
It’s really interesting. I think that everyone wants to know how the freshman quarterback will do. Michigan has been very careful over the years not to just jump off into the deep end with a true freshman. When they do it though, it has often worked more than it hasn’t. Chad Henne was a true freshman starter and he never lost the job. I write a lot in the book about Rick Leach and that was his story, too. He just was the best guy they had at the time and nobody ever beat him. So he just kept going. If this could be a situation where they enter a three-year period with the same quarterback, I think that could be really fascinating. But we’ll have to see how it goes. They’ve got a lot of talent on defense but I’m curious to see how the quarterback Bryce Underwood plays.
What do you do when you are not writing or talking about football?
I follow my kids around, basically. I have two kids, one is in first grade, one is in kindergarten. We’re here in Ann Arbor doing who knows what, pretty much every day. That’s most of my life when I’m not doing football stuff, just family stuff and hanging around with my kids and my wife.
Do your kids like football? Are they old enough to like football?
They don’t really have much of an opinion on it. Although, when they say what I do for a job to their friends or anybody else that we randomly meet, they tell them that I watch football for a living. That’s what I do. I watch football. And people look at me like, “what does that mean? Do you not have a job?” And I’m like, no, I do. But that is kind of what I do. There’s more to it. But, yeah, that’s what they like to say.
Do you have any significant memory or moment that sticks out to you related to an independent bookstore or library?
I think it’s always cool to visit old bookstores, like any old independent thrift book store where you can see old books with old cover art. I love looking at a book and understanding that it was seriously taken care of. And it might not look like that, but back in the day, it had a place in time. That’s always pretty cool to think about.
You can find more of Nick’s work at The Athletic where he writes about college football, or on his podcast, Welcome to Detroit, where he talks about the Detroit Lions with his co-host Colton Pouncy. Keep up with him on social media @nickbaumgardner.