The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (25 page)

The litany of lies that began on Easter weekend 2010 lasted until Memorial Day 2011. At that point Tressel had outlasted additional violations involving extra benefits, a five-game suspension and $250,000 fine and a knockout March 2011
Yahoo! Sports
investigation by Charles Robinson and Dan Wetzel charging Tressel knew about the scandal in April 2010. But in the end, he could not survive a withering
Sports Illustrated
cover story that opened another huge can of worms. The linchpin of the piece: the memorabilia-for-tattoos party had started as far back as 2002 and involved at least twenty-eight players—twenty-two more than previously acknowledged by the university.

Tressel was out the door by Monday.

In their official response to Notice of Allegations, Case Number M352, Tressel’s attorneys finally acknowledged he broke a cardinal rule of coaching—Unethical Conduct Bylaw 10.1. Tressel offered “no excuses” for his decisions.

In its official response, Ohio State said its former coach had paid a “terrible price” for his mistakes.

In February 2012, Tressel was hired by the University of Akron as its vice president of strategic engagement, a position created just for him. His main focus at the school would be working with students and alumni to foster better relationships with the community. His base salary was a reported $200,000 a year, some $3 million a year less than he earned annually at Ohio State. At his introductory press conference Tressel made clear he felt fortunate to have this opportunity.

“This,” he said, “is a second chance.”

T
hey are the unseen, unsung heroes of college football. Seated up front on every bus or plane, walkie-talkie in hand, eyeing the road, checking a watch and anticipating trouble. Getting things
done
.

The official title of these problem-solving point men is director of football operations (DFO). It might as well be director of
detail
operations. For eighty hours or more a week they are consumed with nothing but
details
. Team travel. Game management. Seating charts. Rooming lists. Hotel buffets. Academic support. Law enforcement. Ten thousand and one things in their hands alone.

“We’re facilitators,” said Mike Sinquefield, the highly respected DFO at Texas Christian University. “That’s what we do. Coaches expect things. Athletic directors expect things. You can’t anticipate everything, try as you might, [but] you just have to be ready to think on your feet.”

In 2012, Stanford’s DFO Matt Doyle was honored as the Operations Director of the Year by his peers. It said something about the nature of his job that Doyle could not remember how old he would be in May of that year—thirty-six, it turned out. But he knew precisely the number of goblets (two) and drinks (six) and the type of bread (sourdough) and ketchup (Heinz 57) he wanted set on a breakfast table at away hotels.

“For the most part it’s because we want to eliminate distractions that exist,” said Doyle. “What we don’t want is for things to be different. We don’t want a guy after three weeks finally getting into a routine of eating eggs and cheddar for breakfast and all of a sudden we don’t have eggs and cheddar. Sounds silly, but that’s how it is.”

That’s exactly how the game is run these days, because if you can’t
systemize
life for coaches consumed by Xs and Os, by one thing and one thing only—winning—you’re working Division IV football, which, by the way, does not exist.

“I always think if something goes wrong, somehow it’s my fault,” said Doyle. “If the sprinklers come on in the middle of practice, that’s probably my fault. If the plane is delayed, there’s nothing I can do about it. But it’s nobody else’s fault but mine.”

In the spring of 2012, about one hundred and fifty DFOs from across the country converged on the Omni Fort Worth for their annual convention. Had some wayward soul stumbled into the second-floor ballroom and listened to a panel discussion, he would have thought it was a taping of the
Dr. Phil
show.

“I don’t see my family, ever,” said Luke Groth with a sigh, then in his second year as DFO at Division III power Wisconsin-Whitewater. “I don’t see my mom. I don’t hardly ever talk to my mom. I feel terrible.”

Like virtually every other member of his profession, Doyle had paid a steep personal price. A few days after the Fort Worth meeting, during a two-hour drive to speak at a donor luncheon in Sacramento, Doyle laughed at the notion he was enjoying his so-called downtime.

“Downtime is an interesting definition because right now I’m traveling like fourteen of the next eighteen days,” he said. “So that’s not really my downtime.

“This is fun for me; I like doing it,” he added. “But the reality for me is what would I be doing if I decided not to go to Sacramento to speak? If I don’t speak, I’d be teeing off at two o’clock. Or heaven forbid, I might pick up my daughter at lunchtime.”

After graduating from college, he found work as a teacher and coach at his alma mater, St. Francis High in affluent Mountain View, California. Several of his students had parents who were coaches or worked at Stanford, including the son of then Cardinal head football coach, Tyrone Willingham, and the daughter of former athletic director Ted Leland. A member of the football staff was leaving and wondered if Doyle would be interested in the job. He was. Doyle applied, got it and over the years, through five head coaches, had seen his role steadily expand into assistant AD, director of football operations.

From the first of August 2012 and the start of training camp until the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day 2013, Doyle had worked 153 days in a row. “There’s no day off to go to the dentist,” he said. “There’s no mowing your lawn. You can only get a haircut because Supercuts stays open until ten. But for the most part there’s not all this stuff that regular people do on weekends.”

Instead there was a list of duties and responsibilities Doyle had compiled in the winter of 2012 for national comparison with other DFOs:

For those scoring at home, that is forty-five different areas in which Doyle had some control or input. In answer to the frequent “What do you do?” question posed three years earlier, he had compiled another list. Jim Harbaugh was the Stanford head coach at the time. “A Day in the Life” was how Doyle described it. The day in question, a Monday following a heartbreaking loss on the road at Arizona. He had already worked his regular twelve-hour day on Sunday. Monday had started bright and early, at 7:00 a.m., with a quick stop for coffee. By 7:04 he had unlocked some meeting rooms for NFL scouts who wanted to watch film. Nearly sixteen hours later, at 10:45 p.m., Doyle’s list ended with this notation: “Day is done, heading home.” In between his timeline showed no fewer than a dozen different meetings ranging from game management to the equipment manager, head trainer, offensive and defensive coaches, to finally Harbaugh himself, at 10:00 p.m. Sprinkled throughout was a daily dose of multitasking combined with crisis management—making sure the ryegrass inside the stadium looked just right for the upcoming game against Arizona State on national TV; tracking down a player’s lost wallet; responding to a flood of e-mails that had poured in overnight; helping a graduate assistant fill out an application to a coach’s academy. Just one more day of driving the locomotive that was only picking up speed. Fueled by what Doyle saw as a “major inflation of self-importance” rippling its way through top-tier programs.

“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).