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

by Jeff Benedict

  “Well, I’m not sure who I’m calling,” Leach interrupted. “Somebody called me from this number. Who’s this?”

  It was a high school senior from Los Angeles. He hoped to walk on the team at WSU. He had watched the 60 Minutes segment on Leach at Texas Tech. “I’d like to play for you,” the kid said.

  “You say you are from Compton?” Leach said.

  “Yes,” the kid said.

  “I’m going to have you talk to Dave Emerick,” Leach said. “I can’t say for sure we’ll have a spot for you. I can’t say we won’t either. We might.”

  Sharon dropped off Mike at his office. He immediately went on Rivals.com to look up the kid who had just called him. Then he texted a link of the kid’s scouting profile to his director of football operations, Dave Emerick, along with a message: “Research this kid.”

  Moments later, assistant coach Jim Mastro entered the office. The stout forty-six-year-old running backs coach had been at UCLA the previous season. Before that he had spent eleven seasons at Nevada. When Mastro was a college running back at Cal Poly in 1987, Leach was one of his coaches. He jumped at the chance to join Leach’s staff at WSU.

  Mastro was prepping for that night’s team workout, something Leach called Midnight Maneuvers—an intense physical-conditioning session held from 10:00 p.m. to midnight. NCAA rules prohibit official workouts for football players during the eight-week period from January 1 through the start of spring practice in late February. Every BCS program gets around this rule by holding what are called “voluntary” workouts. What made Leach’s approach unusual was the timing of these so-called voluntary sessions—late at night.

  “Everywhere I’ve ever coached,” Mastro said, “no one does this. People do conditioning at six in the morning. Leach’s philosophy is that no one is ever in the fourth quarter of a game at six in the morning. The fourth quarter happens late at night.”

  At five minutes to ten, Leach pulled a new Nike sweatshirt over his head and entered the indoor practice facility. A dozen stations were set up—one with tiny orange cones; one with hula hoops; one with medicine balls; and another with two-by-fours. Roughly 125 players wearing shorts and T-shirts were at the center of the field house, stretching. Scaffolding had been erected at the far end of the facility. Fifty feet up, Nick Galbraith, a skinny nineteen-year-old accounting major, looked down on the players. Weeks earlier one of Leach’s graduate assistants had approached Galbraith on campus and asked him if he had any good music. Galbraith, an aspiring college football coach, said he did. So Leach hired him to perform a very important function—select hip music to motivate football players to go all out during Midnight Maneuvers sessions.

  Galbraith connected his iPod to huge speakers positioned throughout the facility. He had his playlist cued up. All he needed was for Leach to give him the signal.

  At precisely 10:00 p.m., Leach blew his whistle. “Everybody, up.”

  Players and coaches surrounded him at center field.

  “We’re gonna have the music on tonight,” Leach said. “That doesn’t mean you can dick off. But you need to enjoy what you are doing to be really good at it. You should thrive on the energy. Nothing better than being on the road and sticking it up the other guy’s ass.”

  An assistant looked up at Galbraith and nodded. Angus Young’s guitar solo at the start of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” began pulsing through the field house as the team broke the huddle and ran to their stations.

  I was caught

  In the middle of a railroad track (Thunder).

  I looked around

  And I knew there was no turning back (Thunder).

  “Let’s go!” a coach shouted. A group of defensive linemen got on all fours, their hands on two-by-fours. On the whistle, they pushed the boards along the AstroTurf at top speed from one end of the station to the other, then back again. Nearby, linebackers sprinted in and out of cones while their position coach shouted at them to go faster. Offensive linemen dropped for push-ups, bounced up for jumping jacks, dropped back down for rolls. The place had the look and feel of boot camp at West Point with one exception: deafening music.

  No one noticed when two campus police officers entered the facility and approached an assistant coach closest to the exit. The music was so loud that it violated a campus noise ordinance. The assistant coach motioned to Galbraith to take the volume down a couple decibels. He did, but barely. By then players were sweating to 50 Cent.

  Meanwhile, Leach moved from station to station with a clipboard, grading players on effort: great, average, below average. He wrote “great” next to offensive lineman John Fullington, a six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound junior who was running wind sprints. “He’s the hardest-working guy in the bunch,” Leach said as Fullington burst across the finish line, cursing himself for not being faster.

  “I love guys like that,” Leach said. “He’s never satisfied.”

  After all the players had been through every station, they huddled at the center of the field house, hands on their knees, heads down, gasping for air. Most of them were shirtless by then, sweat beads running over the tattoos that colored their biceps. Leach congratulated them on their effort.

  “These workouts are voluntary,” Leach said. “But here’s the thing. The starting lineup is voluntary, too. If you think you are going to dick off and do some half-ass bullshit, the starting lineup is voluntary, too.”

  Players returned his gaze with a hard stare. None of them had ever participated in team workouts so intense, so late at night. But there were more new things in the works.

  “Now, we’re going to get some boxing equipment in here,” Leach continued.

  Players looked at each other with confused expressions.

  “We want you to start learning to use your hands and improve your hand speed,” Leach said. “You know why dinosaurs have small hands?”

  A few guys turned their heads from side to side. Coaches smirked.

  “Because they never used them,” Leach said. “So they got real small and shriveled up.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “We don’t want that to happen to any of you,” Leach said. “I want you using your hands and being violent with your hands. So we’re bringing in boxing gear.”

  Players nodded in approval.

  “Now, some of you are lazy,” Leach continued. “Let’s face it. If we had a hundred nuns here, a few of them would be lazy. So if in the back of your mind you know you’re lazy and you’re thinking you don’t want to do the conditioning, also what you need to have in your mind is that if you don’t do the conditioning, you’re fucking him.” He pointed to a player.

  “And you’re fucking him,” he said, pointing to another player. “And him and him and him and me.”

  The players stopped laughing.

  “Any questions?” Leach said.

  There were none.

  Midnight Maneuvers were over. At 11:45 p.m. the players left the field house. Lineman John Fullington stayed behind to remove the athletic wrap from his ankles and wrists. “I love the atmosphere,” he said. “I love Coach Leach’s style.”

  Leach returned to his office and studied film until 1:00 a.m.

  The following morning, one of Leach’s graduate assistants picked him up at 9:45 and took him by Safeway for his morning fix—a tall cup of coffee. They were on campus by 10:15. The first item on the schedule was a meeting with Chris Cook, the director of academic support. Leach and his entire staff took their seats around a giant conference table in the football office. Cook passed out copies of his “Football Eligibility Report,” a breakdown of every football player’s academic profile. Players of concern were highlighted.

  Leafing through pages, coaches sipped coffee while Cook walked them through steps being taken to keep players at a 2.0 GPA—increased study hall sessions, increased tutoring sessions and enhanced monitoring protocols. The report suggested very few academic problems. GPAs were up, and absences were down.

  “If a guy misses a
class or a tutoring session, we want to hammer him that day,” Leach said. “If we are pretty punitive on the front end, it will help us.”

  Cook nodded. “We understand that you want to amp up the checking system,” he said.

  “The other thing is if a player is below a 2.0, he is moving back in the dorm,” Leach said. “You need to let the players know.”

  The list of players with academic problems was short, raising doubts among the coaches. “If you don’t see a player on the list, you don’t need to be concerned,” Cook said.

  Skeptical, Leach looked up at Cook. “Either these guys are the greatest choir class ever—and if they are, we need to make them meaner—or they are missing more classes and we’re not catching it,” he said.

  Cook reported an incident involving a player who had been chewing tobacco in study hall. When the study hall monitor told him to stop, the player refused, arguing that if he had to be there for two hours, he was going to do what he wanted.

  “In terms of squeezing somebody’s balls,” Leach said, “I don’t care how many snaps he took or if he’s an all-American. I want to make sure we are all on the same page philosophically.”

  “These guys need to know that academics trumps 7-on-7,” another coach added.

  At 11:20 the academic support meeting ended, and Leach went into a battery of breakout sessions with individual position coaches. By 3:00 p.m., the five quarterbacks showed up for a film session. They took their seats around a conference table. Leach put in the instructional video for quarterbacks that he had made at Kentucky. It featured NFL quarterback Tim Couch teaching techniques. The film had barely begun when Leach hit pause, stood up and illustrated the precise position he wanted his quarterbacks in when throwing a pass.

  “Get your hips around so you are aimed at the target,” Leach said.

  He twisted his hips, showing what he meant.

  The next sequence featured Couch doing a two-step drop and throwing quick strikes. Leach repeatedly hit rewind to show the same steps. “The ball needs to make it from the center’s ass to the receiver’s hands as fast as possible,” Leach told them. “You are just the middleman.”

  The session lasted an hour. Leach had been on the job for close to two months. He still had no idea who his starting quarterback would be in the fall.

  Construction workers in hard hats and orange vests stood atop scaffolding, directing a crane operator as he set a giant steel girder between two crossbeams. Sparks flew as ironworkers welded the girder in place. On the ground below, the drums on cement trucks churned, and carpenters shored up forms designed to hold new concrete. The start of the 2012 football season was less than five months away, and the push was on to complete the $80 million stadium expansion in time.

  Next door, the sound of cleats click-clacking on pavement echoed off the athletics building as football players exited the locker room and trotted toward the practice field. It was 2:15 on a Tuesday afternoon in early April. Sunlight blanketed the brand-new artificial turf. A few linemen were already on the blocking dummies. The quarterbacks were tossing lightly on the side.

  Under NCAA rules, football programs are permitted to hold formal practices in the spring. Leach stepped onto the field wearing a black sweatshirt, red baseball cap, sunglasses, khaki shorts and running shoes. He stopped to watch the receivers, a young, unproven group. The one exception was Marquess Wilson, a six-foot-four, 185-pound junior receiver. Wilson was a genuine NFL prospect. He was only the second wide receiver in WSU history to have multiple thousand-yard seasons. But he was the only one to accomplish that in his freshman and sophomore seasons.

  One look at Wilson and it was obvious that he was head and shoulders above the rest. He was bigger and faster, with Velcro hands and a nose for the end zone. He could flat out elevate and snatch just about anything thrown in his vicinity.

  “Pump the arms,” Leach shouted at Wilson as he ran a route. “Pump the arms. It gives the illusion of speed. As you slow down, the defense thinks you are speeding up. It’s an optical illusion. It works every time.”

  Wilson nodded.

  “Marquess can be really good,” Leach said, one of his assistants standing beside him. “The kid has real potential. He just needs to be tougher. He’s got to see the physical part of things.”

  As far as Leach was concerned, the entire roster needed to increase its toughness. Thirty minutes into practice he blew his whistle. “Bull in the ring,” he shouted. “Bull in the ring.”

  The drill is as old as the game itself and a favorite among players at top programs throughout the country. Hooting and hollering, players formed a circle in the center of the field. Defensive line coach Joe Salave’a, a six-foot-three, 350-pound Polynesian wearing shorts and his trademark muscle shirt, took charge of the drill. A ten-year NFL veteran, Salave’a is an intimidating hulk of a man with no neck; his arms rival the size of some players’ thighs. He stepped to the center of the ring, and Leach called the names of two players: receiver Marquess Wilson and a linebacker. They stepped into the ring and faced each other. On the whistle, they plowed into each other at full torque.

  “Go right through that mothafucka,” Salave’a thundered. “Right through the bitch.”

  After the initial collision, the linebacker drove Wilson to the turf.

  “It ain’t a fuckin’ church,” Salave’a shouted. “Get your asses up. Let’s go.”

  Leach called off the next two names. A running back and a defensive player stepped into the ring. On the whistle their helmets collided, and the shorter running back drove his opponent backward.

  “Hell, yeah,” Salave’a yelled. “Hell, yeah.”

  Both players pumped their legs, grunting and hammering away at each other, as the rest of the team shouted at them.

  “Let’s go mothafucka,” Salave’a yelled, pounding his hands together. “Go. Get him! Run through the mothafucka.”

  The players forming the ring fed off the energy, shouting and egging each other on.

  After fifteen minutes, Leach blew the whistle—time for the next drill.

  Tyler Bruggman had notified Leach that he planned to attend a couple days of spring practice in Pullman. He was leaning heavily toward committing to WSU. But he wanted a firsthand look at Leach’s methods. His parents, intimately involved in their son’s recruiting process, flew up with him from Phoenix. “Quarterbacks have to commit early,” Bruggman said. “I wanted to see Washington State before I made my decision.”

  Leach invited him to sit in on a quarterbacks meeting. Bruggman stood in the back of the conference room while Leach and the quarterbacks huddled around a conference table, going over film from the previous day’s practice. The first sequence was a series of plays in the red zone.

  “Here’s one thing,” Leach said, freezing the video. “When we get down here and start moving the ball, there can’t be this hoping that we’re gonna score. It has to be Now we’re gonna score. And it has to start with you guys. You are the ones doing the talking. It can’t be Maybe we’re going to score. No. We’re scoring!”

  He fast-forwarded to the next play. Two receivers ran seven-yard patterns, side by side, forcing an outside linebacker to cover both players. But neither receiver bothered blocking the backer. “If we want this piece of real estate,” Leach said, highlighting the outside linebacker, “and we pay double the value”—he highlighted the two receivers in the area—“somebody has to block.”

  Leach’s passing game hinges on creating open passing lanes, a point he kept stressing to his quarterbacks. “The most important thing is space,” Leach said. “Space and personnel. You have to utilize your personnel and figure out where you have space. The defense may try and fill the space. But if you have a combination of routes and there is integrity to the routes, when they try to fill up one space, they will give up another space. So you want routes that attack a variety of spaces—high, low, right, left. As you go through the priorities of the play, it will take you to the right route.”

 
; The quarterbacks nodded. One of them asked to see the previous play one more time.

  Leach went through a few more sequences until coming to a play where two receivers in the middle of the field hadn’t bothered to block because the play was going away from them. “Are you shittin’ me?” Leach said, freezing the video on a safety running across the middle of the field. “You can knock the hell out of this guy,” he continued. “Wouldn’t it be kind of nice to find out what their No. 2 safety is like? Let’s find out if he’s any good.”

  The quarterbacks smiled.

  On the next sequence, Leach froze the film on a simple eight-yard crossing pattern that left one receiver wide open. “There’s more space than it’s possible for them to cover,” he said.

  The quarterbacks pointed at the screen, focusing on the wide-open lane.

  “Just make routine plays,” Leach said. “Not super plays. Routine plays. Besides the eight yards we get, now they are unraveled in terms of the pass rush lanes. It all comes unraveled.”

  By the end of the film session it was easy to see the fatigue factor setting in among many of the players. “That’s why we have highly conditioned athletes as opposed to the Swedish bikini team,” Leach said.

  The guys laughed. Leach shut off the film.

  Bruggman had never seen a film session like that. He wished he could put on pads and play for Leach right away. “I always knew he was a great coach,” Bruggman said. “But I was surprised at how funny he was. I didn’t realize what his personality was like. He is very funny.”

  Leach gave the quarterbacks a parting story.

  “When I was in law school, I hated the Dodgers,” Leach told them. “But I lived fifteen minutes from Dodger Stadium and I like baseball. So I went and watched them and rooted for the other team. That’s when the Dodgers were rolling and going deep into the playoffs and winning the World Series. There was game after game that the Dodgers won that they should not have won. But they won because they were the Dodgers and good things happened at the end of the game. They just expected to win. They had this whole expectation thing. That’s what has to happen with us. One of the quickest places for our team to get that way is for you to talk to them as a quarterback. ‘We’re gonna win this.’ ”