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

by Jeff Benedict

  “Football is vital,” declared Nevins. “Not so much from an economic standpoint. Frankly, it’s a drain financially … it’s never going to be an economic driver at our level; it’s always going to be more expensive than the revenue it produces. So why do we do it? Hopefully, the answer is because football gives our campus something to rally around, to boost the spirit of our community. Football does that six or seven times a year. We believe at a school like Towson, transitioning to a big-time residential campus, football plays a critical role.

  “Look,” he continued. “We’ve been a quite extraordinarily solid institution for several decades now. We train a plurality of the state’s teachers, a majority of the state’s nurses, a plurality of the state’s technology professionals. But, you know, we’ve never had the spotlight shine on us for much of anything.

  “Winning is really important. It also matters who you win against. At Towson we are changing the way teachers are taught to teach. Hopefully, in a few years, we will invent a new way to teach. That gets us an article on page 2 of the newspaper.

  “Nothing drives attention to this university like winning the Colonial Athletic Association football championship. It was that that caused the articles about the teacher’s program to be written. It’s unbelievable. That’s the reason we put so much emphasis on football … It’s time to step it up. Athletics is the most visible way to do it. We want to get on TV, tweeted about … [But] there’s definitely risk involved. If it’s 42–14, between you and me, I’ll take that.”

  From the opening drive of the second half Towson got a full dose of a different LSU. By the end of the third quarter—after another long bomb to wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.—it was 31–9. The rout, it appeared, was on.

  But then Towson did in Death Valley what nonconference opponents rarely do. Like Ali, it got up from the canvas, squared its shoulders and punched back. As the fourth quarter began, the Towson Tigers put together their best drive of the night, a gritty, clock-grinding, in-your-face testament to toughness and will. On third and two from the LSU four-yard line quarterback Enders stuffed it right down to the one. A moment later it was 31–16 with nine minutes left. Ball game.

  Again LSU responded. Running no huddle, it pounded away on the ground and attacked through the air, scoring again: 38–16. In response, Towson’s offensive line and tailback Terrance West pounded back, producing another long, never-say-die drive that ended with a nine-yard circus catch in the end zone right in front of Waddell, who looked as if he’d just won the lottery. And maybe he had.

  The final score read 38–22. A sixteen-point loss on paper. But a win in every other way.

  “You couldn’t buy this type of advertisement nationally,” said Waddell after the game. “I could not be more proud.”

  Later, in a locker room brimming with pride, Ambrose told his team, “I’ve been doing this since I was about four years old, and I’m telling you the truth: of all my time in football I’ve never seen a team put in that kind of effort and belief. This team believed in each other and tuned out what everyone else had to say.”

  He took a breath and looked around at a roomful of sweaty, dirty, half-dressed athletes. They had escaped without serious injury. They had done their university proud.

  Within minutes, the name Towson was trending on Twitter. The game highlights were in regular rotation on ESPN, its anchors singing the school’s praises in the same breath as the eight touchdown passes by West Virginia’s quarterback Geno Smith and Texas’s last-second win at Oklahoma State. Towson University had arrived, even if the team was still trying to depart Baton Rouge …

  It turned out that the charter company, Miami Air, had two runs that day. In addition to the Towson trip, it was ferrying the Cincinnati football team back from Virginia Tech. So by the time the charter arrived in Baton Rouge, it was 1:30 in the morning. Not a word was uttered as the players piled off buses and onto the plane. Within minutes the entire travel party was sacked out save a couple of graduate assistant coaches huddled over computers finishing up scouting reports on James Madison.

  It was 5:30 in the morning when the team buses finally pulled in to a university parking lot. Some players drove away in cars. Others began a zombielike walk to their apartments or dorms. Waddell headed to Denny’s for breakfast. In six short hours, the system required quarterbacks, wide receivers and defensive backs to report for treatment. By 4:00 p.m., the team would assemble for unit meetings. The schedule listed a walk-through/practice at 6:20.

  Physically and emotionally drained from the LSU game, Towson lost 13–10 the following weekend at James Madison, a critical conference defeat, before dropping another crucial game, this time at home, to Old Dominion, 31–20, two weeks later. The team went on to win its final four games to finish 7-4, including rolling up 660 total yards in a 64–35 season-ending win at New Hampshire. Still, it wasn’t enough to make the postseason playoffs.

  But as Waddell suggested, in the long run the LSU game lived on. Few would forget the sight of that scoreboard: Towson 9, LSU 7, 5:15 to go in the first half. In the lights. On national television. Towson University.

  The return of “The Senator”

  A chilling northwest wind sliced across the campus of Ohio State University on the final Saturday in November. It was The Game day—the 108th revival of the border war between the Buckeyes and their neighbor to the north.

  By 8:45 the four cash registers at College Traditions were humming a pricey little tune. It was near freezing outside (thirty-three degrees), so the scarlet-and-gray hooded sweatshirts and fleece blankets flew off the shelves. With every purchase buyers received a commemorative BEAT MICHIGAN button. One fanatic bought fifty.

  Up in Section 39A at the south end of the Horseshoe, twenty-one-year-old Cayla Hellwarth passed a box of Donatos pizza around. She and about three hundred of her fellow students had been inside since 8:00 a.m., setting color-coded flash cards on every seat in the section. On the back of one card were directions explaining exactly how they were to be used for a series of stunts during the game. “Every week, since we’re here so early, we get free pizza for everyone that’s on setup,” Hellwarth explained. “I mean we’re here for eight hours if you include game time, so we offer some incentive to sign up and help out.”

  Hellwarth was vice president of Block O—the largest student organization on campus and one of the finest student-run sports organizations in the country. Founded in 1938 by the former head cheerleader Clancy A. Isaac Jr. in support of the team, today Block O numbers nearly twenty-six hundred students. The group is funded largely by a $20 surcharge on twenty-one hundred first-come, first-served season tickets that sell online faster than seats to a Taylor Swift concert.

  Block O was far from some “hey, dude, let’s hang out” operation. It organized viewing parties for away games and pep rallies, where head coaches spoke, bands played and actual cheers and songs were learned. There was something called Blockie points for attending games and meetings. Earn enough and you could score a seat on a special bus trip to Ann Arbor or Madison. And it wasn’t just football. Block O supported all sports, with directors of operations for volleyball, soccer, baseball and many other teams. Elections were no beauty contests; if they were, odds were that Hellwarth, a stunning senior blond marketing and international business major, would have won, as she was, well, an actual beauty queen. The reigning Miss Miami Valley 2013, she came to Ohio State as a legacy; there was no other choice.

  “I’m actually the sixth person in our family to attend Ohio State,” she said a few days before The Game. “My mom was the only one that didn’t go. She didn’t go to college either, so we kind of already included her as a Buckeye. It was a tradition to go; I didn’t even bother to visit here. I just knew it was the place for me to go.”

  Hellwarth fell in love with Block O her sophomore year after she “painted up” for the first time. “I think we won 65–0, and I think it was the best game I’ve ever been to as a home game,” she said. “The experie
nce is just so different.”

  So, it appeared, was the experience behind Section 39A. That’s where sophomore Trevor McCue and a bunch of his Block O buddies were getting their game faces on. College girls with sponges—always a good thing—were busy painting a variety of Os and Hs and Ss, in gray and scarlet, on the chests and backs of shirtless boys. Hard to believe, but McCue and his buds actually had to sign up for this kind of work. McCue has done it every home game the last two years, even on frigid days like this. Normally, McCue said, he was a U. Today he settled for an S.

  “You just have to stay active and move around,” said our boy McCue. “Plus, the adrenaline from the game helps.”

  Ah, The Game.

  The first one was played on October 17, 1897, a 34–0 Michigan victory. The Wolverines led the overall series 58-44-6 on the morning of November 24, 2012. By that night, it was 58-45-6, thanks to a gritty 26–21 comeback win by OSU that would have made Woody Hayes proud.

  But as joyous as the score was, the game would long be remembered not for the fourth-down stop by the Buckeyes or the four Michigan turnovers, but rather for the celebration of the 2002 national championship team between the first and second quarter.

  Ten years earlier in the Arizona desert, Ohio State had knocked off heavily favored Miami 31–24 in double overtime in the most memorable title game of the BCS era. And here they were again. Cheers rang out as the team was introduced. Maurice Clarett was among them.

  As a freshman, the talented but troubled running back had carried the Buckeyes to the 2002 crown. A year later he was a pariah to the program. A year after that Clarett extracted a shocking form of revenge. He buried Ohio State in a carpet-bombing story written by Tom Friend in ESPN the Magazine. In chapter and verse Clarett revealed what Friend described as a system full of “free rides, free cash [and] free grades” for the star running back. A place where eligibility problems magically disappeared, tutors wrote research papers, and Clarett lived the life of a rap star.

  “I had the money I wanted, the car I wanted. I literally, literally, had everything,” Clarett told Friend.

  And then, suddenly, it was gone.

  In the week leading up to the win over Miami, Clarett said he was led to believe he would be able to travel back to Ohio to attend the funeral of a childhood friend. But then OSU said no, citing a paperwork problem. Clarett was angry and called out school officials.

  In the ESPN article, Clarett said it was head coach Jim Tressel who set up the buffet table of mouthwatering perks—“thousands” in cash from boosters, free loaners from car dealers, phony jobs, no-show classes, whatever he needed. In the spring of 2003, the NCAA got wind of the cars and cash. Questioned that summer, Clarett kept answering, “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” or “I magically got them.” Protecting his head coach, he said. By the fall of his sophomore year, however, he was done, suspended for the season. And Tressel, he said, had stopped taking his calls.

  “I think he knows in his heart he sold me out,” Clarett told Friend. “He sold me out to keep his integrity … Coach Tressel, he made everything easy … until he wanted to make it hard.”

  Crisp in tone, polished in nature, a stickler for detail, Tressel had earned the nickname The Senator. He had guided Ohio State to three BCS title games and won 81 percent of his games in ten years. He had won or shared six straight Big Ten titles and sent the Wolverines home with their tails between their legs nine times.

  Tressel’s epic fall from grace was quick and painful just eighteen months after it was discovered that the coach lied to the NCAA and Ohio State on several occasions while being questioned about the “tattoo-gate” scandal in which more than twenty players, including star quarterback Terrelle Pryor, received free tattoos in exchange for memorabilia. But inside the Horseshoe, in the Church of the Scarlet and Gray, all seemed forgiven on game day. The 2002 team received a special blessing. Cheers rolled out of the stands. Chants of “Tress-el! Tress-el!” and “We love Tress-el!” thundered across the stadium.

  Ohio State fans had plenty to cheer about on this afternoon. After new savior Urban Meyer led Ohio State past Michigan the Buckeyes had reached perfection again, this time finishing 12-0. But it ended there. No Big Ten title game. No bowl. No possibility of another national championship. Among the NCAA penalties for Tressel’s lies and “tattoo-gate” was a postseason ban.

  “I wasn’t actually affected all [that] much that there was no postseason for us,” said Ohio State senior Tim Collins, president of Block O. “Probably because I’ve had a year to process this and fully expected it. The perfect season probably won’t hit me until I’m telling nostalgic stories to friends or children, that I was at Ohio State during one of its most tumultuous yet simultaneously terrific times in our athletic history.”

  From the headlines it appeared that the Ohio State football scandal had broken new ground. Not so. On paper it looked pretty familiar—free stuff for athletes, some memorabilia sales, a little cash courtesy of a deep-pocketed booster, the failure to properly monitor his activities. The suspected criminal drug connection of the tattoo parlor owner was the wild card.

  In its Infractions Report dated December 20, 2011, the NCAA laid out the allegations:

  • Between November 2008 and June 2010 eight football student-athletes had received more than $14,000 in cash payments or preferential treatment from tattoo parlor owner Eddie Rife in the form of free or discounted tattoos or cash for things like championship and bowl rings, game-used pants, jerseys and shoes.

  • One player was given an estimated $2,420 discount on the purchase of a used car and an $800 loan from Rife to fix his car.

  • Between the summer of 2009 and the summer of 2011 nine football players received a total of $2,405 for work not performed (five players, $1,605) and “impermissible extra benefits” (four players, $200 cash each) from a “representative” of the university’s athletics interests to attend a charity event in the Cleveland area.

  • Unethical conduct charges against Tressel.

  • Failure to monitor charges against the school.

  To soften the coming blow, Ohio State did what every school does these days: it self-reported. The school launched an internal investigation, then proposed a series of penalties—harsh but not too harsh—in hopes of appeasing the NCAA’s powerful Committee on Infractions. During its self-report investigation OSU never discovered that its upstanding head football coach knew about the memorabilia-for-tattoo problem as far back as April 2010. OSU penalized itself with two years’ probation, the loss of five football scholarships over three years, vacating all wins associated with its tainted 2010 season and the forfeiture of more than $388,000 in revenue from the 2011 Sugar Bowl. It also took the preventive step of disassociating the booster involved, Robert “Bobby D.” DiGeronimo, from the athletics program for ten years.

  The Infractions Committee was not moved. It focused on the “failure to monitor” DiGeronimo and the fact that several Buckeyes linked to the violations, particularly Pryor, had played in the Sugar Bowl with Tressel’s full knowledge of their transgressions. In December 2011 the committee came down hard on Ohio State.

  It hit the Buckeyes with three years’ probation beginning in December 2011 (not two) and the loss of nine scholarships (not five) while vacating the wins and forfeiting the bowl revenue. Most significantly, the committee banned the team from a bowl game in 2012 and expressed particular displeasure with The Senator, slapping a “show cause” penalty on Tressel, essentially removing him from major college coaching for five years.

  Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith described the university as “surprised and disappointed” at the ruling.

  It’s a new day in Columbus. Under Urban Meyer the school had a renewed energy and fresh commitment to learn from past transgressions. A stellar 2013 recruiting class and a slew of returning stars, like quarterback Braxton Miller, had the Buckeyes on the short list of teams with legitimate BCS title hopes in the 2013–14 season.

>   But those inclined to plumb the “tattoo-gate” scandal at greater depth discovered that what happened at Ohio State offered sobering lessons in how the system could be used and abused. Used to protect those familiar with its levers of power and control. Abused to punish those caught up in its clutches. A system where the athletic director who can’t remember in an NCAA interview what month it is (“Where we at? October?”) and cannot, for the life of him, remember specific times and dates, is allowed to slide on his answers. While a student-athlete is expected to have an extraordinary memory—to reconstruct days and hours worked two years past. Where cell phone records read one way confirm guilt, while read another confirm innocence; a place where the qualifiers “around,” “near,” “likely” and “estimates” are strung together to devastating effect.

  Two days before Easter Sunday 2010, Jim Tressel received an e-mail from someone named Chris Cicero. It arrived at 2:32 on Friday afternoon. As best Tressel could remember, Cicero was a former walk-on football player, a mid-1980s guy when Tressel served as an assistant coach under Earle Bruce. Tressel could not recall Cicero’s position—linebacker, it turned out—but knew he was a local criminal defense attorney. Five or six years earlier, he recalled, Cicero had been part of a group that put on a seminar on law enforcement issues for his team.

  Ten months later, on February 8, 2011, Tressel was interviewed for five hours by NCAA investigators Chance Miller and Tim Nevius. Several Ohio State legal and compliance officials and outside enforcement consultants were also in attendance. About a half hour into the interview Tressel was asked about Cicero’s first e-mail. Tressel said one of his first thoughts was, “What in the devil are you sending this to me for? This is not in my league.”

  But then he looked at the bullet points, and the words “Federal government raid” registered. At the bottom of the e-mail he noticed the words “homicide” and “drug trafficking.” And this: Cicero said he had been told the federal government had hit the house of a former client, Edward “Eddie” Rife, owner and operator of Fine Line Ink. In 2001, Cicero said, Rife had been convicted of felony forgery and possession of criminal tools. Cicero wrote he was being told Pryor and “other players” had taken signed Ohio State memorabilia (shirts, jerseys, footballs) to Rife, who was selling them “for profit.”