The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (16 page)

Salt Lake City defense attorney Greg Skordas got a desperate call from Karland Bennett’s mother, begging him to represent her son. Before becoming one of the city’s best criminal lawyers, Skordas had been a Salt Lake City prosecutor, where he was the Special Victims Unit chief. When Skordas visited Bennett in jail, he immediately observed three things: good looks, manners and, above all, fear.

“He was scared,” Skordas said. “He’s a very good-looking kid and extremely respectful. He called me ‘sir’ and had a southern way about him.”

Skordas wasted no time getting to the facts with Bennett. “I had him describe the events,” Skordas said. “The defense was consent, not that it didn’t occur. This was a ‘yeah, it happened, but’ case.”

For Skordas, it sounded all too familiar: horny jocks versed in the pickup game cross paths with a vulnerable girl who gets in way over her head. “It was the other guys that jumped in that caused the problem,” Skordas said. “Karland wasn’t an active physical participant. On a good day he was an aider and abettor. He supplied the bedroom and the condoms.”

Eventually, Skordas called Kelly and started talking about a plea deal. Then, on March 17, 2005, Bennett went with his lawyer to the prosecutor’s office and submitted to a lengthy interview. He was not put under oath. The prosecutors wanted him to speak freely, and Skordas didn’t want anything he said to be used against him if a deal wasn’t reached. First, Bennett told authorities that when Brown got sick, the reason he led her to his room was to protect her from the other guys. Second, he claimed that Brown had been taunted into drinking and that he later saw multiple teammates taking turns having sex with her.

On August 9, 2005, Bennett pleaded guilty to obstruction and dealing harmful material to a minor in exchange for the state dropping the sexual assault charges against him. He also agreed to testify against Mathis and Rashada. His sentencing was delayed until after their trial.

“The other lawyers were mad at me because my kid turned,” Skordas said. “But it’s business. It’s what you have to do.”

The trial against Mathis and Rashada opened two weeks later. There
was plenty of drama. Brown described her assault. Medical and criminal investigators testified, as did football players and BYU officials. But the state’s key witness was Bennett. He placed Mathis and Rashada at the scene and confirmed that they both had sex with Brown. But he did not go as far as to say it was the result of force.

“He was a star witness, and he didn’t describe a rape,” Skordas said. “In the end, the defendants were happy because his testimony helped them.”

The jury acquitted Mathis and Rashada on all counts.

Mathis’s criminal lawyer, Jere Reneer, said, “I’ve never felt prouder to be a lawyer.”

Outside the courtroom, Mathis’s grandmother cried and shouted: “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!”

Brown was devastated. After leaving the courthouse, she collapsed and started sobbing. “They raped me. They raped me. They raped me.” She had to be carried to the car. Over the ensuing months, she became a recluse and gained seventy-five pounds.

The verdict stung Kelly, too. Despite her long career, she had never tried a case against college football players. She saw things in the BYU case that were completely foreign to her. “There was something obviously very different about prosecuting football players,” she said. “The football dynamic was an undercurrent to everything we did. And it was ultimately football that had a very big influence on the jury.”

After the courtroom cleared out, three jurors were still around. Kelly cornered them and asked why they had acquitted. “The jury said they had suffered enough,” Kelly said. “They lost their scholarships. They were kicked off the team.”

Kelly said it was the most bizarre thing she’d ever heard—the idea that the players had been sufficiently punished when they lost their opportunity to play football. “That’s the power of college football,” she said.

After the trial, B. J. Mathis and Ibrahim Rashada went on to play college football elsewhere. Mathis became a standout kick returner at Midwestern State, and Rashada went to Southwest Mississippi Community College.

Karland Bennett never played football again. After watching his teammates go free, he withdrew his guilty plea on obstruction and dealing harmful material to a minor. Prosecutors threatened to try him. But Brown had no interest in taking the stand again. Ultimately, the state dropped the charges against Bennett, wiping his record clean in Utah.

But back in Texas his life went downhill fast. He accumulated a lengthy criminal record, including multiple arrests for aggravated robbery, unlawful possession of a handgun, theft and possession of a controlled substance. Then, on April 16, 2010, a Dallas man was abducted, shot and killed in a drug deal that went bad. Bennett was arrested, jailed and charged with capital murder. On January 25, 2013, he pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to forty years in prison.

T
he 2009 season was Mike Leach’s tenth at Tech. When it ended, Tech got invited to the Alamo Bowl to face Michigan State. It would mark Tech’s tenth straight bowl appearance under Leach.

With less than two weeks remaining until he would take his team to San Antonio, Leach held a night practice on December 16, 2009. Afterward, reserve wide receiver Adam James tracked down Mark “Buzz” Chisum, one of the team’s athletic trainers. James said he had been injured on one of the final plays of scrimmage and felt dizzy and disoriented.

Chisum took James to his office, pulled out a Sports Concussion Assessment Tool 2—known in college athletics as a SCAT 2—and recorded the time: 10:52 p.m. Then he asked James a series of questions and documented the following symptoms:

Along with instructions to take Tylenol for pain, Chisum gave James his cell phone number and told him to call if symptoms got worse overnight. James went out that night with a friend. They ended up at IHOP. It was after midnight by the time James went to bed. The following morning he saw team physician Dr. Michael Phy and Tech’s head trainer, Steve Pincock. He reported that his headache had subsided a bit. But he said he had thrown up some time after eating at IHOP and he still felt a little nauseated. His dizziness hadn’t completely subsided either.

Phy administered a standard diagnostic test, and James lost his balance. That, along with everything else Phy had heard and seen, led him to his diagnosis: mild concussion.

With Pincock looking on, Phy instructed James not to practice for seven days. But he was cleared to follow the team’s protocol for players with a mild concussion—dress in team-issued workout clothing and walk laps around the field during practice. But no running or other strenuous activity that might elevate James’s heart rate or increase his stress level.

That afternoon, practice had been under way for about twenty minutes when James showed up wearing street clothes, a blue bandanna, a backward baseball cap and sunglasses. Leach spotted him walking nonchalantly around the practice field. Irritated, he turned to Pincock.

“Why’s he dressed like that?” Leach said.

“I don’t know,” Pincock said. “He just got here.”

“Why’s he wearing sunglasses?”

Pincock revealed that James had been diagnosed with a mild concussion. The shades, he said, were no doubt intended to deal with his sensitivity to light.

The injury was news to Leach, but his dissatisfaction with Adam James was not. Just three days earlier, Leach had stopped practice and removed James and a few other receivers from the field for poor effort. In spring practice, Leach had kicked James off the field in an incident that was captured on tape. “I can’t even stand to watch you fucking stumble around,” Leach told James during a drill. “Shitty fucking effort. Like you fucking accomplished something.”

Then, at the start of the regular season, James’s position coach, Lincoln Riley, called him into his office to inform him that he was being demoted to third string, citing poor effort in practice. James disagreed. So Riley showed him practice film to prove his point. When James left the office that day, he took his anger out on the door.

Another coach confronted him. “Why did you break the door?”

“What the hell do you think?” James said.

Leach thought about kicking him off the team then but didn’t.

Complicating the relationship between James and the coaching staff was the presence of Adam’s father, Craig James. The former NFL player was a college football analyst for ESPN. It wasn’t unusual for him to attend Tech practices and cover Tech games. Leach felt he meddled too much. “I heard more from Craig James than I did from the other 120 parents of players combined,” Leach said.

Right after Adam got demoted to third string, he texted his father: “Bummer news. I’m third string.”

Later that day, Lincoln Riley got a voice mail from Craig James: “If you have the balls—and I don’t think you do—call me back.”

Leach found out and didn’t like it. “He was a helicopter parent,” Leach explained. “It was all about trying to get more playing time for his son.”

Pincock’s report that James had a concussion guaranteed that he wouldn’t get much practice time leading up to the Alamo Bowl. Fed up, Leach told Pincock to isolate James from the team for the duration of practice.

“Put his fucking pussy ass in a place so dark that the only way he knows he has a dick is to reach down and touch it,” Leach told Pincock.

At Leach’s insistence, Pincock shared that statement with James. Then he led him off the field to a shed that housed blocking dummies, watercoolers, an ice machine and an ATV. Injured players would sometimes go there to ride a stationary bike. Virtually spotless, the brand-new structure had a tacky, rubberlike floor and an overhead, garage-style pull-down door, as well as a man door on the side. There were overhead lights but no windows. Aided by freshman student-trainer Jordan Williams, Pincock removed anything that James could sit on and made sure the lights were off. He told James that Leach wanted him to remain standing in the dark for the duration of practice. Then he closed the door.

Pincock had Williams remain outside the shed to monitor James. “Leach had also instructed me to have a student trainer sit outside the shed to make sure he was standing and that he did not leave,” Pincock said. At one point, however, James did leave after requesting permission to use the bathroom. Otherwise, he stayed put for the duration of practice—roughly two hours. During that time he sent his father a text message: “You’re going to like this. Leach thinks it’s impossible for me to have a concussion. And I’m just being a pussy. So for punishment he had me locked in a pitch black shed for the whole practice.”

Later, when asked to explain why he sent that message to his father, James said, “We have the same sense of humor and personality, and I thought it was funny. So I said, ‘You’re going to like this.’ I did find humor in it.”