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

by Jeff Benedict

  “He wouldn’t be dean anymore,” Bailey responded.

  That sealed it. They all agreed that Leach shouldn’t coach the game. As soon as the meeting broke up, Anders sent Hance an e-mail: “Kent, I agree with Jerry and you. He will not coach the Alamo Bowl while this is ongoing.”

  “Our hope,” Bailey explained, “was that the suspension would send a strong enough message that we really had to have the letter.”

  The responsibility to inform Leach fell to Myers.

  Sharon Leach had invited practically every relative on both sides of the family to the Alamo Bowl. A virtual Leach family reunion was set for San Antonio. As soon as Mike and Sharon reached the hotel room, she started calling family members to double-check arrival times. Her ten-year-old daughter, Kiersten, and thirteen-year-old son, Cody, were unpacking. Mike went off in a corner and began scribbling notes for the team meeting scheduled for later that afternoon. It was roughly 2:00 p.m. when his cell phone vibrated. It was Myers. He didn’t bother with pleasantries.

  Sharon immediately knew something was wrong. Mike was pacing with the phone to his ear.

  “Why?” he finally said, breaking the silence.

  The kids looked at Sharon.

  “None of it’s been proven,” Leach said to Myers. “And it didn’t happen.”

  Sharon put her arms around Kiersten.

  “Who is they?” Leach said.

  There was another long pause.

  “I’m not signing a letter that said I did something I didn’t do,” Leach told Myers.

  Myers was through talking. “Mike, the administration, the board, supports this. It’s a done deal. You’re suspended.”

  Leach hung up and turned to Sharon. “I’ve been suspended.”

  Sharon covered her mouth. The in-laws had just landed at the airport. They would be at the hotel soon. “What do we do now?” Sharon asked.

  “Fight.”

  Leach called his defensive coordinator, Ruffin McNeill, and told him he’d have to run the team meeting. Then he called Liggett back in Lubbock.

  “They are not gonna let me coach,” he began.

  “What?” Liggett asked.

  “They suspended me.”

  “What? Shit.”

  “What are my options?”

  “Mike, I’m going to have to hang up and think about this for a second. I have to absorb this before I counsel you.”

  Minutes after Myers had hung up with Leach, Kent Hance telephoned Craig James.

  “Craig, I want to read a statement that will be coming out from the university here in the next thirty minutes. ‘Tech University recently received a complaint from a player and his parents regarding Red Raider Head Football Coach Mike Leach’s treatment of the athlete after an injury. At Texas Tech all such complaints are considered as serious matters, and as a result, an investigation of the incident is underway. Until the investigation is complete, Texas Tech University is suspending coach Leach from all duties as Head Football Coach effective immediately. The investigation into this matter will continue in a thorough and fair manner. Coach Ruffin McNeill will assume duties as Interim Head Coach and will coach the team during the Alamo Bowl. The decision to take these actions was made in consultation with the Texas Tech University president, and the Texas Tech University System chancellor, and Board of Regents chairman and vice chairman. Because this is a personnel matter no further comment will be forthcoming.’ ”

  James thanked Hance for the heads-up.

  Meanwhile, the video that Adam James had shot on his cell phone in the electrical closet was turned over to Craig’s PR firm. After viewing Adam’s video, one Spaeth associate e-mailed another: “I think the sound adds to the drama. He’s turned on the lights but is afraid he will get caught.” The firm started making plans to release the footage to national media, as well as post it on YouTube.

  Ted Liggett never expected Tech to suspend Leach. Not after he and his family had flown to San Antonio. Not on the eve of a bowl game. Not when they had a strong ally in Guy Bailey, the university’s president. Liggett was convinced of one thing: Bailey and the athletic director weren’t calling the shots. That left Kent Hance and the board. And Liggett was convinced they were listening to Craig James. The suspension, Liggett felt, looked like a compromise move by Hance. It didn’t go as far as James wanted, but it punished—and embarrassed—Leach.

  Pissed, Liggett ran through Leach’s options. One was to simply sign some sort of apology letter. Another was to ask a judge to issue a temporary restraining order (TRO), effectively freezing the suspension until a full hearing could be held to determine whether the suspension had merits. The chances of getting a TRO, Liggett believed, seemed pretty strong. Leach’s contract gave him a ten-day cure period for any disputes pertaining to employment.

  But Liggett couldn’t help wondering how Tech officials would react if he took them to court. They might just fire Leach.

  He called Leach and gave him his options: sign the apology letter and keep his job, or go to court and risk getting fired.

  “You might want to think long and hard about doing what they want you to do,” Liggett said.

  Leach held his ground. He wasn’t signing the letter.

  “Mike, I’ll file the TRO. But it’s going to be a big fucking deal. It will force their hand.”

  “File it.”

  By the evening of the twenty-eighth, speculation was rampant among the Lubbock media about the identity of the player who had accused Leach of mistreatment. But by the following day, it was a national story. Craig James’s ESPN colleague Joe Schad named Adam James. So had the Associated Press. The ESPN story cited an unidentified source close to the family who said James had sustained a concussion and “Leach told the trainer, two days later, to ‘put [James] in the darkest, tightest spot. It was an electrical closet, again, with a guard posted outside.’ ”

  Shortly after the ESPN story broke, Kent Hance heard that Ted Liggett planned on asking a judge to block the suspension. An emergency hearing had been scheduled for the following day. It was hard to predict how a judge in Lubbock might rule. But there was no question what the court of public opinion in Lubbock thought. Fans and alumni were in an uproar. They wanted Leach back. They wanted Adam and Craig James jettisoned. And they wanted Hance and Myers fired. The comment pages on the Lubbock news Web sites were flooded:

  I literally cannot fathom how the board of regents can allow this injustice to occur. I will never attend another athletic event or donate to the Red Raider Club again if Coach Leach is fired. I encourage others to do the same.

  I am a Texas Tech alumnus. Here are my thoughts: Give Leach a bonus. Fire Kent Hance.

  Mike Leach has done wonders for this university and its football program. I would hate to see Mike Leach fired. I am sure that my loyalty to this university and its sports program would go elsewhere if that happens.

  I have been a season ticket holder for many years, but if this situation results in Coach Leach leaving, I will not renew them. Furthermore, I will not support Tech athletics in any monetary way until Gerald Myers is dismissed.

  If Tech fires Leach over this, there will be a mushroom cloud over Lubbock that will be visible for thousands of miles and a likely revolt of Tech fans, alums, and former players.

  Leach has helped fill the seats at the stadium the administrators continue to expand. I am quite sure that most of those seats will not be filled should Leach be let go. This will be a huge setback not just for the Texas Tech but also the city of Lubbock.

  The local media had clearly sided with Leach, too. Hours after the suspension was announced, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal ran an article featuring a slew of former Tech football players—including star quarterback Graham Harrell, who had played with a broken hand—who had come to Leach’s defense. “Leach doesn’t deviate from the rule book at all and wouldn’t do anything to put a player in harm,” one former player told the paper.

  But Hance wasn’t talking to alumni, fans or former T
ech players. He was talking mainly to two regents—Turner and Anders. Both were determined to keep Leach out of the game. “He’s not coaching the game,” Turner told Hance in an e-mail. “Hope we don’t have to fire him to prevent him from doing so. But he’s not coaching the game.”

  There was another thing to consider. Leach had just earned an $800,000 performance bonus, based on how well he had coached during the regular season. But regents and university lawyers were looking at a provision in his contract that said the lump payment was contingent on Leach being “the Head Football Coach at University as of December 31, 2009.” In other words, if the university fired him on December 30, Tech didn’t have to pay him the bonus.

  Not all of the regents were comfortable with the direction things were heading. “I am pleading that the course we are on wait until Monday after the game,” wrote regent Nancy Neal in an e-mail to Jerry Turner. Neal was on the audit committee and had previously overseen fund-raising for the university. “If we owe the $, let’s not be so cheap that it isn’t paid … that being said, wait until Monday to act if still necessary.”

  Bailey felt as if the situation were spiraling out of control. “The whole purpose of the suspension was to get Mike to work with us to resolve the issue,” Bailey said. “When it became clear that that wasn’t going to happen, we had two choices: either we say we really didn’t mean it, or we take the next step.”

  While Texas Tech officials figured out the next move, Craig James gave his PR firm permission to post Adam James’s cell phone video on YouTube. A Spaeth employee provided the following description: “This video was taken by Adam James, a player on the Texas Tech Red Raider football team, on Saturday, December 19th, after being confined by Coach Leach in an electrical closet off the press room at Jones AT&T Stadium.”

  Spaeth also sent out an internal e-mail to some of its employees, encouraging them to take steps to help the video go viral.

  Leach was holed up in his hotel room in San Antonio, working on an affidavit to accompany his application for a TRO. That’s when his cell phone began blowing up with phone calls and text messages about a video on the Internet that showed Adam James in a closet. It was the first Leach had heard of it. He called Liggett, and by that night Liggett was on KCBD-TV in Lubbock, giving a local television reporter a guided tour of the shed where James had been put.

  That same night, Craig James was in San Diego preparing to provide color commentary for the Holiday Bowl. Before the game he did an interview about Leach’s actions with ESPN’s Steve Levy on SportsCenter. “ESPN made me go on the air and do the Steve Levy interview,” James said. “They said, ‘We won’t let you announce the Holiday Bowl if you don’t address this. You’ve become the news. If you want to work the game, do the interview.’ [It was] the hardest interview of my life.”

  Judge William “Bill” Sowder presided over the district court in Lubbock. Mike Leach’s fate rested in his hands. A Texas A&M grad with a law degree from Baylor, Sowder fully appreciated the significance of college football in Texas. A poster of Robert Griffin III running out of the tunnel at Baylor hung on the wall in Sowder’s chambers. His son Andrew Sowder is right behind RGIII in the poster. Andrew was Griffin’s tight end. Judge Sowder was intimately familiar with just how seriously folks in Lubbock took football.

  But even he didn’t expect the scene that greeted him when he showed up at court at 5:30 in the morning on December 30. Television satellite trucks were in front of the building. Reporters were outside. He ducked in through a side door and spent his morning preparing for the hearing. By 9:00 it was standing room only in the courtroom. The gallery was packed with Red Raiders fans, none too happy.

  Tech sent a team of lawyers, led by general counsel Pat Campbell and deputy general counsel Victor Mellinger. Deputy Attorney General Dan Perkins was also on hand. They were all waiting in the judge’s chambers when Liggett drove up to the courthouse. He had not been told in advance that the hearing was going to be in open court and was surprised by the media circus outside. He telephoned Judge Sowder from his car.

  Sowder explained that the media had petitioned to have the hearing in open court and he’d granted it.

  “Shit! You’re kidding me,” Liggett said.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  Liggett was wearing jeans and a camouflage coat. “I’ve gotta go home and get a suit on,” he said.

  “Just come in,” Sowder said.

  “My ass. I’m getting dressed.”

  More than an hour later, Liggett returned. The people in the courtroom had grown impatient. So had Judge Sowder. He wanted a word with the lawyers in his chambers before starting the hearing.

  “Is there anything I need to know before we go out there?” Sowder asked. “I don’t like any surprises.”

  “Well, Judge, there is,” Campbell said. “Even if you grant the TRO, we’re not going to let him coach.”

  “So what are you saying?” Sowder asked.

  “The decision has been made to terminate Mike,” Campbell said.

  Sowder was speechless.

  Liggett was incredulous. “Win, lose or draw?” Liggett asked.

  “Win, lose or draw,” Campbell said.

  “Why have a hearing if what I do isn’t going to make a difference practically?” Sowder asked.

  “That’s why I’m telling you,” Campbell said.

  Campbell reached into his jacket pocket, removed a letter and handed it to Liggett.

  Dear Coach Leach,

  This letter shall serve as formal notice to you that, pursuant to Article V of your Employment Contract, you are terminated with cause effective immediately, for breach of the provisions of Article IV of that Contract.

  That was it. One sentence. Tech’s president, Guy Bailey, had signed it.

  Liggett handed the letter to Sowder. He read it and handed it back.

  “What do you want to do?” Sowder said.

  Liggett asked for a moment. He stepped into a private hallway and called Leach at his hotel room in San Antonio. “Mike, they fired you.”

  Leach was reserved. “Yeah, well …” His voice trailed off. Liggett couldn’t help thinking back to the final minute of Tech’s dramatic victory over Texas a year earlier. He was on the sideline that night, standing just a few feet behind Leach, when Michael Crabtree got into the end zone with one second remaining. Leach showed no emotion then. He expressed no emotion now. He just quietly hung up the phone.

  Sharon Leach didn’t need to ask what happened. She knew. And as soon as Mike and Sharon started packing their suitcases, the kids figured it out too—Dad was out of a job.

  “What does this mean?” Kiersten asked, tears running down her cheeks. “Are we still going to be living in Lubbock?”

  Sharon put her arms around her daughter. “Shhhh.”

  “We’re gonna sue those sons of bitches,” Ted Liggett muttered to himself as he trudged back to Judge Sowder’s chambers. “There is no point in having the hearing,” he told the judge.

  Sowder agreed.

  “Can I use the courtroom to speak to the media?” Liggett asked.

  “I don’t have any problem with that, Ted,” Sowder said.

  As Liggett stepped into the courtroom, Tech’s lawyers quickly filed out through a back door to avoid the public and the media. Sowder sat alone in his chambers. Moments later he heard a collective gasp from his courtroom. Liggett had just read Leach’s termination letter. “No!” someone screamed. The courtroom erupted in anger. “You can stuff my season tickets,” a man shouted. The fury quickly spilled into the hallway and out into the street. Cars circled the courthouse. Horns honked. People shouted obscenities.

  It was chaos in Lubbock, and Tech fans and alumni weren’t the only ones upset. Some regents were angry, too. The governor had appointed Windy Sitton, mayor of Lubbock, to the board of regents. Hours after Leach was fired, she e-mailed her fellow regent Jerry Turner.

  “How in the world can the Regents justify suspending, much less firing
Mike Leach, over this issue?” she said. “Mike Leach is not perfect by any means but he cares about his students, he wins games, he fills the seats … Everyone sees through this injustice to Mike Leach and Texas Tech. The Sitton family has given scholarships and has had multiple seats since 1976. We will not renew our options [on] our 12 seats or for that matter our PSLs for basketball. This whole thing smells, and we do not want to be part of this blight on Texas Tech.”

  Guy Bailey regretted the way it ended. But he wasn’t surprised. “Mike’s whole personality is to be aggressive and to take the offense, not the defense,” Bailey said. “If you watch Mike’s teams, he just scores as many points as he can. He just wants you to score one less. Part of the way this case worked out was just personality.”

  Adam James suited up for the Alamo Bowl. The following season he was booed every time he caught a pass. But he stuck with the program and became one of the team’s standout players—and a team favorite—in his senior year before graduating and taking a job in the oil and gas industry.

  “At some point I had hoped that Mike would just man up and take ownership of what he did,” said Craig James. “It was wrong.”

  Mike and Sharon Leach returned to Lubbock just long enough to pack a week’s worth of clothing. Then they took the kids and headed to the vacation home they had purchased in Key West a year earlier. By the time they arrived, Craig James had authorized his PR firm to give the video Adam James had made of himself in the closet to CNN, along with permission for CNN to broadcast it on all its networks and affiliates worldwide. “We wanted to prove, to show that our son had been confined, ordered and confined twice to be by himself,” James said.

  Meanwhile, Tech withheld Leach’s $800,000 bonus, as well as the remaining portion of his base salary that was owed for the 2009 season. Leach sued Tech for wrongful termination. And after a week in Key West, he and Sharon decided not to leave. They enrolled their kids in a school on the island, purchased four bicycles for transportation and began the process of trying to figure out what to do next with their lives.