The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (6 page)

Kiffin ended up apologizing less than twelve hours after accusing Meyer. But the Kiffin–Meyer flap made headlines for days, diverting attention from a much bigger recruiting battle that Kiffin was waging behind the scenes. The No. 1 recruit in the country at that time was running back Bryce Brown, a high school senior out of Wichita, Kansas. Virtually every recruiting service rated him as the best high school football player in America. As a junior, Brown had verbally committed to the University of Miami. It was believed to be a foregone conclusion that he would sign his letter of intent, officially committing to the Hurricanes, on National Signing Day. But at the last minute, Brown announced he would delay signing until
March 16, 2009. He also announced five new finalists in addition to Miami: LSU, Oregon, USC, Kansas State and Tennessee.

Brown’s official visit to Tennessee took place on Valentine’s Day and Kiffin asked Lacey Earps to be Brown’s escort. “I was flattered,” Earps said. “Official visits were the ultimate goal in Orange Pride. And Bryce was the No. 1 recruit in the country.”

Earps was twenty-one at the time. Brown was seventeen. That weekend, she took him to a Tennessee men’s basketball game against Vanderbilt. Afterward, they went to see the action movie
Taken
. Then Earps took him out for ice cream. They were together virtually the entire weekend.

The moment Brown returned home to Wichita, he and Earps started communicating daily during the period leading up to his decision day in mid-March. “I kept in contact with him the whole time,” Earps said. “We Skyped. We texted a lot. We talked on the phone. Talked on Facebook.”

One night Earps even stayed up until 4:00 a.m. Skyping with Brown. “We didn’t have a relationship, but we were getting close,” Earps said. “Actually, as I was recruiting him, maybe I did lead him on a little bit. Bryce wanted me to be single. It was more attractive to the guys if you are single.”

In the vernacular of recruiting, “single” means a hostess isn’t in a relationship with another player. The prospect of a long-term relationship with a hostess can be a powerful lure, one that hostesses are eager to perpetuate.

Brown notified Kiffin that he planned to return to Knoxville on March 13 for a follow-up visit, just three days before announcing his choice. Determined to close the deal with Brown while he was in Knoxville, Kiffin approached Earps and asked if he could speak with her. First he informed her that Brown was coming back to campus—a fact she knew before he did. Then Kiffin asked Earps for some help.

“I asked him what he wanted to do,” Kiffin told Earps. “He said, ‘Coach, all I want to do is hang out with Lacey.’ So will you take him out?”

Earps agreed.

Then Kiffin gave her some money.

“I went into his office, and he handed me $40,” Earps said. “It was enough to go to the movies and get ice cream.”

Under NCAA rules, it was a violation to pay for recruits’ entertainment and food on unofficial visits. But Earps didn’t think much of being handed a few bucks for a night out. Kiffin was the head coach and certainly knew the rules. Besides, it wasn’t the first time that members of Orange Pride had been given money by members of Kiffin’s staff. On more than one occasion, coaches gave hostesses money for recruiting parties. Earps was personally
handed $100 on one occasion and $200 on another. “I was given money by the coaches to get things for the party,” Earps said. “The coaches aren’t stupid. It’s not like they didn’t know what we were using the money for.”

On March 13, Brown returned to Knoxville, and Earps accompanied him to a football scrimmage in Neyland Stadium. Afterward she took him to the movies. Then they went to Marble Slab Creamery, a popular ice cream shop at Market Square. It was another great weekend.

Two days after returning home, Brown held a press conference at the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame, where he announced he would attend Tennessee. “I feel that’s the school that’s gonna prepare me the best to go to the next level,” he said.

“I had a big role in recruiting Bryce Brown,” Earps said. “I was an influential part of his decision.”

The press didn’t pick up on Earps’s role. But Kiffin’s staff certainly did. After Bryce Brown signed with Tennessee, Earps got a new nickname. One afternoon Condredge Holloway, the director of student-athlete relations and lettermen, approached her. In the early 1970s, Holloway became the first African-American quarterback to play in the SEC. He was a legend around Knoxville. Earps knew and respected him. She was taking in a Tennessee practice when Holloway approached her.

“You know what you remind me of?” Holloway said.

She just looked at him.

“
The Closer
,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you ever seen the TV show
The Closer
?”

Earps was confused. Holloway then described the television crime drama that starred Kyra Sedgwick as a tough LAPD interrogator with a knack for obtaining confessions that result in convictions. “She goes in and closes the case,” Holloway told Earps. “Nobody can figure something out and they bring her in. She’s the closer.”

It was intended as a compliment, and that’s exactly how Earps took it. The nickname stuck. From that day on, every coach and every member of Orange Pride knew Earps as The Closer.

When Bryce Brown committed to the Vols, Charlotte “Charli” Henry was a five-foot-six Tennessee sophomore with brown eyes and shoulder-length dark brown hair. She had grown up in a small town in West Tennessee famous for its Ripley tomatoes. One of her best childhood memories was
spending Saturday afternoons watching Tennessee football games with her father. It was the Peyton Manning era, and Henry decided back then that one day she wanted to be a member of Orange Pride. In the spring of 2009—right after Lacey Earps officially took over as the captain—she got her chance. Henry was one of two hundred girls who applied for the twenty openings.

Beautiful and smart (her GPA was 3.77), Henry shone in her initial group interview, easily answering questions about UT history, naming the athletic director and head football coach and repeating her favorite UT chant. She got called back for a more rigorous individual interview with an athletic department official and two senior members of Orange Pride.

To make a good impression, Henry went to Banana Republic, where she purchased a baby-blue top, chocolate-brown pants, a big brown belt and some hot-pink heels. When she went to the interview, she also made sure to wear her pearls. The interview lasted thirty minutes. Her final question was whether she had ever quit anything. Henry had played volleyball and tennis in high school. Academically, she finished in the top 10 percent of her class. A classic overachiever, she couldn’t think of any time when she had given up. “I’m a really honest person,” she said. “I honestly said that I had not.”

A month later, the list of twenty girls who had been chosen to join Orange Pride for Lane Kiffin’s first season was posted outside the admissions office. The make-or-break tension felt just like trying out for an athletic team. Nervous, Henry ran her finger down the list. Her name was on it.

Orientation began immediately. There were packets to read and endless meetings with experienced hostesses and school officials. They suggested topics of conversation with recruits (Rule No. 1: Do not talk about the weather); how to conduct a campus tour; the importance of keeping a calendar; and instructions on how to dress, apply makeup and do their hair. In the ever-important quest to land top recruits, the athletic department wanted these girls to look as attractive as possible. There were also sessions on NCAA rules governing recruiting.

The hardest part for Henry was remembering the names and titles of all the coaches on Lane Kiffin’s staff. To get them all down, she pinned each coach’s name and title to a bulletin board above the desk in her bedroom. “I would study it every night before I went to bed,” Henry said. “I wanted to know exactly who these coaches were because when an athlete comes in—especially a top recruit, like a potential quarterback—the quarterback coach would come in and talk with them. So I had to know their names.”

Henry was a quick study. By the start of the 2009 season, she had found
her groove with recruits. “I had no problem making these guys feel at home,” Henry said. “There was flirting. Your goal or your job is to put all your attention on your recruit when he’s there. The point of all this is no matter what the NCAA regulation is, when you have an official recruit that is torn between, say, Florida and Tennessee, your relationship is not to start and stop at the beginning of a football game. It just doesn’t work like that.”

By the start of the 2009 season, Tennessee had turned its attention to the top high school running back in the 2010 class—Marcus Lattimore from James F. Byrnes High School in Duncan, South Carolina. At the same time, Tennessee was after two of Lattimore’s teammates, defensive stars Brandon Willis and Corey Miller. Both had attended a summer football camp at Tennessee in June 2009. Earps and another Orange Pride hostess, Dahra Johnson, met Willis and Miller at the camp. Earps and Johnson had become virtually inseparable. Johnson was the other member of Orange Pride who was offered a job in the football office. While Earps and Johnson were hanging out with Willis and Miller at the summer camp, Earps observed that one of the players had three championship rings hanging from his necklace. When she pointed that out, he responded, “You should come see us play sometime.”

Earps and Johnson said they might just do that.

“Our job was to flirt with them, to be honest,” said Earps. “So we said, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’ll come see you play.’ ”

But Earps and Johnson weren’t serious about driving more than two hundred miles to Duncan, South Carolina, to watch a high school football game. They did, however, stay in regular contact with Willis and Miller through social media, building an online relationship much as Earps had done with Brown. By the third week of the 2009 season, the communication had intensified to a point where Earps felt as if both players were going to commit to Tennessee. They planned to visit campus on an unofficial visit on September 26 to watch the Vols play Ohio.

But the night before—a Friday—Byrnes had a home game. Willis and Miller wanted Earps and Johnson to attend. That Thursday night, Earps Skyped with one of the players until 4:00 a.m. The last thing he said to her was “Please come.”

Earps didn’t rule out the possibility. But after only a few hours of sleep, she was exhausted and had no desire to trek more than three hours to Byrnes. Johnson agreed. It wasn’t worth the effort.

But when Earps and Johnson showed up for work at the football complex later that afternoon, Kiffin and his staff were having a luncheon. Earps and Johnson were invited. When they entered the room, Kiffin made an impromptu announcement: “These girls are going to Byrnes today.”

The coaching staff, led by Kiffin, broke into applause.

“I guess I don’t have a choice,” Earps thought. “I’m going to Byrnes.”

Johnson agreed—now they had to go.

“At this point I wasn’t planning on going,” Earps said. “I was exhausted. I had pulled an all-nighter. So this was not on the top of my list. But when Lane said, ‘These girls are going to Byrnes,’ I didn’t want to look bad.”

Earps and Johnson spent the early afternoon in the football office using colored chalk and poster board to make signs to hold up at the game. One said
COME TO TENNESSEE
. Another read
MILLER & WILLIS HAVE OUR HEARTS
. Numerous assistant coaches complimented them on their artistic touch. And at one point, Coach David Reaves, a brother-in-law to Kiffin who was in charge of recruiting in South Carolina, gave them some gas money—$40—for the trip. After Earps put on an orange outfit, the girls set out for Duncan, South Carolina, arriving just before kickoff.

Byrnes won big that night. But Earps and Johnson stole the show with their colorful signs and eye-catching outfits. The mother of one player called them “dolls” and asked to snap some pictures after the game. Earps and Johnson held up one of their signs and posed with Miller and Willis.
Sports Illustrated
senior writer Andy Staples, who had gone to the game to watch Lattimore, also snapped a picture. He had no idea that Earps and Johnson were from Tennessee and were part of Orange Pride.