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

by Jeff Benedict

  With six and a half minutes left in the third quarter, ’Bama had found itself down 21–10 after a seventy-five-yard Georgia touchdown drive and a fifty-five-yard Bulldogs TD run off a blocked field goal. The hometown crowd in the Georgia Dome was in a frenzy. On the sidelines, Smart said later he wondered if the Tide had what it would take to come back in the Bulldogs’ backyard. “I was questioning it,” he admitted. “You’re sitting there going, Well, here we go. This is another challenge to our competitive character. Are we going to be able to get the stops and get the scores necessary to bring it back?”

  Lock in, lock out. Control what you can control. Play the play. Be the best you can be. You could almost hear all the mental mantras and collective suffering of the Fourth Quarter program at work. And sure enough, the Crimson Tide responded as one.

  The offensive line just kept coming, stuffing the ball down the throat of a stout Georgia defense that had allowed only nineteen total points in its last three SEC games. Freshman tailback sensation T. J. Yeldon finished off a penalty-aided seventy-seven-yard, four-play drive with a ten-yard scamper for a score. The two-point conversion made it 21–18. ’Bama quickly got the ball back on downs, and this time it was Lacy and the line pounding away for the go-ahead touchdown. Score: 25–21 with 14:57 to go.

  Georgia roared back with a TD of its own—28–25 now, 12:54 left in the game. Once more Alabama ditched the pass and doubled down on the run. Facing a make-or-break third and five with 4:01 left, Yeldon slammed through a hole and into a tackler, crashing forward for a crucial first down. Then, with the Bulldog safeties crowding the line of scrimmage, quarterback McCarron lofted a perfect pass to Cooper for forty-four yards and what turned out to be the game-winning score.

  In the end, Alabama had rushed fifty-one times for a championship game record of 350 yards. Afterward, Saban spoke of having to restart his heart. He spoke of a team that would not be denied. With a shot at the national championship on the line, his team had been the best that it could be.

  “The thing about the whole process is, The Process leads to success,” said Neighbors. “You’ve just got to get people to see it. And once they see it, they start believing it. And once they believe, you have nowhere to go but [to] that success.”

  After reaching the pinnacle of such success—the merciless 42–14 demolition of Notre Dame in the BCS title game—a word unavoidably arose among players and the press. Saban swatted it away like a gnat. “I don’t think words like ‘dynasty’ are really words I’m much interested in,” he said. He would celebrate for twenty-four hours and not an hour more. The championship ring would join the others on his office coffee table for recruits to see.

  “ ‘Look what I got’—that’s not my style,” he said.

  The national championship victory had touched off a wild on-field celebration. There were hugs and kisses and handshakes as a scene unique in sports unfolded like a thousand New Year’s Eves in one. Suddenly there was Saban, surrounded by security, scanning the crowd until he found the person he was searching for—his wife, Ms. Terry. Hand in hand, they walked up the stairs onto the makeshift stage.

  Addressing a roaring crowd, Saban spoke of what a great win it was for the “organization,” admitting to ESPN’s John Saunders that it was okay now for his players to talk about repeats because, well, they’d just repeated. Linebacker C. J. Mosley was next. Saban shifted off to the side. Head slightly down, he nibbled on a nail. One could only wonder what was going on inside his head. The slippery night of player partying to come? Future expectations?

  Then someone handed him the gorgeous glass football, which twinkled in the metal halide lights. As he hoisted the trophy above his head, a small, contented smile crossed his face. “Sweet Home Alabama” poured out of the stadium speakers. The crowd chanted “Roll, Tide, Roll!” in perfect unison at just the right opening, as if those words were part of the song.

  On this night, they were.

  When the ceremony finally ended, Saban descended the stage into a barricaded area reserved for family and friends. There was only one more place to go. And his security team pushed toward it against a crush of television cameras and photographers. Finally, Saban made it—to the exit, near Section 156, right behind a goalpost. The cheers and screams grew even louder. Before he left the field, Saban stood for a moment—only a moment—and let the sound of worship wash over him. Then he was on the move again. But just before he disappeared into the tunnel and out of sight, Saban’s right hand rose up, tentative at first, until a single index finger pointed straight to the sky. Saban’s way of saying that until somebody proved it on the field, when it meant the most, there was but one team, one coach, one system, in big-time college football.

  For one night, everything glorious about college football was on display. The vivid pageantry, collective excellence, communal celebration and fierce competition provided the grand spectacle only NCAA football played at its highest level can deliver. One could almost forget the unremitting pressure, the scandals haunting the sport—the bidding wars for top recruits; the booster payoffs; the horrific injuries; the academic cheating; the rising tide of criminal acts; the brute fact that the young men who sacrificed on the field were interchangeable pieces who received exactly none of the billions of dollars of revenue the game generated.

  Almost.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could not have been written without exceptional access to the individuals and programs profiled on these pages. We are indebted to them for their time, their hospitality and, most important, their trust. So we begin by thanking those who allowed us to see, hear and tell their stories:

  Mike and Sharon Leach; Michael Crabtree; Graham Harrell; former Tennessee hostesses Lacey Earps and Charlotte Henry; Dave Brandon, Brady Hoke and Dave Ablauf at the University of Michigan; Don King in Austin, Texas; former BYU head coaches LaVell Edwards and Gary Crowton; detective Devon Jensen and prosecutor Donna Kelly in Provo, Utah; attorney Ted Liggett in Lubbock, Texas; Kent Hance and Guy Bailey at Texas Tech; Craig James; Rob and Jared Ambrose, Devin Crosby, Mike Waddell and David Nevins at Towson; Matt Doyle at Stanford; Zach Maurides from Duke; Cleve Bryant at Texas and his attorney Tom Nesbitt; Kyle Van Noy, Ezekiel “Ziggy” Ansah, Bronco Mendenhall and Tom Holmoe at BYU; T. Boone Pickens; Mike Holder at Oklahoma State; former Missouri tutors Teresa Braeckel and Lauren Gavin; prosecutor Andrea Hayes in Columbia, Missouri; Sarah, Donald and Derrick Washington; Bill Moos, Elson Floyd and Mike Marlow at Washington State University; Chance Miller, Brynna Barnhart and Rachel Newman Baker at the NCAA; Ohio State booster Bobby DiGeronimo; agent Gary O’Hagan; Joe Giansante; Nick Saban, the late Mal M. Moore and Jeff Purinton at Alabama; former Florida State lineman Jarad Moon; Marcus Lattimore and his agent Pat Dye Jr.; the entire Ricky Seals-Jones family; Alabama student Samuel Jurgens; Notre Dame alumnus Tom Seeberg; Coach Keith Donnerson and his players Alphonso Marsh, Brandon Beaver, Lacy Westbrook and Lavell Sanders at Dominguez High in Compton, California; LAPD’s Brandon Dean; Kyle Whittingham at Utah; the entire Washington State coaching staff; and ESPN’s John Skipper, Burke Magnus, Lee Fitting, Keri A. Potts and the entire team at College GameDay.

  Behind the scenes there were many more who helped arrange and facilitate our reporting. We can’t possibly name them all. But we are especially grateful to: Jay Rosser in T. Boone Pickens’s office; Sally Geymuller and Monica Long at Oklahoma State University; Brett Pyne and Kenny Cox at BYU; Stacey Osburn and Erik Christianson at the NCAA; Travis Van Noy; Debbie Nankivell, Robert Giovannetti, Linda Ann Nelson, Gil Picciotto, Ginger Druffel, Debra Jo Dzuck and William Stevens at Washington State University; attorney Bill Marler; agents Todd Semersheim and Jonathan Butnick; court officials Diana Taylor and Bonnie Adkins in Columbia, Missouri; paralegal Eunice McMillan in Ted Liggett’s law office in Lubbock, Texas; and George Pine, Ben Sutton, Sandy Montag, Kim Berard and Johnny Esfeller IV at IMG.

  At Sports Illustrated, former editor in chief Terry McDonell and college football editor B. J.
Schecter championed the feature stories we wrote on crime and gangs in college football. This book grew out of those projects. At CBS News, producer Josh Gaynor and associate producer Sarah Fitzpatrick collaborated with us on those stories. Gratitude to CBS News chairman Jeff Fager, CBS News president David Rhodes, former CBS News president Sean McManus and producer Craig Silver and his entire CBS Sports college football crew.

  We also had a great team working with us in the trenches: reporters Timothy Bella, James Oldham and Michael McKnight; researchers J. J. Feinauer and Jeff Gasser; photographer Deanne Fitzmaurice; editor Craig Neff; fact-checker Alex Wolff; intern Hannah Waite, IT specialist Cameron Berry; and travel agent extraordinaire Mark Johnson.

  Our agent Richard Pine at Inkwell Management was a visionary behind this book idea and a driving force to see it through to completion. We are grateful for his impossibly high standards and professional touch. We can’t say enough about William Thomas, publisher and editor in chief at Doubleday. He was involved in every step of this project and provided exceptional guidance and a skillful editor’s touch to the manuscript. His trusted assistant Coralie Hunter was indispensable. Publicist Todd Doughty and attorney Amelia Zalcman were valuable members of our team, too.

  Deep and abiding thanks to the Flemings, Jonathan and Amy, two family members whose gracious offer to stay at their beautiful Cape Cod summer house on Wakeby Pond for seventeen quiet days and nights made all the writing difference in the world.

  Finally, we pay tribute to our families. The book is dedicated to Lydia Benedict and Dede Keteyian for a reason. They put up with us and lived through every step of this two-year odyssey through big-time college football with us. We are two very lucky guys.

  NOTES

  Much of this book is based on firsthand observations. Between September 2011 and April 2013 we spent more than four hundred hours shadowing and interviewing coaches, athletic directors, student-athletes, boosters, high school recruits, directors of football operations, ESPN GameDay crew members, NCAA investigators and fans. We attended spring practices, off-season workouts, team meetings, fall camps and 7-on-7 tournaments. We also traveled with teams (by charter plane and bus) and were present on the sidelines or in the locker room before, during and after games. In addition, we traveled and attended games with boosters, fans, athletic directors, university presidents and television broadcasters. In all, we attended fourteen regular-season games, the SEC Championship game and two bowl games (including the national championship game) during the 2012–13 season.

  Throughout all of our reporting we carried tape recorders. In many instances we also chronicled our travels with still photography or video. Virtually all of the descriptions and dialogue from chapters that take place between 2011 and 2013 come from what we or our designated reporters saw and heard firsthand.

  For this book we also conducted more than five hundred interviews, including multiple interviews with key characters. Some of those were done with individuals we were shadowing or observing. But many more were conducted for chapters that cover incidents and events prior to September 2011. Almost all interviews were on the record, and many of them were tape-recorded. Some cases were also videotaped as part of a story on big-time college football that aired on 60 Minutes in the fall of 2012. Most of the quotations in the book are from our observations or our interviews. When they’re derived from a different source, we’ve done our best to cite it here. In instances where we reconstructed dialogue, we almost always attempted to interview both parties to the conversations. We also pulled quotations and dialogue from trial transcripts, grand jury transcripts, NCAA interviews, court depositions, affidavits, police reports and video-recorded press conferences, practices and games. The sources for quotations that did not come from our reporting—and were not public statements—are noted below.

  Hundreds of people are identified by name in this book. We used pseudonyms in only four instances. The identities of a juvenile rape victim and a member of her family who was a witness for the prosecution were changed to protect their privacy in accordance with customary journalism standards consistent with the rape shield law. The other sexual assault victims who are identified by name in the book authorized us to do so. The names of a University of Texas football player and a stripper with whom he maintained a sexual relationship were withheld at their request because reporting their names would jeopardize their current employment.

  With a couple exceptions, we did not use anonymous sources in this book.

  Along the way, we had invaluable assistance from four reporters and one photojournalist who worked on the book. Timothy Bella, a former producer and investigative reporter for CBSNews.com in New York and now the lead digital producer/reporter for Al Jazeera America’s America Tonight, did extensive statistical research, conducted forty-two interviews and helped write the chapter on injuries. J. J. Feinauer is Jeff Benedict’s executive assistant. He developed and maintained a database that tracked player injuries, arrests and graduation rates. He also conducted twenty-five interviews and helped write the chapter on injuries. Jeff Gasser, a former research assistant to Jeff Benedict, did extensive reporting for the Sports Illustrated cover story on college football and crime. Gasser also compiled a September 2011 research report that helped form the basis of the authors’ proposal for this work. James Oldham, a former reporter at the Lantern, the newspaper of record at Ohio State, conducted ten interviews and worked on one of the Ohio State chapters. Deanne Fitzmaurice is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer. She accompanied the authors while they shadowed players and coaches at Washington State, Alabama, BYU, Utah and Dominguez High in Compton, California.

  In addition, Sports Illustrated executive editor B. J. Schecter oversaw the six-month investigation that led to the SI cover story on college football and crime, as well as the feature story on college football and gangs. Those two pieces were instrumental to the foundation of this book. Schecter, who also oversees college football for the magazine, had a direct hand in shaping the Ohio State chapters and providing input at various junctures of the project. Craig Neff, a former colleague of Armen Keteyian’s at Sports Illustrated and now an assistant managing editor who has edited some of Jeff Benedict’s pieces at the magazine, provided invaluable editing and editorial counsel on several chapters, including those involving Towson University, Ricky Seals-Jones and Alabama. It goes without saying that a book of this depth and scope is not possible without the groundwork laid by writers and reporters who cover college football on a regular basis. With that in mind we’d like to offer a heartfelt nod to, in particular, Andy Staples, Stewart Mandel and Pete Thamel of Sports Illustrated, Bruce Feldman of CBSSports.com, Dan Wetzel and Charles Robinson of Yahoo! Sports, Steve Wieberg at USA Today and Greg Bishop of the New York Times.

  Finally, any mistakes are those of the authors and the authors alone.

  PROLOGUE: Game on

  The descriptions, conditions and play-by-play of the Notre Dame–Alabama game are based on firsthand observations by the authors and official game notes. The kind of stadium lights (halide) used was confirmed by the engineering department at Sun Life Stadium. The source of teams on probation for major violations came from the NCAA’s database on such matters. The Auburn graduation rate and white-black disparity came from an abstract written by Rodney K. Smith, a distinguished professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. The time demand figures were part of a GOALS study of approximately twenty thousand student-athletes conducted in the spring of 2010 and presented to the 2011 NCAA Convention. The October 2009 Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics report (“College Sports 101”) proved invaluable, as did USA Today’s extensive research and continued reporting on coaching salaries. The spending differential statistics between academics and athletics were the product of a 2010 research study conducted by the American Institutes for Research. Principal researcher Donna M. Desrochers was the author of the study.

  The quotations attributed to Brent Musburger were taken direct
ly from the ESPN broadcast.

  1. THE COACH: Part I, Mike Leach after midnight

  The portrayal of Mike Leach is based on extensive interviews with Mike and Sharon Leach. Some biographical information was also taken from his autobiography, Swing Your Sword: Leading the Charge in Football and Life (New York: Diversion Books, 2011); Michael Lewis’s profile “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep,” New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2005; and a 60 Minutes segment on Leach that aired on January 4, 2009.

  The characterization of BYU’s offensive scheme in the early 1980s is based on interviews with LaVell Edwards and information provided by Steve Young, who quarterbacked the Cougars during Leach’s senior year of college.

  Texas Tech provided the graduation rates for its football players under Mike Leach via e-mail to the authors.

  The game scenes from Texas Tech and the dialogue are based on interviews with Mike Leach, Michael Crabtree and Graham Harrell, as well as video footage of the Texas–Texas Tech game.

  Additional information was gleaned from “Huskies Coaching Search: Texas Tech Coach Mike Leach Meets with UW,” Seattle Times, December 3, 2008; and “Leach, Tech Reach Five-Year Agreement,” ESPN.com, February 19, 2009.

  2. THE CLOSER: The life of a college football hostess

  The portrayal of Lacey Earps is based on interviews with her. Additional interviews were conducted with Earps’s attorney, Alan Bean, and the Tennessee hostess Charlotte Henry. Henry’s professional résumé provided additional biographical detail, including her grade point average. Some information about Orange Pride was obtained from the school Web site.