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

by Jeff Benedict

  “There’s a football program in the Big 12 where they have an equipment manager going to each coach’s home and packing his bag before they leave on Friday for the away game,” he said with more than a touch of disgust in his voice. “You’re telling your coaches they don’t have the wherewithal—they’re too busy to pack their own bag and bring it in with them on Friday to the office. Have the staff, have the equipment manager, go to a guy’s home and pack their bag?”

  In Fort Worth the impromptu therapy session eventually evolved into a nuts-and-bolts Q&A. How best to nurture alumni help? What’s best—training table or university food service? Clearly the bane of every DFO’s existence was finding the best way to communicate with 105 players in a constant state of social media flux, ever-changing cell numbers, oblivious to university e-mail. One DFO said he still relied on old-fashioned notes stuck on lockers to update a change in practice time. But in reality, at football powers with robust budgets, old-school ways were quickly being replaced by cutting-edge communication and organizational systems like Scoutware and ACS. Doyle said Stanford used a program called Teamworks, produced by Logistical Athletic Solutions (LAS).

  “Totally changed the way we do business,” he said.

  A voice rose from the back of the meeting room. “Come see the big Greek guy, we’ll take care of ya!”

  Zach Maurides was, indeed, a big, outgoing Greek guy. A former left guard at Duke, he had founded LAS in 2005 with $300,000 in seed money. “Human beings are the least efficient solution to your problem, especially when it’s rote work, repetitive tasks, like data entry,” he said. “Why should you have a coach sit and individually text 105 kids? That can all be done programmatically; it can be scripted.”

  In 2006, Maurides brought in computer programmer Shaun Powell, now a partner in the company, to design a Web-based platform geared to streamlining communication and the convergence of data. “The concepts aren’t new,” said Maurides. “They’ve been applied to every other industry. It’s just that athletics is finally to the point now where it’s a big enough operation, there’s enough money involved, you have to start looking at these things and organizing ourselves.”

  Teamworks offered eight core modules. There was a mass-messaging system; another eliminated the need for paper and paperwork. A Profiles module stored biographical information, family contacts, addresses, academic information and notes. A Time Management module synthesized practices, workouts and appointments.

  By now the big Greek had fired up his laptop. Multicolored, password-protected files and pages danced on his screen. “Take a look at this,” he said. He clicked on a sample Mass Communication page. The options appeared endless—immediate messaging via text, voice or mail by grade, group or position within ten seconds. Real-time feedback as to whether the message had been received or not. To demonstrate, Maurides sent a voice mail to a reporter’s phone. Ten seconds later it appeared: “You’re late for a meeting.”

  The jaw-dropper was the Athlete Record Management module. In addition to centralizing all medical and academic records, biographical data and financial and personal information, it provided a metrics component. For example, Player A’s entire weight room and conditioning history could be inputted by a staff member, and then, with the click of a mouse, the staffer could run a regression analysis to see if the player was improving or had flatlined in his bench, squat or forty-yard dash. What player had made the biggest percentage increase in strength at tight end? One click and the answer appeared.

  Duke was one of the first schools to buy into the program. In 2011 it purchased all eight modules (Maurides said, depending on the size of the team, the cost ran between $450 and $18,000 per module; an entire athletic department priced between $35,000 and $70,000). A return-on-investment study conducted by LAS and approved by Duke showed in 2011 the athletic department saved more than eighty-eight hundred man-hours that year and more than $244,000. Teamworks had since expanded to more than forty FBS programs; Nebraska, Oregon, Notre Dame, Miami (Florida) and Texas had all bought into the system within the system.

  “If you look at Moneyball and the way people look at baseball teams, it’s the same thing here,” said Maurides. “A lot of things are still gut decisions. This is what I think I should do. But then we can change it to this is what the data is telling us, this is what the data said.”

  Maurides made no bones about the fact much of the data collection—the personal info, roommate and girlfriend contacts—was mainly about “risk management.” In an emergency it enabled a DFO to find a player as quickly as possible.

  “A guy’s in trouble, he’s hiding out,” said Maurides. “That’s a reality.”

  During the question-and-answer period Mack Butler, the silver-haired DFO at Oklahoma State, had touched on that topic. He was looking for suggestions on the best ways to handle what Butler described as “those probing eyes.”

  “Probably have a hard time getting anyone to do this,” Butler said. “I think how you handle those things is a huge deal. One of the things that has been unique about this group is we all know ways to do things in which we stretch the envelope. We all know the NCAA doesn’t necessarily agree with this, but we have found the words and the terminology to go beyond what they are trying to control.”

  Circumstances being what they were, the man best suited to address the issue of wayward players was not in Fort Worth but in Austin. In the insular world of football operations Cleve Bryant, the DFO at Texas from 1998 until 2011, was viewed as nothing less than a legend, lionized for his ability to facilitate, to stamp out fires before the first sign of smoke.

  Bryant liked to say he could look into a player’s eyes as he boarded the bus and know exactly what kind of practice he was going to have. Nothing got by Bryant—not a watch, not a vehicle, not the slightest change in lifestyle.

  “Whose ride?” he’d ask a player suddenly driving a different car.

  “My girl.”

  “Bring me the paperwork,” Bryant would say. “No paperwork, that ride had better disappear.”

  To those who had butted heads with Bryant over the years, he was known as Dr. No, a backhanded slap at the force field he’d built up over thirteen years around Texas’s head coach, Mack Brown. Bryant was perhaps best known for his unwavering radar when it came to issues that might eventually spread some mud on the Longhorns program.

  Bryant’s personal warning system began to buzz one year when the Longhorns checked into a hotel for a game with Oklahoma State. It was nearly midnight. Off in the corner of the lobby Bryant spotted a young, pretty girl in a miniskirt. Groupie, he thought. Then the tumblers clicked and he remembered how sports agents had turned to babes like this as “runners” to help entice top draft picks to sign. Either way she was a problem. Bryant turned to the Texas Ranger who always accompanied the team on road trips.

  “Lance, check that out for me,” he said, nodding at the girl. “Find out if she’s a guest in the hotel.”

  Turned out she was.

  “But that didn’t matter to me,” Bryant explained. “I didn’t want her there. So I went to the manager of the hotel and told him he had to decide if he wanted to rent one room or a hundred rooms because either she’s gone or we’re gone. And like that, she was gone.”

  In a legal setting Bryant described himself as “a liaison guy for football operations,” the messenger between Brown and the administration, his assistant coaches, trainers and staff. Officially, Bryant handled day-to-day football operations. Unofficially he was Mack’s jack-of-all-trades: disciplinarian, teacher and father figure to every single player on the Texas roster.

  “Shit happens,” Bryant said. “And my job is to deal with the ‘holy shit’ moments. That way Mack can spend his time on football, and I can run the program.”

  He had been with Brown since they arrived in Austin in 1998 and for three years before at North Carolina. More than once Brown had acknowledged Bryant’s friendship and influence, saying publicly, “If Cleve leaves, I’m le
aving, too.”

  “He knows everything,” said one former UT football star of Bryant. “He was the reason the program was indestructible. Why it never had a problem with the NCAA.”

  So how did Bryant see himself? Right-hand man? Buffer? Bad cop?

  He paused, smiled and turned up his hands.

  “I’m the janitor,” he said. “I fix shit.”

  As Bryant, sixty-four at the time, spoke of his janitorial duties, he was sitting in a deserted restaurant on the lower level of the Austin Four Seasons in the fall of 2011. Tall and fit, he arrived wearing sweatpants and a crisp Polo shirt and carried a quiet, confident air. In 1967, Bryant was an all-conference quarterback at Ohio University, one of the first blacks to play that position in the Mid-American Conference. The next season he earned Player of the Year honors.

  “Many people just didn’t think blacks were smart enough,” he said. “It was a challenge, and I was stubborn, bound and determined.”

  He was drafted by the Denver Broncos in the eleventh round in 1970 but never made the team. A twenty-year coaching career began a few years later, with stops as a quarterbacks and/or wide receivers coach at his alma mater, North Carolina, Illinois and Texas before Brown brought him back to Chapel Hill in 1995, adding recruiting coordinator to Bryant’s growing list of responsibilities. He was forty-seven years old. At fifty, he told Brown he was giving up prostitution, a reference to the recruiting game.

  “I don’t give a shit,” Bryant said Brown told him. “I want you on my staff.”

  In 1998, Brown got the call from Texas. Soon he and Cleve were headed to Austin to pick up the pieces of the broken John Mackovic era (1992–97). With Bryant at his side, Brown expanded the school’s promotional and recruiting base, courted high-end donors, upgraded facilities and reversed the ratio of white to black athletes. Together they rebuilt a fading football power. Texas won nine games each of its first three seasons and eleven in three of the next four before striking it rich with the undefeated (13-0) 2005 national championship team. It didn’t stop there. The Longhorns reeled off forty-five wins (against just seven defeats) over the next four seasons before a loss to Alabama in the January 2010 BCS championship game.

  Brown got the accolades. But Bryant did the dirty work.

  “I was always on call, twenty-four hours a day,” he said. “During the course of the day you don’t know what’s coming at you. You just adjust on the run and go. My television never goes off. It’s on all night. When a call comes into my house, it comes up on the TV. Two, three, four in the morning, my wife turns to me and said, ‘Cleve, that’s for you.’ I can look at the TV and tell who is calling. I pick up the phone, ‘Cleve, we arrested one of your boys.’

  “In this town I know the UT police and the Austin PD. I met with them two or three times a year. I bring them our media guides. And I tell them: If one of my players shows up someplace they aren’t supposed to be, you call me. I don’t give a shit what time it is.

  “My first question is, ‘Where’s he at?’ I ask what’s the situation, and the officer will tell me. Then I hang up and the process rolls from there. I take care of everything.”

  And no matter how sensitive or messy the crisis, Bryant never strayed from Rule No. 1: Never panic.

  “As soon as the kid is released, he knows his ass is in my office. I’m going to hear his side of the story. I got his side, the police side, the truth is going to fall someplace in between. Once I have that, I call Mack and say, ‘So-and-so has been arrested.’ Mack may say, ‘Do you believe him?’ I tell him the same thing every time: ‘Coach, I’m still gathering information.’

  “After I see Mack, I see the AD. Then I call the SID [sports information director] and tell him to prepare a statement to the press for Mack. ‘We are aware of the situation. We are monitoring the legal process.’ The standard bullshit lines.

  “Bottom line, these are my sons. Right, wrong, indifferent, I’m going to defend them. I tell them, ‘I don’t give a shit what you did. When you come into my office, you tell me the truth. If you lie to me once, I’m going to leave you out there on your own. Tell the truth.’ I’ve never had a kid lie to me.”

  In all their years together Bryant and Brown acted like an old married couple—speaking in unspoken looks and shrugs. They had long since devised a way to deal with distractions and potential trouble. Cleve would handle it.

  “Most schools have individuals to do each job,” Bryant said. “It’s really better when one person does it all. Mack said he didn’t want a committee. I’m my own committee. Mack and I met every day.

  “Mack can handle the bad news. What he doesn’t like is surprises. He doesn’t like people coming into his office if he doesn’t know what it’s about. Ninety percent of the day-to-day bullshit never made his desk.

  “Mack doesn’t like people getting mad at him. They get mad at Cleve. I can handle it. It’s easier for me to say no, let me work on that rather than Mack. I don’t give you a fast no. I’ll give you a slow no. I may know in my mind it’s not going to happen, but because of the sensitivity I’ll give you the slow no.

  “Sometimes we have pissed off parents. They call, demanding a meeting with Mack. ‘I don’t want to fucking talk to Cleve.’ Okay. In my office I have a file on every player—scholarship, walk-on, manila folders, in alphabetical order. If a player is late for class, doesn’t show for treatment, flunks a drug test, gets a ticket, I have all the paperwork in my file. Mack would not meet with the parent alone. I would be there with that file, and I’d pull that file out and start talking the truth.”

  The truth was, said Bryant, eighty percent of the kids did everything right. The thickest files were always the other twenty percent—the ones he would have to remind: “They were playing before you got here and when you leave they’ll still be playing.” That’s why he created what he called the Newcomer List. It covered all the dos and don’ts—everything from how to handle a traffic ticket (“you don’t pay, at some point it becomes a warrant”) to time and money management.

  “That’s a tough one,” he said. “Most adults in the country can’t do it [and] we expect these kids to do it. NCAA only lets us provide one meal a day. For us, that’s usually dinner. So the kids get a check for the other two meals [a day]. One check per month. The problem with the check is you give a freshman a check for $400, he’s going to buy a phone, CDs, gimmicks. It’s gone in one or two weeks. Now what’s he left with? He’s got one meal a day, and he’s trying to survive off that until the end of the month. So halfway through the month he’s hungry. He ends up eating at McDonald’s and living on fast food. It’s another reason the quality on the field is suffering. We take these guys to grocery stores and show them how to eat. They are told to eat healthy and why it’s important. It doesn’t matter. They get that check in the beginning of the month and they blow it.”

  Often Bryant dealt with problems that had nothing to do with the players. At the 2000 Holiday Bowl in San Diego, Texas was down late in the game to Oregon—it would eventually lose 35–30—when Arthur Johnson (now UT’s associate athletics director for football operations) approached Bryant on the sideline.

  “Cleve,” said Johnson. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

  “Give me the good news.”

  “The good news is the postgame snack is here.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “The plane we were supposed to take home right after the game is still in Minneapolis.”

  Shit, thought Bryant. Johnson’s next question dealt with who was going to inform Brown. Bryant knew that answer. But first things first.

  “Okay, call the hotel,” he told Johnson. “I don’t give a fuck what it costs, get Mack his room back. Then get a room downstairs and fill it with pizzas and food.”

  “Do you want me to tell you when the plane leaves Minneapolis?” asked Johnson.

  “No, tell that son of a bitch to call me when he’s on the ground in San Diego.”

  After the
game Bryant walked up to Brown and delivered the bad news.

  “You’re shitting me,” said Brown.

  “You got your room, don’t worry,” Bryant said.

  After the game the team and the travel party bused back to the hotel and hung out until the plane finally arrived. It was only after Bryant had every single player accounted for and every single person in the travel party on the bus that he knocked on Brown’s hotel door.

  “Okay, Coach,” he said. “Let’s roll.”

  At the time of his departure Bryant estimated Texas was netting at least $8 million per home game, plus concessions. The fifty-seven luxury suites surrounding the field go for around $56,000 a year, he said, not counting food and tickets. The fact the players, his players, didn’t see a dime of that money, of any outside money, bothered Bryant.

  “It’s basically slave labor,” he said.

  To that end he explained how if he could find a way to skirt the rules from time to time, to put a little extra cash in a kid’s pocket, he would. Sometimes it meant playing games with the way plane tickets were purchased. Sometimes it meant knowing a place where the star running back could buy a $500 suit for $50 to look good at an awards dinner or setting up a good deal on a used car.