The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football

by Jeff Benedict

  Over the next minute and twenty-one seconds, Harrell completed his first four passes—one over the middle and three toward the sidelines. He drove his team all the way to the Texas twenty-six-yard line before throwing an incomplete pass that stopped the clock with eight seconds remaining. Tech had a decision to make: attempt a long-distance field goal, or run one more play in hopes of getting closer for the kicker. But if Harrell completed a pass and the receiver didn’t get out-of-bounds before time ran out, Texas wins.

  Harrell ran toward Leach. “Wanna take a shot?” he shouted.

  Leach was calm. “Just run four vertical.”

  It was Leach’s favorite play—all four receivers running vertical routes. It gave Harrell options. If a receiver got past his man, he’d throw into the end zone. If the defense played back, he’d throw underneath, enabling the receiver to catch and quickly get out-of-bounds to set up the field goal.

  Harrell relayed the plan in the huddle.

  “Man, there ain’t no way we can let the game come down to the kicker,” Crabtree said.

  Harrell agreed.

  “Just throw me the damn ball,” Crabtree said.

  Harrell was sure Texas would double-team Crabtree, forcing him to throw to a different receiver. But when they broke the huddle, Texas was in man-to-man coverage. Harrell and Crabtree thought the same thing: If the defender overplays, throw the back-shoulder pass.

  On the snap, Crabtree ran full speed straight at the defender, who backed off to protect against a throw to the end zone. Crabtree dug his toe into the turf at the eight-yard line and cut toward the sideline. The ball had already left Harrell’s hand. Crabtree hauled it in and stopped on a dime. Two defenders ran past him, one of them trying to push Crabtree out-of-bounds. Tightroping the sideline, Crabtree kept his balance and scampered into the end zone. One second remained on the clock.

  Fans stormed the field. Crabtree and Harrell were mobbed in the end zone. The goalposts came down. Cannons blasted. The band broke into the fight song. Texas Tech had knocked off the No. 1 team in the nation.

  Amid the chaos, Mike Leach showed no emotion. He didn’t even crack a smile. “There was a lot of drama and excitement, don’t get me wrong,” Leach said. “But this was pretty routine. If Crabtree was even with his man, throw it over the top. If they overplay him, throw the ball to his ass cheek, away from coverage, and he comes back and catches it. We practiced that all year. It’s a safe play. They executed it perfectly.”

  That night, Leach stayed up until 5:00 a.m. talking with friends about the victory. By the time he woke up later Sunday afternoon, Texas Tech was ranked No. 2 in the nation. The victory transcended the sports page. Scott Pelley brought a CBS News camera crew to Lubbock and profiled Leach on 60 Minutes. Actor Matthew McConaughey, a University of Texas alumnus, started hanging out with Leach and his wife. Film director Peter Berg gave Leach a cameo role in Friday Night Lights. Mike and Sharon even accepted an invitation to take a private tour of the White House and meet with President George Bush at the end of the season. Graham Harrell went with them.

  Leach’s only regret was that his days coaching Michael Crabtree and Graham Harrell were numbered. A few weeks after knocking off Texas, his two star players started their final regular-season game as Red Raiders. It was at home against Baylor on November 29. Both got injured early. Crabtree ended up on crutches and did not return. Harrell’s injury happened on a sack in the first quarter. When he got up and dusted himself off, he knew he was in trouble. Two fingers on his left hand were dangling. He knew they were broken.

  Facing third and long, Harrell looked to the sideline. Leach called a running play, requiring Harrell to take the snap from under center.

  Harrell turned his head from side to side and crossed his hands, indicating he didn’t like the call.

  Leach signaled time-out, and Harrell jogged to the sideline.

  “What’s wrong?” Leach said.

  “My hand is messed up. I broke my fingers. I don’t think I can take a snap under center.”

  The team trainer stepped in.

  Harrell held out his hand.

  “Your fingers are dislocated,” the trainer said.

  “Bro, I’m telling you. They are broken.”

  The trainer took a closer look.

  “Don’t mess with them,” Harrell said.

  The trainer yanked on both limp fingers, trying to set them.

  “Dude!” Harrell shouted. “They’re broken.”

  After being set, both fingers promptly went limp again.

  “They’re broken,” the trainer said.

  “No shit,” Harrell said. “I just told you that.”

  Leach scowled at the trainer. “What are you doing?”

  The referee jogged to the sideline. “C’mon, guys,” he hollered. “It’s time to play.”

  Leach looked at Harrell. “What do you want to do?”

  “I’ll play. Just don’t call anything under center.”

  He trotted back on the field. A few plays later he threw a touchdown pass. For the rest of the second quarter Leach called nothing but pass plays out of the shotgun. At halftime, the medical staff took Harrell to the X-ray room. The technician, an older woman, smiled and handed him a candy. Harrell was her favorite player.

  But after X-raying his hand, she started crying.

  “Are they that bad?” Harrell said.

  “You’re not gonna like what you see.”

  “Then don’t show them to me.”

  She handed the images to the trainer. Harrell had broken his hand in nine places. His ring finger and pinkie were shattered. After consulting with the rest of the medical staff, the trainer led Harrell back to the locker room. The team was ready to head out for the second half. Harrell and the trainer huddled with Leach.

  “We looked at the X-rays,” the trainer told Leach. “He probably shouldn’t play.”

  “Well, what do you want to do, Graham?” Leach said.

  “I can play.”

  Leach looked at the trainer. “Will playing make it worse?”

  “Well, his fingers are shattered,” the trainer said. “It can’t get much worse.”

  “Tape ’em together and let him play,” Leach said.

  Harrell played the entire second half with his left hand wrapped in black tape. He completed forty-one of fifty passes, throwing for 309 yards and two touchdowns, while leading Tech to a come-from-behind victory in the final minutes.

  “It was the most courageous effort I’ve ever seen,” Leach said.

  The following day Harrell underwent four hours of surgery. Seventeen pins were permanently inserted in his fingers.

  “Leach made you tough,” Harrell said. “And he made the game fun for me. Football is a kids’ game, and he made it feel that way. I loved playing for him. All of us did.”

  The 2008 football season was the best one in the history of Texas Tech. The Red Raiders won eleven games and finished in the top ten. Harrell won a slew of awards and was runner-up for the Heisman. After just two college seasons, Crabtree led the nation in receiving and entered the NFL draft, where he was selected tenth overall by the 49ers. And the nation’s college football coaches elected Mike Leach as Coach of the Year.

  The Leaches’ financial situation had changed, too. At the end of 2008, Leach had just one year remaining on his contract at Tech. Nine coaches in the Big 12 had higher annual salaries. Leach’s agents had spent months trying to negotiate a contract extension that would have made Leach one of the highest-paid coaches in the conference. But the two sides were far apart, and the tenor of the negotiations got so ugly that Tech’s athletic director, Gerald Myers, shut down the discussions altogether. That was before Tech upset Texas. After that game, Leach’s name was floated to become the new head coach at Auburn. And Leach interviewed at the University of Washington, prompting the university’s president at the time, Mark Emmert, to say publicly that the Huskies were well on their way to finding the right coach to take over the program.r />
  The prospect of Leach leaving Lubbock for Seattle or anywhere else didn’t sit well with the fan base at Tech. But the fact that Leach had interviewed elsewhere irked Myers. Shortly after the season ended, Tech’s chancellor, Kent Hance, interceded and brokered a deal with Leach’s agents that resulted in a five-year contract extension with a base salary of $12.7 million and bonus incentives of up to $800,000 per season based on performance. Hance boasted that Leach’s new contract did not contain a buyout provision. “I know he’s not leaving,” Hance said.

  For Sharon Leach, the days of sleeping on a floor mattress and living off $3,000 a season were ancient history. The kid who told her on their first date at BYU that he wanted to be a football coach had delivered.

  The life of a college football hostess

  Dictionaries generally define “hostess” as “a woman who entertains socially.” Sounds simple enough. But the role of a hostess is a little more complicated in the college football lexicon. Officially, hostesses are university employees who typically receive minimum wage and work under the auspices of the admissions office, where they are responsible for promoting an institution’s strong academic programs and rich traditions. The job description almost always mentions one other aspect: working with the athletic department to escort potential student-athletes on campus visits.

  “Escort” is a bit of a misnomer. A hostess is the first—not to mention prettiest—face a recruit sees when making an official campus visit. Over the course of a weekend—the typical length of an official visit—a recruit spends far more time with his hostess than with anyone on the coaching staff. A recruit and his hostess go on campus tours together, take in a game, go to a movie, go out to eat and attend an official reception of some sort. A hostess may even take her recruit to an after-hours party. For a high school recruit, it is like having a weekend date with a college girl.

  The idea of using pretty girls to entice the next big man on campus is not a new concept. In the 1960s, Alabama’s legendary coach Bear Bryant had Bear’s Angels. These hostesses were later renamed Bama Belles. Plenty of other programs, particularly in the SEC, followed suit. By the 1980s, Florida’s Gator Getters, Clemson’s Bengal Babes, Auburn’s Tigerettes and Miami’s Hurricane Honeys were somewhat notorious as recruiting tools.

  But these days, hostesses are much more technologically savvy. Many of them spend countless hours communicating with recruits through text messaging, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets. This banter creates great expectations of what might be if a recruit commits to a particular school. The promise of an intimate relationship is the sort of thing that can trump sold-out stadiums, state-of-the-art facilities, Nike deals and schedules packed with nationally televised games, all of which are the norm in conferences like the SEC.

  “All things being equal, in our conference hostesses can be a real difference maker,” said one senior athletic department official in the SEC. “Let’s not forget, these are college girls dealing with high school boys.”

  Yet fans—even the most ardent ones—know very little about the significant role that hostesses play in the system. Recruiting agencies never consider them when projecting where recruits might land. Even the NCAA has very little in the way of regulations to keep hostesses in check. For instance, hostesses are not subject to the contact restrictions with recruits that are imposed on coaches. For the most part, hostesses are a part of the system that gets very little scrutiny.

  If there is such a thing as an über-hostess, Lacey Pearl Earps was it. A platinum blonde from outside Nashville, Earps had the usual prerequisites when she joined Tennessee’s Orange Pride as a sophomore prior to the start of the 2008 season—good looks, a charming personality and boundless school pride. But Earps was hardly just a pretty face. She was a business major with unusual organizational skills, an indefatigable work ethic and a goal of one day working in college athletics. She figured that by going all out as a hostess in the hypercompetitive SEC, she’d learn the ropes while playing a pivotal role in convincing blue-chip athletes to commit to Tennessee. In the end, she hoped her efforts would be noticed and she’d eventually land a full-time job with her alma mater.

  It was a good plan. And Earps couldn’t think of a better person to work under than Tennessee’s head coach, Phillip Fulmer, who had been with the school since 1992. Earps set out to be Fulmer’s top choice as an escort for prized recruits. It was an ambitious undertaking, given that she was one of sixty hostesses and the best recruits were usually assigned to juniors and seniors. But when it came to recruiting, Earps was more competitive than most of the athletes Tennessee pursued, never mind her fellow hostesses.

  “I would keep talking to a guy to get him to come,” Earps said. “If texting was all we had to do, we did it. That was my mind-set. Let them think they have a chance with you once they get to school here. But in reality they don’t.”

  Earps never had any interest in an intimate relationship with a football recruit. But she had no qualms about flirting. That was just part of the territory. “We are a few years older than these players,” Earps said. “At that age that is a pretty substantial difference. They are juniors and seniors in high school. We are juniors and seniors in college. The thought of having a relationship with an older woman is appealing. But it never happened.”

  Earps stood out in her first year working with Fulmer and his staff. Recruits enjoyed their time with her, and she said the coaching staff told her they loved her work ethic. As a result, her peers elected her captain of Orange Pride. On top of that, the athletic department offered her a job as a student assistant helping out with recruiting. She was paid $7.50 an hour and assigned to work exclusively with the football team. Her office—which she shared with another student assistant—was down the hall from the coaching staff. She spent roughly twenty hours a week in the football complex. On weekends she continued as a hostess.

  After going 5-7 in 2008, Fulmer was fired. On December 1, 2008, athletic director Mike Hamilton convened a press conference to announce the hiring of Oakland Raiders head coach Lane Kiffin.

  “When it was all said and done, we felt like Lane Kiffin was a perfect fit for Tennessee,” Hamilton told the audience. “He’s energetic, charismatic, consumed with recruiting and has had a lifelong love affair with football.”

  Hamilton wasn’t exaggerating when he said Kiffin was consumed with recruiting. Prior to joining the Raiders, Kiffin had been the offensive coordinator and recruiting coordinator on Pete Carroll’s staff at USC for three years. In all three years, USC had the No. 1–ranked recruiting class in college football.

  Hamilton introduced Kiffin to cheers. Kiffin wasted no time talking about where he planned to put his focus. “We will go everywhere to find the best players in the United States,” he said. “We’ve got to find the best players, and we’ve got to get them to come to the University of Tennessee so we can do this thing and make a run for a long, long time.”

  After the press conference, Kiffin got on a plane and flew to Memphis to meet with a top recruit.

  But it didn’t take long for Earps to meet Kiffin. Given her personality and his enthusiasm to utilize Orange Pride, they hit it off right away. Kiffin and his staff were immersed in trying to commit recruits before the fast-approaching February 4, 2009, signing day. As captain of Orange Pride, Earps ended up working overtime on a flurry of official visits that took place in January. She became the go-to hostess for the top prospects that Kiffin and his staff were pursuing.

  “Coach Kiffin was influential in the decision-making process for which woman is going to host a recruit,” Earps said. “I got more official visits. And that was my ultimate goal.”

  The effort was a big success. Most notably, Kiffin and his staff convinced one of the top high school players in the country—Nu’Keese Richardson, a receiver from Florida with 4.4 speed in the forty—to break his commitment to the reigning national champion, Florida, and sign with Tennessee. On February 5, 2009, Kiffin talked about hi
s first recruiting class with a group of nearly a thousand Tennessee boosters assembled at the Knoxville Convention Center. In his remarks he bragged about landing Richardson. In the process, he accused Florida’s Urban Meyer of high-pressure tactics that crossed the line.

  “This is a recruiting violation, and I’m gonna turn Florida in right here in front of you,” Kiffin told the audience. “But while Nu’Keese was here on campus, his phone kept ringing. So one of our coaches said, ‘Who’s that?’ And he looks at the phone and said, ‘Urban Meyer.’ Just so you know, when a recruit’s on another campus, you can’t call a recruit on another campus. But I love the fact that Urban had to cheat and still didn’t get him.”

  The Tennessee boosters roared with laughter.

  But Florida’s athletic director, Jeremy Foley, was livid and demanded an apology. The SEC’s commissioner, Mike Slive, not a man to be trifled with, didn’t appreciate Kiffin’s brash accusation either. Within hours Slive issued a public statement reprimanding Kiffin.

  “Coach Kiffin has violated the Southeastern Conference code of ethics,” Slive said. The bylaw “clearly states that coaches and administrators shall refrain from directed public criticism of other member institutions, their staffs or players … The phone call to which Coach Kiffin referred to in his public comments is not a violation of SEC or NCAA rules. We expect our coaches to have an understanding and knowledge of conference and NCAA rules.”

  Kiffin ended up apologizing less than twelve hours after accusing Meyer. But the Kiffin–Meyer flap made headlines for days, diverting attention from a much bigger recruiting battle that Kiffin was waging behind the scenes. The No. 1 recruit in the country at that time was running back Bryce Brown, a high school senior out of Wichita, Kansas. Virtually every recruiting service rated him as the best high school football player in America. As a junior, Brown had verbally committed to the University of Miami. It was believed to be a foregone conclusion that he would sign his letter of intent, officially committing to the Hurricanes, on National Signing Day. But at the last minute, Brown announced he would delay signing until March 16, 2009. He also announced five new finalists in addition to Miami: LSU, Oregon, USC, Kansas State and Tennessee.