The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (43 page)

In the lobby of the Courtyard Marriott by the Sarasota airport, Brett Goetz sipped water and spoke in machine-gun bursts. It was nearly 10:00 on Saturday night. All around the lobby were members of his two South Florida Express teams—Elite and Pro—drained from five hours of pool play earlier that day. They had gone undefeated in five games but paid a price. One player was at the hospital being checked for a concussion; three others were nursing injuries. Dinner was about to arrive, and when it did, in the form of chicken wings and fries, about forty high school kids attacked like locusts, forcing Goetz into action.

BACK UP!

BACK UP!

BACK UP!

I SAID, BACK UP!!

BACK UP!!

Nobody moved. Not a single soul. Three hundred and seventy-five wings and several small mountains of fries packed onto serving trays evaporated in seconds. Goetz didn’t eat. Instead, he stepped back and left every last piece for his players, coaches and a guest. It felt like one of those old
White Shadow
episodes. A perfect example of why so much of South Florida’s frontline talent lined up each and every February to try out for Goetz’s teams, in the process making the forty-one-year-old investment adviser one of the most powerful, respected and—to a point—outspoken figures in the world of 7-on-7. Goetz had been hip-deep in the cesspool for going on five years.

“There’s so much shit I’d love to tell you because it makes me sick, so much shit that I see,” he said. “I read the message boards. I go on message boards and see, oh, Brett Goetz is a street agent. Anybody can hide behind a keyboard. It bothers me because I do really great things with really great people to help these kids.”

He had grown up in the Philly area, a die-hard sports junkie with a mind for names and numbers. He spent two years at Temple University before transferring to the University of Florida. Later, after he got into the financial services business, Goetz became involved in charity work and youth sports programs funded by the North Shore–Nor-Isle Optimist Club down in Miami Beach.

“Extremely rewarding,” he said.

As often happens, one event for kids in need led to another. In 2001, Goetz proposed the idea of a weekend youth football camp, the forerunner to a league he wanted to start. The city fathers of Miami Beach were less than impressed. Forget it, they said, nobody’s going to come.

“Two hundred kids showed up,” Goetz said. “I started the program, ran it, funded it through the [Optimist] club.”

The football league eventually ran for about six years on city fields—with the city’s blessing. “It became more than football to me,” said Goetz. “We helped so many kids.” Toward the end, Goetz said he picked up a kid and, as he so often did, drove him to practice. The tenth grader told Goetz he dreamed of playing college football one day.

“I’ll call some schools,” Goetz told him. “I’ll make it happen.”

So he called Duke. Out of the blue. He looked up the name of the linebacker coach at Ohio State. Called him, too. Got the coach on the phone.

“Hey, I got a great kid for you,” Goetz said.

The old names-and-numbers guy, who could list the starting five of Arkansas’s 1992 national championship basketball team off the top of his head, started poring over recruiting Web sites and scouting services looking for the names of college recruiters. He got them on the phone. Talked up his player.

A Duke assistant finally looked at some film and a combine report Goetz had sent on the kid from Dr. Michael M. Krop High School in North Miami Beach who one day dreamed of playing college football. He offered a scholarship.

“Now,” said Goetz, “I start calling the big boys.”

Notre Dame, Ohio State, Florida. Writers from Rivals, Scout, ESPN and MaxPreps reached out for information, to swap stories. Goetz began to build a network of writers and recruiters. Then, in 2008, Ohio State offered a scholarship to the Dr. Krop kid with a dream. His name was Etienne Sabino. He would go on to become a starting linebacker and defensive star at Ohio State.

“It was unbelievable,” said Goetz. “I said, ‘I can make this thing happen for kids.’ ”

But in a world of ego and influence, of loud winners and sore losers, something else happened as well, the same sad story line so often heard in summer league hoops.

“I start hearing, when a coach didn’t get a kid, ‘Oh, Brett pushes kids to Ohio State.’ I heard everything in the world.”

Goetz was making a name for himself. In 2008, somebody from Scout.com asked if he wanted to bring an all-star team to a 7-on-7 tournament in Tampa. Goetz checked around. Invited thirty kids to come try out. Forty showed up. He took twenty-four. Then he rolled out what turned out to be a superstar South Florida Express team. Geno Smith, who went on to star for West Virginia and was drafted by the New York Jets, was Goetz’s quarterback. His team finished second. Afterward, several of his South Florida kids received scholarship offers to schools like Florida and the University of South Florida. Coaches and parents and recruiting writers began to take notice.

In 2009, Goetz said more than a hundred kids showed up at his tryout. The next year the number doubled. The Miami Beach boys and a few good friends were still funding the team, with Goetz kicking in the rest out of his own pocket. In 2010 the South Florida Express won a national championship in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. By the time the 2011 tryout rolled around, 250 kids were waiting at Hallandale High School.

Goetz quickly lost control of his own tryout. Guys he had never seen in
his life were all of a sudden walking around in the middle of drills eyeballing the talent and asking for phone numbers. The 7-on-7 meat market had officially opened.

“I never saw so many shady fucking people in my life,” Goetz said. “I was sick about it. My name was tied to this. I see people involved in the process I didn’t like the way they looked. It really hit me hard in the fact I didn’t realize this was the monster I created.”

By February 2013 the number of prospective kids wanting to play for the South Florida Express had jumped to three hundred. By now, the drain of making a living and raising a family had pushed Goetz out of the day-to-day operations of his teams. He still raised the funds—about $25,000 for fees and travel that year—but deeded full-time coaching and managing responsibilities to former NFL stars Sam Madison and Patrick Surtain, ex–All-Pro cornerbacks for the Miami Dolphins.

“It’s a great showcase, it really is,” said Goetz of 7-on-7. “The kids get better, they compete, and it gets them off the streets. It gets them looks by schools.” He let out a long, deep sigh. “I think it’s a great
concept
, I really do.”

If there was one individual at the IMG event who raised the most questions, it was unquestionably Jimmy D. Smith.

The thirty-one-year-old coach of the Louisiana-based Bootleggers didn’t help himself in the first-impression department. He was late to the coaches’ meeting. And while some coaches mouthed off to referees and questioned calls as the stakes rose, Smith appeared to be the only coach who openly bad-mouthed his own players.

On Sunday morning the Bootleggers added to the head shaking when they barely avoided a forfeit in an elimination game against Cam Newton’s All-Stars by showing up five minutes into the ten-minute grace period. They quickly found themselves down 15–0. But then a team chock-full of Division I talent got loose, and their long, languid Louisiana athleticism took over. A series of explosive plays put them up by nine, 24–15, with about three minutes left to play.

“We’re on
fire
right now,” Smith yelled to his team.

Thanks to a timely interception, the All-Stars roared back to tie the game up, 26 all, and then won it, 28–26, with a big two-point defensive stop with just seconds to go.

“Mistakes killed us,” Smith told his team in a haphazard postgame huddle. “We were the best team out here. Every loss we had, we gave it to them.
Stay in touch with each other. If you need help with anything, let me know. Love you on three.”

He didn’t bother to stick around for the team picture.

A few minutes later Smith plopped down in the shade of a VIP-media hospitality tent. He wore a wrinkled gray polo shirt and matching shorts. He said he had grown up playing high school sports in New Orleans before finding some entry-level player evaluation and data entry work with Max Emfinger, a former Dallas Cowboys scout and the first person to establish a national ranking system for high school football players back in 1980.

Between 2009 and 2011, Smith said he worked part-time for the Dallas area–based New Level Athletics, founded by former University of New Hampshire all-American and 7-on-7 power broker Baron Flenory, and wrote scouting reports on North Florida/South Georgia kids for Fort Lauderdale–based Elite Scouting Services, owned by Charles Fishbein.

During that three-year period both New Level and Elite would come under the watchful eye of NCAA investigators attempting to get a handle on the fast-moving world of 7-on-7 and rapidly expanding outposts of player evaluations, rankings and combines. Investigators eventually homed in on Will Lyles, a Houston-based talent evaluator who worked for both New Level and Elite. Of particular interest to the NCAA were Lyles’s dealings with then University of Oregon head coach Chip Kelly, now the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, and the $25,000 fee Oregon had paid in 2010 to a fledgling company started by Lyles, Complete Scouting Services, for recruiting profiles written, it turned out, in invisible ink.

Lyles eventually told
Yahoo! Sports
, which broke the story, that Oregon paid him not as a traditional scout but rather for his influence with top Texas recruits and his ability to navigate prospects through the signing and eligibility process.

In March 2011, Fox Sports labeled Lyles “the most dangerous” street agent in college football. Lyles would deny any wrongdoing and call such charges “unequivocally false.”

“When I started working at Elite, Will had just got there,” said Smith when asked about his connection to Lyles, New Level and Elite. “He was supposed to be running the Louisiana and Texas database. And my first time getting on the Web site and checking our database, we [Elite] have nothing on Texas. But yet we advertise and bill people for it.

“I knew there was a lot I didn’t know,” Smith added. “Here I am working for one company, New Level, that was getting hammered all over the Internet. And then they’ve got the Will Lyles thing going on with Elite. I was
working for both companies at the same time. Every investigator came at me right away, thinking I may be the common link.”

Smith said he had met with at least four NCAA investigators probing New Level, Elite and Lyles. And while Smith said he willingly provided certain information—texts, phone records, checking account—he said he stopped short of spilling the whole story. But he did inform Fishbein, the owner of Elite, that the NCAA bloodhounds were sniffing around.

Smith originally said Fishbein fired him on the spot. Later he said they had “parted ways.” In an interview Fishbein said Smith’s departure was by “mutual” agreement. He knew Smith had worked for Flenory at New Level Athletics and now he was talking with the NCAA.

“I said to him, ‘Who are you? And why are they asking you these questions?’ ” said Fishbein. “ ‘Are you working for the NCAA? Are you some kind of double agent? What’s your deal?’ I didn’t know whether he was clean or dirty.”