The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (59 page)

“I pushed him. I pushed him to the limit,” Chester said. “I told him you’ve got to grind, you can’t quit. I want Ricky to make it. I want to see him play on Sunday. I want to live to see that day.”

His wife, Buffy, on the other hand, had different priorities. And who could argue with her, given what happened to her brother—Ricky’s namesake—after he won the hundred-meter dash at a regional track meet at nearby Blinn. A day so full of joy and promise ended in a late-night car accident on Highway 36, just ten miles from home. Ricky Seals had fallen asleep at the wheel coming home from his girlfriend’s house. He was dead at seventeen.

That was what Chester was remembering as he stood silently at the mantel, pointing to a fresh-faced teenager wearing uniform No. 9, with
RICKY SEALS 1973–1990
inscribed underneath.

He pointed to another photograph: a Christmas card in a place of honor.

“That’s Eric right there,” he said.

Eric, as in Hall of Fame running back Eric Dickerson, the pride of Sealy, Texas. Owner of the NFL’s single-season rushing record, Dickerson was one-half of SMU’s prolific Pony Express backfield from 1979 to 1983 at the center of a $60,000 cars/cash/boosters-run-wild recruiting scandal that resulted in the school’s football program being shut down by the NCAA’s first and only use of the death penalty. Dickerson was now acting as an unofficial recruiting adviser to his first cousin. When those sweet talkers came calling, ED was there to translate.

And if the dining room table—the one covered in an avalanche of mail—offered any indication, Seals-Jones was in need of some sage advice. Stacks and stacks of letters sat neatly organized by school, more than fifty colleges in all. Nebraska, UCLA, Miami, Iowa, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas Tech, Missouri, Michigan, Notre Dame, Arizona, Houston, Baylor, Oklahoma State.

The three tallest stacks belonged to Texas, Texas A&M and LSU. Seals-Jones had verbally committed to the Longhorns in February 2012, only to rock the recruiting world four months later by de-committing. Now, in November, the field had been narrowed to two favorites—A&M and LSU—with Oregon and Baylor looming on the outside. The college football world was left waiting to find out which school would win the sweepstakes and, it turned out, the price some were willing to pay to come out on top.

On the first Sunday in September 2012, Ricky, Buffy and Chester sat down for lunch at Tony’s, a busy down-home diner not far from their house, to talk about the foreign army of recruiters who had invaded their life.

“Been a lot of stuff happening around here lately, a lot of stuff,” said Chester at one point, shaking his head.

“It’s been hectic,” added Ricky. “The rankings come out and you’re No. 1 and everyone is congratulating you. Even my [football] friends, they say, ‘We know you’re No. 1, but we’re going to try and beat you out and get it.’ You got to keep that in the back of your mind, but you still got to enjoy it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You just got to go with it.”

One seat over, his mother simply nodded. A pretty, petite woman, she worked for the school district as a part-time bus driver and administrator, up every weekday by 5:00 a.m. She was deeply invested in not just her son’s life but also those of many others his age. Her concern was clear: Ricky
was not just her youngest child, the last to leave, but also a visual, daily reminder of what happened to her brother. She called Ricky several times a day. She wanted to know where he had been, the people he was hanging with and where he was going.

He might be out of sight, but he was never out of Buffy’s mind.

She had pulled Jamal out of Houston when his grades fell below her expectations. Ricky would be an honor student—that’s all there was to it. In a bedroom filled with trophies and awards, with size 15 Jordans and school caps lined up like cadets, perfect attendance certificates and a kindergarten diploma were among the awards most prominently displayed.

By Ricky’s sophomore year everyone from local fans to Division I recruiters knew he was going to be special. He broke out nationally his junior year, when he was district MVP and college football coaches started showing up at his
basketball
games. One afternoon he got called out of class and down to the office. The principal and a counselor were waiting when he arrived.

“Now I’m thinking I left trash on the floor or something,” Ricky said.

Not quite. It was LSU’s head coach, Les Miles, who had guided the Tigers to the 2007 national title, stopping by to say hi, all smiles and charm as he and Ricky walked the halls together. One girl was so awed by the sight that, as Ricky put it, “she about passed out.” Coach Miles casually offered that he’d love to have Ricky come down and see how he liked the campus. Seals-Jones giggled remembering the moment. “He’s a smooth talker,” he said of Miles. “He’s just so smooth when he talks.”

The same week a Baylor assistant coach dropped by. Then TCU’s head coach, Gary Patterson, arrived carrying a box. A sudden crack of sunlight shone down like magic as Patterson opened it up to reveal a set of diamond-encrusted rings, including one from his team’s undefeated Rose Bowl season in 2010–11.

“This is what happens when you come to TCU,” he told Ricky. “We win championships.”

By now Ricky couldn’t go anywhere without hearing what he called the million-dollar question:
Have you decided where you want to go?
“I could go into Walmart and somebody comes up who I don’t know: ‘Have you decided where you want to go? I think you should go here.’ ”

He got to making a joke of it, playing a game with a bunch of his hotshot buddies from the national 7-on-7 circuit. They would tell reporters they were going to shock the world and commit to Bethune, as in Bethune-Cookman, the historically all-black school that plays in the Mid-Eastern
Athletic Conference. “And they were writing it down!” Ricky said. “We were laughing. One of us would make a big play, we were like, ‘
Beth-THUNE …
,’ reporters just writing it down. We were just messin’ with them.”

As the winter of 2012 wore on, fans and coaches searched for any sign of where Seals-Jones might be headed. One day Buffy wore a Texas shirt, and in no time the recruiting message boards were buzzing:
Seals-Jones leaning to Texas!
His parents learned the hard way what
they
said, what
they
wore, was news. Then, in February, after a Junior Day visit to Texas, where coaches implied they were handing out only a few select scholarships, Ricky made some news of his own. He verbally committed to Coach Mack Brown and his Longhorns.

“I felt like that was it, but I felt like I rushed it,” Ricky said.

“I felt like he was being rushed, too,” said Buffy.

The smart coaches—meaning just about everyone in the Seals-Jones sweepstakes—barely blinked; yeah, it was Texas and all, but “verbals,” they knew, were little more than foreplay to National Signing Day in February. The letters, e-mails and texts—especially the texts—continued to pour in: USC, Clemson, Illinois, Oregon, Michigan, Mississippi State, Florida State, Oklahoma State, Alabama, Auburn … all talking about playing him at wide receiver, but mostly just talking and talking. And talking …

“The recruiters, they didn’t care what time it was,” said Ricky. “They just kept calling. I would wake up, and I’d have ten missed calls. It was, like, two in the morning, and I’m like, ‘Dude, don’t y’all sleep?’ ”

Meanwhile, his cousin Eric, the Hall of Fame running back, weighed in, cautioning his cousin to be patient. They want you. Take your time. Make sure where you want to go. Advice that hit Ricky like a linebacker when in early June 2012 he attended the UT football camp in Austin and took stock of some of the Longhorn recruits, worried they weren’t up to their four- and five-star billing. Within two days he called Texas and told them he was de-committing.

“They didn’t want to let me off the phone,” said Ricky. “The whole coaching staff got on the phone. They said there was no place like Texas. I just told them I just wanted to open up my options and look around.”

The news spread like a Texas wildfire across recruiting sites and Twitter. Longhorn fans did not take kindly to the fact that Seals-Jones was suddenly playing the field. Soon Ricky noticed strange cars driving slowly past the house.

“You live in the country; you kinda know the cars,” said Ricky.

The cars were one thing, the death threats something else. Four or five
showed up on his Twitter feed, one warning him if he didn’t come to his senses, his family was going to miss him.

“I just shook it off,” Ricky said.

His parents certainly didn’t after he finally confessed to the threats a month later at a Nike event in Oregon.

“I said, ‘What?’ ” recalled Chester.

“That just shook me up,” said Buffy.

By the summer of 2012, Seals-Jones was blowing up on the invite-only showcase circuit. He was selected as the top wide receiver at the Rivals100 Five-Star Challenge 7-on-7 in Atlanta and named the MVP at a Next Level camp in Houston. He was abusing some of the top-rated cornerbacks in the country with highlight-reel plays that were exploding on the Internet.

In mid-June the entire family took a trip to College Station for an unofficial visit to A&M. The arrival of pass-happy coach Kevin Sumlin in December 2011, the school’s impressive facilities and the Aggies’ move to the SEC had electrified an already formidable fan base. In addition, Sumlin was proving he could recruit with the big boys. At A&M the Jones family was escorted to a room where a pristine Aggies jersey bearing Ricky’s high school number, 4, was laid out on a table, along with a helmet, socks and gloves. The unmistakable message: It’s all yours. Then an assistant coach showed a video of an A&M wide receiver running with the ball and getting caught from behind that—magically—morphed into shots of Seals-Jones running downfield untouched for a touchdown.

“Man, they were selling that stuff,” recalled Chester.

Coincidently, two days later the family had a meeting set in Austin with Texas basketball coach Rick Barnes. The Longhorns had been floating the notion of allowing Seals-Jones to play two sports, something he talked openly of wanting to try. When Mack Brown found out that Seals-Jones was on campus, he flew into action, canceling a trip to a coaching clinic in San Angelo, and set up a meeting in a Texas-sized conference room in the football offices. There, around a big burnt-orange table, Brown, Barnes and several assistant football coaches and school officials made their pitch.

Said Chester, “They wanted him to commit again.”

“I’m talking about the whole coaching staff in there,” said Ricky.

“Man, they went from pleading the third to the fifth,” Chester recalled. “Mack. Everybody. They said, ‘Whatever you decide to do, Texas is going to beat this, beat that, everybody is going to take care of you.’ They’re going
to do this here, this there. A job when you graduate. [They’ll take care of] people in your life.”

Chester remembered one assistant coach kept asking,
What’s it going to take? What do we need to do?

It was an hour before the Sealy-Bellville brawl, and the stands were filling up fast. Sealy’s record stood at 6-3, and to make the Class 3A playoffs, the Tigers needed to win the game by at least nine points. It had been a roller-coaster season for Sealy and for Seals-Jones, who began the year scoring five touchdowns in a 62–6 win over Houston Milby before suffering a major setback one week later against Houston’s powerful St. Pius X, in a game nationally televised on ESPNU.