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

by Jeff Benedict

  “Mike had been in coaching forever,” Sharon said. “The hardest thing about living in Key West was not having a team. All of a sudden we were all alone.”

  Towson University plays with the big boys

  In a downstairs meeting room at the Crowne Plaza Baton Rouge hotel, Towson University quarterbacks coach Jared Ambrose had a few final words. It was Saturday afternoon, September 29, 2012. In a little less than four hours the Towson Tigers, twelfth in the NCAA’s second-tier Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) rankings, would play undefeated LSU, ranked third in the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) rankings, in Baton Rouge. To come here to “Death Valley,” the recognized funeral home for nonconference opponents—LSU had won a record forty such games in a row—Towson was being paid a school record $510,000. That amounted to a full 25 percent of its annual football budget.

  Staring back at Ambrose were twenty-five members of the Towson offense. Most had no idea of the financial stakes at play. No clue as to the physical and emotional price they were about to pay.

  “All right, listen up, I’ll be quick,” Ambrose began. “Who here’s nervous? Hands in the air.”

  Not a single hand shot upward.

  “No?” he said, his eyes scanning the room. “How long you been driving a car, Tyler?”

  “Four years.”

  “How long you been dating girls, Joe?”

  No answer.

  “The point is,” said Ambrose. “Football’s the one thing in your life you’ve been doing longer than anything else. Now, this is a big stage [but] football is the one thing you know best. Find pride in that. Not nervousness.”

  Jared Ambrose is the younger brother of Towson’s head coach, Rob Ambrose. And like his brother he could breathe his fair share of fire.

  “There are three things we’re going to do,” he said, voice rising. “Play fast and smart. Play physical. And play relentlessly.”

  Another hard look around the room. Nobody uttered a word.

  “Now, there are a couple of things we have in our favor,” said Ambrose. “Number one, they don’t fucking respect you. Number two, they’re the No. 3 team in the nation and they don’t fucking respect you. Number three, they’re Parade all-Americans, blue-chippers. These motherfuckers never have gone through during the dark hours of this program. They’ve never gone somewhere and had to build something.

  “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to punch them in the mouth. And then we’re going to do it again. And again. And again.

  “Now let’s go whip their fuckin’ ass at home. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  In the world of twenty-four-thousand-square-foot weight rooms and twenty-four-carat donors, there are few absolutes. But there is this: no mega-program can physically survive a dozen heavyweight fights a year. The players are just too young, the bodies too fragile, the depth chart too thin, to handle the load and still be fresh when it comes to crunch time late in the season. So a smart athletic director—in concert with his head coach—concocts a regular-season schedule peppered with a couple of patsies. More often than not the pain relief comes in the form of home games against lower-division opponents or “directional” schools. The various sacrificial lambs are lured to slaughter by so-called guarantees—payouts that run from a few thousand dollars to several hundred thousand or more.

  Over the years these money games had served but a single purpose: the visitors take a beating, take the check and use the funds to help balance deep athletic department deficits. So if that means the Savannah States of the world become roadkill at Oklahoma State (84–0) or Florida State (55–0)—a combined score of 139–0—as they did in 2012, so be it. Or if Idaho State gets run through a 73–7 meat grinder at Nebraska, take heart in the news that the Bengals athletic department took home $600,000 for the mugging—or about 5 percent of its entire athletic department budget.

  But more and more lately, for the designated losers these guarantee games have morphed into marketing plans, a way for college presidents and athletic directors (and even boards of trustees) to raise the promotional flag, to showcase the “brand.” And while the move can occasionally surprise—witness Central Michigan’s upset of Iowa and Northern Illinois knocking off Kansas on the same September weekend in 2012—the unwritten contract remains clear: You come into our house. We kick the shit out of you and rest our starters. You take home a nice fat check for playing the Christians to our Lions. Or Tigers.

  Or so LSU figured.

  The forecasted rain had begun in earnest by the time the Towson buses snaked their way into Tiger Stadium. A Scottish mist hung in the lights, adding to the ominous air. At LSU the road to the underground visitors’ entrance runs a gauntlet of tailgating fans and hairpin turns, allowing lubricated locals unfettered access and the chance to scream “Ti-ger BAIT! Ti-ger BAIT!” at the tops of their lungs. It also allowed—in a sight, one suspects, unique to this part of the South—a father and towheaded son to stand together on the sidewalk and flip off each and every bus as it crawled by.

  Prior to September 29, 2012, odds were that few in Baton Rouge—and across the country for that matter—could tell you where Towson was located. If they could, more than likely they pronounced it “Toe-son” or “Townsend” or called it Towson State. For the record it has been Towson University since 1997. Located about twenty minutes north of Baltimore, the leafy campus is home to some twenty thousand commuter and residential students. Its forty-four-year football history, while no Notre Dame, featured the likes of Super Bowl champions Dave Meggett and Sean Landeta of the New York Giants and former Pittsburgh Steeler standout Chad Scott. But lately its claim to athletic fame had leaned more toward lacrosse than football.

  “All right, dim the lights,” barked Coach Rob Ambrose. The clock on the locker room wall read 14:30 before kickoff. He had an energy drink in one hand, a chunk of chewing tobacco in his cheek and his starting center holding a sledgehammer down at his feet.

  The 2012 football season marked Ambrose’s fourth as the man in charge at Towson. Intense and deeply organized, he checked off all the right coaching boxes. The son of one of Maryland’s most successful high school football coaches and athletic directors, he’d been a three-sport star in high school, twice an all-county quarterback, before making his mark as a wide receiver at Towson. After a knee injury cut his senior season short, head coach Gordy Combs offered Ambrose a spot as a student assistant—beginning a career that would take him from Towson to Catholic University to the offensive coordinator job at UConn in the Randy Edsall era, where Ambrose played a pivotal role in the development of quarterback Dan Orlovsky, a fifth-round pick of the Detroit Lions.

  The best days of Towson football were fifteen years in the rearview mirror when Ambrose took over in 2008. He would become only the fourth head coach in Towson history after a call from Mama. That’s what he called it at his first press conference. A call from Mama.

  “Although I’ve never been a fan of Bear Bryant’s, I agree with him on one topic,” Ambrose said. “In 1958, Bear Bryant was asked why he left his coaching job at Texas A&M to become the coach at Alabama. He responded, ‘My school called me. Mama called. When Mama calls, then you just have to come running.’ That’s how I feel about Towson.”

  Ambrose took over a team that would have made Mama anything but proud. Its record the previous two seasons was 6-17. It had won only two of sixteen Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) contests and finished dead last in the conference both years. Ambrose’s first two years were actually worse, a combined 3-19. This dismal record belied a major rebuilding job that saw several bad actors run off and a sense of toughness and pride instilled in the program. “In our first year, there were a number of games against CAA teams that were decided long before halftime,” Ambrose once recalled. “In 2010, I think most of our games were decided in the fourth quarter. Even though we didn’t win any of them, we knew we were more competitive.”

  The ridiculous hours and relentless work ethic paid off
in 2011. The Turnaround Tigers, as they were known, turned out to be the most improved team in Division I football. From 1-10 they went 9-3 and finished as the eighth-ranked team in the FCS and won their first CAA title in school history. Despite the heartbreaking loss at home (40–38) to sixth-ranked Lehigh in the second round of the playoffs, the sellout crowd at Unitas Stadium had seen the future … and it was Ambrose, honored that year as the FCS National Coach of the Year.

  “Not only am I proud to be the coach here,” Ambrose told a sellout crowd before the Lehigh game. “I’m proud to be a part of this community.”

  Towson came into the LSU game 2-1, hot off wins over William & Mary and St. Francis University, in Pennsylvania. But after getting a good long look at what the SEC was bringing to the table, Ambrose had emerged, in the words of one observer, “ashen-faced” from the film room.

  “I’ve been watching them on offense, defense and special teams, and I’ve been looking for any holes I can find. I can’t find any,” he said. “This is the most athletically talented, technically sound football team I’ve ever seen on film.”

  LSU presented problems everywhere he looked. Its starting defensive ends were top five NFL prospects; its strong safety a predicted top twenty pick. It had speed to burn at wide receiver and a massive, mauling offensive line. (Eleven LSU underclassmen would eventually declare for the NFL draft.)

  But Ambrose knew he had some players too—eleven Division I transfers to be exact—a quarterback, running back and defensive linemen and backs good enough to be recruited by any Division I school. If his Tigers were going down, they were going to go down swinging.

  “Come on, get in here,” he told his team in the locker room before the game. Fourteen minutes and counting to kickoff.

  The lights dimmed. Up came a video. Muhammad Ali, in the ring, shouting, “I’m going to shake up the world, shake up the world,” giving way to these words from the narrator:

  Here’s the thing that makes life most interesting. The theory of evolution claims the strong shall survive. Maybe so. Maybe so. But the theory of competition says, “Just because they’re the strong doesn’t mean they can’t get their asses kicked.” That’s right. See, what every long-shot-underdog-come-from-behind will tell you is this: the other guy may, in fact, be the favorite. The odds may be stacked against you. Fair enough. But what the odds don’t know is that this isn’t a math test. This is a completely different kind of test: one where passion has a funny way of trumping logic. The results don’t always add up. No matter what the stats may say, and the experts may think, and the commentators may have predicted, when the race is on, all bets are off. And then, suddenly, as the old saying goes, we got ourselves a game.

  The driving music ended, the lights came up, and Ambrose took over. Crammed into every inch of the tiny locker room were kids with no clue as to what waited outside. But they sure as hell were feeling something inside.

  “You are the walking epitome of shitting on the impossible,” Ambrose began. “You are no good. You can’t win. Can’t win in this league. Can’t win a conference championship. No way in hell can you go to Division I playoffs.”

  He took a swig from the Monster can.

  “Fuck ’em.”

  He was in a zone now; the system running on red. You wanted to see, to feel, where this was headed.

  “A tough-ass attitude,” said Ambrose. “An extreme attention to detail. And a relentless belief in each other.” Swig. “They bench four hundred. So do we. They run 4.5. So do we. They squat five hundred. So do we. The only thing makes them different than us is them ugly-ass purple uniforms.

  “So … we don’t wait. This time we don’t wait. Ain’t nothing to be worried about. When tonight is over, you’re going to leave a lasting impression on the United States of America, and no one will ever say Towson State again. They will know exactly who and what this university is.”

  You wanted to put on a uniform.

  “HEY, WHY THE FUCK DID WE COME ALL THE WAY DOWN HERE? WHY’D WE COME DOWN HERE!”

  “TO WIN!!”

  “CAPTAINS! LET’S GET OUT …”

  Standing in the crush right by the door was star defensive end Frank Beltre, he of the multicolored Mohawk. Beltre bounced up and down on the balls of his feet. When he spoke, he seemed to be speaking to no one but himself.

  “God, I love football,” he said. “I swear to God it’s better than sex.”

  The first sign this could be Towson’s night came as the team stormed the field. A cold, persistent rain had thinned the home crowd by a third. So the infamous full-throated, beer-soaked Death Valley roar was down a decibel or two.

  But that low-key atmosphere went only so far once the game began. On LSU’s second possession wide receiver Russell Shepard exploded along the right side on his way to a seventy-eight-yard streak into the end zone. There was 10:24 remaining in the first quarter. You could almost hear the Colosseum crowd beseeching the Roman emperor to send in more Christians.

  But then a funny thing happened on the way to the slaughter. While its offense struggled for every yard, Towson’s disciplined, hard-hitting D was playing its ass off. At the end of the first quarter the score stood at 7–0.

  “That’s what the world is going to see!” screamed deputy athletic director Devin Crosby from the sidelines. “All this is working in our plan!”

  And it kept working.

  Two minutes into the second quarter—in a sight that must have shocked those watching on ESPNU—Towson kicked a short field goal to cut the lead to four: LSU 7, Towson 3.

  It got even crazier when tailback Terrance West slammed into the end zone moments after Towson’s quarterback Grant Enders had scrambled forty-three yards to the LSU one.

  Suddenly, impossibly, the nobodies from North Baltimore were leading mighty LSU 9–7 with 5:15 left in the first half. The crowd sat in silence. On the Towson sideline, athletic director Mike Waddell could barely believe his eyes. He whipped out his phone and clicked a commemorative shot.

  But there are fairy tales, and then there’s the SEC. Right before halftime LSU had used its speed and a shanked Towson punt to push ahead 17–9.

  Still, it was a jacked-up Towson locker room. “Twelve rounds, baby, that’s only six,” shouted all-conference free safety Jordan Dangerfield. “They’re going to come out and try and bully us.”

  Ambrose stuck a stake in the celebration.

  “Now, any of you sons of bitches that are smiling ’cause you think we did something, I’m gonna kill ya. It’s a fifteen-round fight, not five. You got it?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “So what the hell we waiting for? Let’s go!”

  Some on campus had openly questioned the wisdom of becoming Tiger bait for LSU. The most visible anger was evident in the Friday afternoon TU ‘PROSTITUTES THEMSELVES’ FOR LSU headline in the school newspaper. In the accompanying article, the author charged the school was “sacrificing the health of our players and reputation of our program” for a paycheck. Others, like athletic director Waddell, took a broader view. “I think what it means for the university is a branding opportunity,” he said. “It’s another national television appearance. It’s another chance for people to get to know who we are. Hopefully, within a few years of doing this kind of thing, we won’t have other schools saying, ‘Where are they? Are they in Arkansas? Nebraska? North Dakota?’ It’s branding. Everything we do has to, in some way, build to the brand.”

  Waddell’s résumé showed a broadcasting background leading to athletic administrative stints at Virginia, at Akron and, most recently, five years at Cincinnati. (In May 2013 he would accept a job as senior associate athletic director at Arkansas.) One of his first acts after taking over as AD at Towson in September 2010 was to fill the slot on LSU’s schedule that had just opened after Texas Christian University, believing it was headed to the Big East, pulled out.

  “You think Les Miles didn’t do a dance in his office that day,” Waddell said, laughing. “Go from TCU to T
owson.”

  He conceded Ambrose and his boys were essentially taking one for the team—the team, in this case, the entire university. He carried no grand illusions. This was a money play, needed and necessary, balanced by the opportunity to play before ninety thousand fans; the chance for coaches and players to learn something about themselves; to be part of something that would never be forgotten.

  “Hey, you look back on our last ten years, we’ve taken a lot of poundings and not gotten paid,” said Waddell. “So if you look at it at that level of analysis … it’s not uncommon. That’s what it is.”

  “It’s really about the marketing of the institution,” said David H. Nevins, the chairman of the school’s board of visitors, its de facto board of trustees, as well as the owner of a strategic communications company. “It’s really about being on [national TV], being in the papers on Sunday. People will read the name Towson, people who have never heard of it. Hopefully, we won’t lose by the biggest number in college football history, and hopefully we won’t lose any players. But that’s really what this is about.”

  As Nevins spoke those words, he was sitting in the middle seat of the sixth row of the Friday afternoon charter flight down to Baton Rouge. In the row behind him was a well-heeled contractor; across the aisle, the executive vice president of a large health-care concern; two rows up, the president of several eye-care companies. Even though the football team was an enormous financial drain on the university, its $2 million budget funded in large part by $800 in annual student fees, recent success in football had reenergized the alumni base.