Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Benedict & Associates, LLC, and Lights Out Productions, LLC
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
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DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, LLC.
Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor
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CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA is on file with the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-385-53662-2
v3.1
To our wives, Lydia and Dede,
who endured the two-year journey with us
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PROLOGUE Game on
1 THE COACH Part I, Mike Leach after midnight
2 THE CLOSER The life of a college football hostess
3 THE BRAND Going all in at Michigan
4 BIG MAN ON CAMPUS A pretty awesome asset
5 THE VICTIM “They had suffered enough. They lost their scholarships”
6 THE COACH Part II, Terminated
7 THE SACRIFICIAL LAMB Towson University plays with the big boys
8 OHIO STATE V. MICHIGAN The return of “The Senator”
9 THE JANITOR “I fix shit”
10 REBUILDING A PROGRAM “There is no gray with Bronco”
11 THE BOOSTER What $248 million will buy you
12 THE TUTOR Friends with benefits
13 THE ATHLETIC DIRECTOR Part I, “We have no money. Nobody is giving money. We are not on TV”
14 THE INVESTIGATORS Big-game hunting
15 THE SYSTEM AT WORK Ohio State and the consequences of $3.07
16 THE ATHLETIC DIRECTOR Part II, “It’s going to be expensive”
17 THE WALK-ON “I want to play football”
18 SABAN’S WAY The New Testament of college football
19 THE WOUNDED Pain is relative
20 THE BLUE-CHIP RECRUIT The Ricky Seals-Jones sweepstakes
21 THE COACH Part III, “The starting lineup is voluntary, too”
22 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT The SEC leads the nation
23 THE GAME “I hate losing more than anything”
24 THE COACH Part IV, The letter
25 THE DRAFT PICK To go pro or not to go pro
26 GAMEDAY The genius of ESPN
27 BUILT BY BAMA In a class by itself
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
A Note About the Authors
Illustrations
Other Books by This Author
From the blimp’s-eye view high above sold-out Sun Life Stadium the helmets looked like metallic gold dots, bank after bank of thousand-watt halide lights adding an almost ethereal glow. As the view compressed, more colors came into focus—first the crimson, then the white, and finally the navy blue. It was January 7, 2013, a perfect night for football in South Florida—a balmy seventy-three degrees with winds out of the northeast at five miles per hour. A record crowd of 80,120 erupted as four Wings of Blue paratroopers stuck landings on the field. Another 26.4 million fans were tuned in at home, making it the second-largest audience of any program in cable television history.
On paper, the Discover BCS National Championship game was a match made in football heaven: No. 1 and undefeated Notre Dame (12-0) against No. 2 and defending national champion Alabama (12-1). After six weeks of analysis and hype the big boys were finally getting down to business. It had all the earmarks of a storybook ending to a wild, crazy roller coaster of a season that had driven the popularity of college football to dizzying new heights.
For fourteen consecutive Saturdays in the fall of 2012 college football owned the sporting public’s attention from noon till deep into the night. Click and there was Johnny Football, on his way to Johnny Heisman, performing magic tricks for Texas A&M; click and there was Bill O’Brien’s gritty Penn State squad rising from the ashes of the soul-crushing child abuse sex scandal to go 8-4; click and there was Ohio State bruising its way to an undefeated season while barred by NCAA penalties from competing in a bowl game; click, click, click, click, and there was Oregon, Stanford, West Virginia and K-State taking their turns on the national stage.
Off the field the news wasn’t so good. A dozen programs were on probation for major NCAA violations, including USC, Ohio State, Tennessee, Boise State, LSU and Texas Tech. Graduation rates for African-American players continued to lag behind, highlighted by 2011 national champion Auburn, where only 49 percent of black athletes graduated, compared with a majority of white players. A 2012 study found that student-athletes in top football programs are more accurately athlete-students, averaging 41.6 hours per week preparing for football, compared with 38.2 hours in the classroom.
The economics of college football were upside down, too. The latest figures showed only 22 of the 120 top-tier programs broke even or made a profit in 2010–11. “If anybody looked at the business model of big-time college athletics, they would say this is the dumbest business in the history of the world,” said Michigan’s athletic director, Dave Brandon, the former CEO of Domino’s Pizza. “You just don’t have the revenue to support the costs. And the costs continue to go up.”
Another study, released in 2012, found that Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools spent more than $91,000 per athlete compared with just over $13,000 per student. Yet students across the country faced steep tuition hikes and increased fees. As colleges and universities absorbed painful cuts in funding and went deeper into debt to stay afloat, a nationwide building boom—an arms race—was under way when it came to stadiums, premium seating, weight rooms and football facilities.
At the same time, a seismic shift in conference realignment had schools bolting conferences and abandoning long-standing rivalries in order to capture a greater share of the multibillion-dollar television contracts. “I don’t know where this all ends,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in early December 2012. “But it does make clear that those moves are, if not entirely about money, predominantly about money.”
The result, said Emmert, was the erosion of friendship and trust that existed for decades among college presidents, athletic directors and conference commissioners.
“I really don’t know what to do, but I’m really concerned about it, really, really concerned about it,” said Emmert. “It’s not healthy at all.”
As for the players, they have paid a heavy price for what has become a year-round job. A staggering 282 players from eight of the ten Bowl Championship Series (BCS) conferences and major independents suffered season-ending injuries. And those were just the officially reported ones. Plenty of other players were carted off practice fields, never to return to action.
Meanwhile, in March 2013, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic released a study showing that college football players are likely to experience significant and long-term brain damage from hits to the head even when they do not suffer concussions. The findings were based on blood samples, brain scans and cognitive tests performed on sixty-seven college football players before and after games during the 2011 season. As the debate over the long-term effects of head injuries in football continues to escalate, it is now an established fact that college football players who never make it to the NFL are at risk of being diagnosed with degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma.
Four decades later, Brian Kelly and Nick Saban had come to power. Kelly, in his third year, was a former women’s softball coach at Assumption College before making a name for himself at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. Six hugely successful seasons at Central Michigan and Cincinnati helped propel the son of a Boston politician to South Bend. Kelly had more than a bit of the Irish in him and, like his father, was wise to the media game. He offered smooth, thoughtful answers to almost every question, even ones he had heard for the third time in an hour. He also spoke of the importance of “painting a vision” of success at Notre Dame.
“Your program is defined by consistency and Alabama is that model,” he said two days before the championship game. “I concede that. It’s where we want to be.”
Saban, on the other hand, was the reigning heavyweight champ of college coaching, 60-7 since 2008, and gunning for his third national title in four years and his fourth in the last decade. His way had become the way in the game. Melding body and mind through “The Process” into a new breed of “Built by Bama” athlete, Saban had his players hardwired to perform at their best when it mattered most.
All of this had helped propel Saban to the front of the roaring, seemingly unstoppable race in coaching salaries. He had earned north of $5 million in salary, bonuses and other perks in 2012, just ahead of Mack Brown at Texas. By July 2013, at least seventy-nine head football coaches made $1 million or more annually. Fifty-two made more than $2 million, while sixteen cleared $3 million. Assistant coaching salaries had routinely reached into the high six figures or more.
“Athletics has gotten so disproportionate to the rest of the economy and to the academic community that it’s unbelievable,” said Dr. Julian Spallholz, a distinguished professor of nutrition and biochemistry at Texas Tech. “The students pay more tuition. The faculty pay for not having a pay increase. And the football coach gets a half-million raise. I think that speaks for itself, doesn’t it?”
Well, not exactly. College professors have tenure, and they are not expected to single-handedly fill stadiums in order to offset the eight-figure investments being made these days in stadium facilities. On the other hand, a college football coach may be the most insecure job in America. Between 2009 and 2012, seventy-two Division I head football coaches were fired. Auburn’s Gene Chizik was among those let go in 2012—following a winless season in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and just two seasons after leading Auburn to the national championship. The pressure to win—and win right away—had never been greater, and it was getting worse. A four-team postseason playoff was finally here, with Cowboys Stadium selected to host the first national championship game in January 2015. The conference “pool” payout for the eventual winner tripled to $75 million.
It was against this ever-changing landscape—in arguably the most tumultuous period in college football history—that the authors secured an all-access pass inside several mega-programs. We spent months behind the scenes with the coaching staffs at Alabama and Michigan and with top recruits headed to Texas A&M and Utah. We went on the road with BYU, Washington State and even up-and-coming Towson University; we traveled on a team charter, listened and observed inside locker rooms and team meetings and from the sidelines during games and practices. We traveled with the game’s most powerful booster and hung out with ESPN’s College GameDay crew. We also dug into some serious dirt at Ohio State, Tennessee and Missouri. We talked with tutors, hostesses, college presidents, agents, walk-ons, strippers, trustees, fans, directors of football operations and even a “janitor.”
In all, with the help of four additional reporters, we conducted more than five hundred interviews and logged well over two hundred hours observing programs at every facet and level of the game to gain a wider, deeper understanding of the power of The System and all its component parts.
In the end, we hope, we have produced an enlightening, unvarnished, deeply detailed look at the pageantry, pressure, pain, glory and scandal that make college football the most passionate, entertaining game in America today.
Green streamers and white hankies filled the stadium as Notre Dame lined up to kick off to Alabama.
“This crowd is ready,” said ESPN’s Brent Musburger against a deafening crescendo of “O-H-H-H-H-H-H.”
The stadium fell instantly silent the moment Notre Dame’s kicker Kyle Brindza sent the football sailing toward Alabama’s Christion Jones.
“Game on,” Musburger said.
Part I, Mike Leach after midnight
On Saturday afternoons in the fall of 1981 the roar of the crowd would echo across campus every time BYU scored a touchdown. It happened a lot that year. BYU led the nation in offense, scoring more than five hundred points, thanks to the arm of two-time all-American quarterback Jim McMahon. On his way to setting seventy NCAA passing records, McMahon had put Provo, Utah, on the college football map.
Twenty-year-old Sharon Smith hardly noticed. But one evening that fall she was outside her apartment when a rugged-looking guy with wavy, shoulder-length hair approached. He introduced himself as Mike Leach, a twenty-year-old junior from Cody, Wyoming. He lived in the apartment complex next door. They even used the same laundry room. Turned out they had been neighbors for months.
Smith was surprised they had never crossed paths. But Leach traveled a fair amount. He was a member of BYU’s rugby team.
She was intrigued. Leach didn’t look like a BYU student. For one thing, his hair was too long. It should have been above his collar, according to BYU’s honor code. But Leach ignored the rule. That got him repeatedly summoned to the dean’s office. Still, Leach didn’t cut his hair. He didn’t talk like a BYU student either. His vocabulary was a little more colorful. So was his upbringing. He grew up in Wyoming with boys who spent Friday nights popping beers and getting in fistfights. Ranchers wearing sidearms would come into town for lunch at the local diner. Gunsmoke reruns were all the rage. Marshal Dillon was Leach’s boyhood hero.
Smith had met lots of guys at BYU. None was as authentic—or as funny—as Leach. They ended up talking until after midnight, and she accepted his invitation to go out the following night.
Their first date was a meal at an A&W restaurant in Provo. That’s when college football entered the picture. Over hot dogs and a couple cold root beers, Leach started talking about coaching. His idol was BYU’s head coach, LaVell Edwards. During Leach’s freshman year he had entered his name in a drawing and won season tickets on the forty-yard line. From that perch he began studying BYU’s offensive scheme: a controlled passing game with somebody always in motion before the snap; lots of receivers running a combination of vertical routes and crossing patterns; throwing to the backs in the flat. Edwards’s innovative system was a forerunner of the West Coast Offense ultimately popularized by Bill Walsh in the NFL. But at the college level in the early 1980s, no defensive coordinator in the country had figured out how to stop it.
To the casual fan BYU’s system looked pretty complicated. And to a certain extent, it was. But Leach had figured out that the genius of Edwards was the way he packaged his plays. He used an endless number of formations to disguise about fifty basic plays. That made it easy for the offense to memorize and difficult for defenses to recognize.
Smith had no idea what Leach was talking about. But one thing was obvious to her: the guy sitting across from her sipping root beer through a straw was no casual fan of the game. He wasn’t some armchair quarterback either. In high school Leach had started a “coaching” file, filling it with newspaper clippings from the sports pages and schematic ideas he scribbled
on loose sheets of paper. By the time he got to Provo and could watch LaVell Edwards up close, he was mapping out his future. “BYU had a state-of-the-art offense,” Leach said. “The best in the country. I started studying it very closely. LaVell Edwards had a major impact on me.”
After one date with Leach, Smith never saw anyone else. “Of all the people I dated at BYU, he was the only guy who knew exactly what he wanted to do,” Smith said. “He told me right away that he knew he was going to be a lawyer or a college football coach. I found it very attractive that he had a plan and was very confident about achieving it.”
Never mind that Leach had never played college football and his only coaching experience was as a Little League baseball coach back in Wyoming. Smith wasn’t worried. “He could analyze the game and the way coaches were coaching, and he had it in his mind that he could do it better at a young age,” she said. “Confidence is a very attractive feature.”
In June 1982, Mike and Sharon were married in St. George, Utah. After BYU, they moved to Southern California, and Mike attended law school at Pepperdine. But just before he got his law degree, he posed a practical question to Sharon: “Do you want me to come home miserable and making a lot of money or come home happy and not earning as much money?”
She told him that being happy was more important than making a lot of money.
Leach didn’t bother taking the bar exam. Instead, he and Sharon headed to Alabama so Mike could attend the U.S. Sports Academy. After he obtained his master’s, they returned to California, and Mike talked his way into a part-time assistant’s position with the football team at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, then a Division II school. The fact that Leach had a law degree intrigued the head coach enough to offer him a job helping out for $3,000. Sharon figured that was a monthly salary. But it was $3,000 for the season.
With a one-year-old baby, the Leaches moved into campus housing. Their bed was a floor mattress. They didn’t own a television. Their motto was “Opportunity trumps money.”
The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football Page 1