The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (42 page)

Forget it. The gloves were coming off.

In May 2012 three members from the NCAA’s football enforcement group settled around a large second-floor conference table at the association’s headquarters in Indianapolis. In one seat was assistant director of enforcement Chance Miller, a University of Tennessee graduate whose résumé included a law degree and defending civil litigation cases for the fire, police and transportation departments in New York City. To Miller’s right was
assistant director Brynna Barnhart, thirty-one, a former basketball and softball player at Knox College in Illinois. After law school Barnhart had done defense work for large insurance and electrical companies. Also seated at the table was Rachel Newman Baker. An ex-investigator and former director of agent, gambling and amateurism issues, Newman Baker was now managing director of the seven-person football group.

In keeping with Emmert’s “risk-reward” mandate, the enforcement group had shifted its focus to developing larger, “more meaningful” cases. The staff’s approach had changed as well—more aggressive and innovative in the pursuit of violations and closing cases. In Emmert’s war on corruption, the enforcement group had become the tip of the spear.

“We’re trying to get smarter because you’ve got to expose one of those [big cases] to have it start resonating with people,” said Newman Baker. “So if we get smarter in how we’re doing our business, which is what I think we’re doing … the penalties make it not worth the risk.”

As part of its approach, NCAA investigators no longer waited for a blockbuster case to drop into their lap. No longer were they just following the leads of enterprising reporters or following up with renegade boosters or coaches with a story to tell. More and more they were doing their biggame hunting. On their own. Developing sources. Tracking down leads. Ear to the ground.

“I think we’re doing business differently,” said Newman Baker. “And we’re trying to get a better handle on what’s going on in the real world. By doing the outreach, by developing the relationships with sources, we’re trying to not just base policy, or legislation or cases based upon what we
think
, but what we
know
is going on.”

Lo and behold—and the sound you heard was certain college presidents, athletic directors, coaches, student-athletes and defense lawyers falling out of their chairs—NCAA investigators were actually becoming people persons.

“In this job that component is extremely critical,” said Newman Baker. “Especially as we talk about football, out in the world with head coaches, assistant coaches, agents, trainers, prospects, their families. You need somebody that knows how to interact with people and can develop relationships.”

“It’s being able to sit down and put a face with a name,” said the twenty-nine-year-old Miller, who had been hired by Newman Baker in February 2009. “When an agent hears NCAA, they only think bad things. So, it’s going out and showing them, hey, we’re human beings. We’re personable. And acting as a resource for them.”

High on the list of the NCAA problems was identifying and eliminating so-called third parties from the recruiting and eligibility process. They could be boosters. They could be street agents. They could be handlers. Increasingly, they were “runners” working on behalf of player agents. The arrival of financial advisers or marketing representatives looking to cash in on player contracts had only upped the corruptive stakes. The latest dodge had become under-the-table marketing “guarantees” or signing “bonuses” paid to players while they were still in school. Some of those guarantees or bonuses reached six figures.

For much of the last three years Miller had been digging into the agent underground in hopes of making a score. He started cold-calling agents.

“You could hear a pin drop on the other end when I said, ‘Hi, this is Chance Miller from the NCAA,’ ” he said.

When the person on the other end finally found his voice, the first words were invariably “What did I do?”

Miller explained he was just trying to better understand the culture, the trends. Barnhart, meanwhile, attended all-star games and the Senior Bowl with her eyes open and mouth shut. The NCAA had investigators on the recruiting trail as well.

“I think everything comes back to third parties,” she said. “Money comes back to third parties. Recruiting comes back to third parties. I think everything we’re seeing as issues has a nexus to third parties—be it agents, financial advisers, the uncle who is getting involved, the local town guy who takes advantage of a kid’s family situation. I really do think everything we see boils down to it.”

Nowhere was the third-party problem more present than in the shadowy world of 7-on-7, the hybrid spring and summer touch football passing extravaganza that had flipped the college recruiting game upside down the last five years.

The basic rules of 7-on-7, or 7v7, made for a fun, fast, wide-open, often fiercely intense athletic contest:

The only players on the teams were quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers, linebackers and defensive backs. For those in the booming talent evaluation and ranking business it offered a bird’s-eye view of size, agility, arm strength and speed, the essence of prime-time college football.

Because of its structure, 7-on-7 had blossomed across the country since 2007, teams springing up like wildflowers in talent-rich Florida, Texas and California and every high school football hothouse in between. By 2013 there were an estimated two hundred teams nationwide. On any given weekend there were dozens of tryouts, shoot-outs, camps, combines or tournaments built around the game.

On the final weekend of June 2012 some of the very best 7-on-7 teams in the country had arrived in Bradenton, Florida, to compete in IMG’s Football National Championships held at the IMG Academy. The two-day event took place on six beautifully groomed grass fields on the back side of the academy’s 450-acre campus. Signs posted on the pebbled path leading to the competition made clear the organizer’s intentions: no agents,
BOOSTERS, OR FBS COACHES BEYOND THIS POINT
.

At 8:00 a.m. on Saturday several hundred high school athletes, about 90 percent African-American, hung out in the brewing summer heat or under the Under Armour and Gatorade sponsor tents. Many of the players wore dark green skintight Spider-Man–like jerseys that showed off bodies sculpted by weights. Thumping house music played. There was even a tented Players Lounge. Hotel accommodations and some meals had been provided. The look and feel was of a special event.

At 9:00 a.m., Chris Weinke, IMG’s director of football and a former Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback at Florida State, laid out the ground rules for coaches. The start of play was just a few minutes away.

“I want the guys to have fun, I want you to have fun, but I want to do it the right way,” said Weinke. “I know it gets competitive. I understand emotions getting a little out of hand. But respect each other.”

Twenty-five teams from as far away as California, Indiana, Michigan and Tennessee had qualified to play. The top-ranked travel team was Cam Newton’s All-Stars out of Georgia, followed by Team Tampa and South Florida Express Elite. A small army of writers working for scouting and recruiting
Web sites and services devoted to the assessment of teenage talent were out in force—Rivals, Scout, 247sports.com, MaxPreps, Elite, ESPN.com,
USA Today
—along with hugely popular team sites like Warchant.com and BamaOnLine.com. They represented arguably the biggest—and, in many ways, most troubling—change in the high school recruiting game in the last five years: the explosive growth of the player evaluation business.

Some of the players, like five-star linebacker Jaylon Smith of the AWP Sports Performance team out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, had already committed to schools. In the case of the six-foot-three, 225-pound Smith it was Notre Dame. For the majority of other players, however, like athletic Jacob Mays and quicksilver wide receiver Jared Murphy, it was a golden opportunity to strut their stuff on a grand stage.

Mays, for one, caught eyes right away. He had one of those sculpted high school bodies that seemed impossible a decade ago—six feet two, two hundred pounds—with huge hands and the ability to find a seam. Tucked away in a losing season at a small high school in Georgia, he had received scant national attention. But then Mays made Newton’s all-star team. Coaches on the sideline watching his first IMG game could barely believe their eyes.

“This kid is the real deal; he’s a
football
player,” said one.

In many ways the 2012 IMG championship was a bit like Mays—an Off-Broadway actor getting a chance to shine on the Great White Way. Several times over the course of the weekend an IMG executive talked about the ten-thousand-seat, multipurpose stadium set to be built nearby. In the fall of 2013, IMG Academy would break new ground by fielding a high school football team. IMG was betting big on high school football and doubling down on 7-on-7. In five years the hope was seventy-five teams would participate in its national championship. The title game would be played—under the lights—inside the new stadium in prime time on cable television.

“We saw an opportunity,” said Odis Lloyd, at the time the vice president of business development for IMG and a former starter at safety for Arkansas.

Lloyd, now the co-owner of VTO Sports, a premier high school combine and college prep company based in Charlotte, North Carolina, believed that with such opportunity came responsibility. On that very day, in fact, IMG had announced the formation of the National 7v7 Football Association. The hope was to create sanctioned events governed by more consistent rules and regulations and structure, especially in terms of player safety, and a coaches’ code of conduct. It was a big reason Renee Gomila,
the NCAA enforcement staff’s point person in Florida, was on the grounds keeping a close eye on things. In a private moment inside one of the management trailers, Gomila and Lloyd had tossed around ways to control the chaos without killing a wonderful showcase for kids. The key, they agreed, was bringing “stakeholders,” like the NCAA, the National Federation of State High School Associations and high school coaches, parents and sponsors into the decision-making process.

“We felt if we could get them [the stakeholders] in one place, we could get some sort of system around it,” said Lloyd. “We’re never going to be able to stop handlers, aunts, uncles, we’re not going to stop that. But everybody knows if you come to this event, it’s not about that for us. It’s not the Wild, Wild West.”

Throughout the weekend there were repeated references to that exact phrase—“Wild, Wild West”—but perhaps the most apt metaphor was the corrupt culture long associated with Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) summer league basketball. Back in the early 1990s, thanks to a massive influx of shoe company money, the AAU summer recruiting scene had turned into a cesspool of problems: under-the-table payoffs, street agents, “coaches” with nothing more than a tight connection to a star player selling him to the highest bidder. The world of 7-on-7 wasn’t at that level—at least not yet—but all the elements were unquestionably in place, including sponsor money, enormous pressure to win at the college level, a worrisome cast of characters and a troubling lack of transparency. And the lack of control and the seamy influences seemed to be growing by the day. By the summer of 2012—with a national football playoff on the way—an entirely new level of anxiety had set in.

Jamie Newberg, a writer for Scout.com, summarized that feeling when he said, “It’s getting completely out of hand.”