The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (65 page)

Meanwhile, when Notre Dame officials suspected that linebacker Manti Te’o might have been the victim of an online prank, the university hired private investigators and moved heaven and earth to get to the bottom of the so-called hoax.

The see-no-evil standard set in South Bend paled in comparison to the widespread institutional cover-up at Penn State. In June 2012, former Nittany Lions defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was convicted of forty-five counts of serial sexual abuse of ten young boys dating back to the late 1990s. He was sentenced to no less than thirty years in prison. But the most infuriating aspects of Sandusky’s case were the actions—or, worse, inactions—taken by legendary Penn State coach Joe Paterno and top officials at the school to bury decades of abuse.

When news of the Sandusky scandal broke in November 2011, Paterno was viewed as a paragon of virtue across the sporting landscape, nothing less than the conscience of college football. The author of the so-called Grand Experiment, Paterno preached that a powerhouse football program could be built on the cornerstones of athletics and academics. He had a record of success to prove it. His teams maintained a 90 percent graduation rate while winning two national titles and racking up 409 wins, giving Paterno the most wins among Division I coaches. And during his forty-six years of coaching Penn State, the university had no major NCAA violations, undoubtedly another record.

But success begets power. At Penn State, Joe Pa wielded extraordinary power. For much of his reign Paterno proved a benevolent king: over the years he donated more than $4 million to the university and raised millions for scholarships and charity. A nine-hundred-pound, larger-than-life bronze statue was erected in his honor—a shrine to an “Educator, Coach and Humanitarian,” as the words on the bronze base read. Beaver Stadium was repeatedly enlarged (by more than 60,000 seats to 106,000-plus) to hold the growing masses worshipping at the Church of Blue and White; an economic-medical-industrial complex grew as the school did, bigger and
stronger, feeding a sense of power and secrecy around the praiseworthy coach and his team.

During an eight-month investigation commissioned by the historically weak-kneed Penn State Board of Trustees, a legal team headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh interviewed more than 430 people and reviewed 3.5 million pieces of electronic data and documents. Freeh’s 270-plus-page report singled out the Penn State culture for permitting a “serial sexual predator” to operate at will on campus. Freeh cited what he called “the callous and shocking disregard” for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State, including Paterno.

For those inclined to believe top school officials were involved in a cover-up—a charge an independent investigation commissioned by the Paterno family claimed was just not true—the most damning evidence proved to be a critical series of internal e-mails from 1998 through 2001. The e-mails implicated PSU president Graham Spanier, senior vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley in what Freeh called “an active agreement to conceal” Sandusky’s sexual abuse from the authorities, the board and the public.

Why?

“The brand of Penn State, including the university, including the reputation of coaches, including the ability to do fund-raising, it’s got huge implications,” said Freeh. “In other words, there are a lot of consequences that go with bad publicity.”

The Sandusky sex abuse scandal resulted in the severest penalty ever issued by the NCAA: five years’ probation, no postseason bowl games for four years, the loss of at least forty scholarships and a record $60 million fine.

Reports of college football players in trouble with the law are nothing new. As far back as the late 1980s the Oklahoma Sooners generated national headlines when the FBI busted their star quarterback, Charles Thompson, for selling cocaine to an undercover narcotics agent in Norman. On February 27, 1989, Thompson appeared on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
in an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs next to the headline how barry
SWITZER
’
S SOONERS TERRORIZED THEIR CAMPUS
. Thompson’s arrest came on the heels of three Sooners being charged with gang-raping a woman in a campus dorm and another player being arrested for shooting a student-athlete in another dorm. At the same time, the team’s best
linebacker, Brian Bosworth, said the team regularly used cocaine and fired off guns in the dorm. Thompson ended up pleading guilty to conspiracy to distribute cocaine and served time. Switzer resigned.

Since then, one program after another has endured scandals involving lawlessness. But there had not been a comprehensive examination of college football and crime until 2010, when
Sports Illustrated
and CBS News jointly spent six months performing criminal background checks on all 2,837 players who were on the rosters of
SI
’s preseason top twenty-five as of September 1, 2010. The checks—performed through state and local courts and law enforcement agencies—revealed that 204 players had criminal records resulting in 277 incidents. Nearly 40 percent of the alleged incidents were serious offenses, including 56 violent crimes (assault and battery, domestic violence, sexual assault and robbery). The report, “Criminal Records in College Football,” also ranked the teams based on the number of players with records. On one end of the spectrum, TCU had no players with a record and Stanford had only one. At the other extreme, Pittsburgh topped the list with twenty-two players (nearly one in four) who had records. Most teams in the top twenty-five at the start of the 2010 season averaged between five and nine players with criminal records.

But one of the most important aspects of the
SI
–CBS News investigation was the focus on high school recruits. One logical explanation for the uptick in student-athlete arrests is that more football recruits are arriving on campus these days with prior arrest records. Most states do not permit public access to juvenile arrest records. But Florida does. And an analysis by SI-CBS News of the 318 athletes on the top twenty-five teams in 2010 from Florida found that 22 had been arrested at least once before turning eighteen. If that rate were extrapolated to the entire pool of players in the SI-CBS News study, it would suggest that approximately 8 scholarship athletes per team have arrest records before setting foot on a college campus.

Without a doubt, some—perhaps most—of these players deserved a second chance. But when juvenile arrests entail crimes of violence—sexual assault, assault and battery, armed robbery—or offenses involving illegal drugs or the use of firearms, there are obvious risks associated with offering these individuals football scholarships. The danger, of course, is a repeat offense on a college campus, which could endanger students and subject a university to adverse publicity, not to mention the possibility of lawsuits. On the other hand, there are situations where football is the only thing between a young man going to college and a young man ending up on the street.

Another potential trip wire for recruiters these days is the proliferation of street gangs. A 2011 study funded by the Justice Department found that nearly 70 percent of campus police chiefs and athletic directors who responded believed gang members were participating in athletics at their schools or another institution. “This is the first study that systematically looks at gang membership among Division I athletes,” said Scott Decker, director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State and the co-author of the study. “I think the most surprising thing was how aware police chiefs were of both the crimes that college athletes are involved in, but also the high level of gang membership among individuals recruited to play Division I athletics.”

Decker and his counterpart Geoffrey Alpert, a criminal justice professor at South Carolina, surveyed 120 BCS conference schools and 10 other universities with Division I basketball programs. “What it said to me is that gang membership in Division I athletics is a significant problem,” Decker said. “It is an issue we need to pay attention to because these young men and women bring a set of relationships with them, bring a set of past practices with them, that if left unattended could pose real problems and liabilities for universities.”

Perhaps no region of the United States better illustrates the dangerous nexus of street gangs and college football recruiting than the “South L.A. strip,” a stretch of gang-ravaged cities south of downtown Los Angeles that runs from Inglewood at the northern tip to Long Beach at the bottom. Compton, the birthplace of the Bloods and the Crips, is right in the center. The city of ninety-six thousand was called the murder capital of the United States in the 1990s. These days Compton is home to thirty-four active street gangs—often several on the same block—and more than a thousand gang members. It is also a hotbed for college football recruiting.

Keith Donerson has been coaching football at Compton’s Dominguez High for more than twenty-five years. Heading into the 2011 high school football season, he had five seniors on his roster who were being heavily recruited by BCS programs. All of them lived in neighborhoods plagued by gang violence.

“We try to let the kids know you have to pick a side,” Donerson said. “You’re either going to play football, or you’re going to be a gangster.”

Donerson, whose shaved head and steely gaze give him the appearance of a marine sergeant, spends about 60 percent of his time mentoring and 40
percent teaching Xs and Os. “Football decisions are minor,” Donerson said. “But a decision to go to a party is not minor. Not for these kids.”

One of the best high school football players in greater Los Angeles was murdered in Compton on May 24, 2009. Dannie Farber, an all-city wide receiver, was eating with his girlfriend at a fast-food restaurant when a member of the Tragniew Park Compton Crips gunned him down. Farber had no gang ties and didn’t know the shooter.

“A lot of kids in this neighborhood are gifted athletes,” said Sergeant Brandon Dean, a supervisor in the L.A. County sheriff’s office assigned to the gang unit in Compton. “Unfortunately, some get involved in a gang and commit crimes. Others get involved in the sense that they are mistaken as gang members and ultimately get shot and killed as a result.”

That’s what law enforcement officials believed happened to Farber. His senseless death shocked the city. USC’s head coach at the time, Pete Carroll, spoke at his funeral. Stevie Wonder sang.

Every high school football player at Dominguez knows the Dannie Farber story. He played for rival Narbonne High. In an attempt to minimize his players’ exposure to gang violence, Keith Donerson uses football as a substitute for family. “A lot of kids around here are raised by grandparents,” he said. “The father is in jail or dead. The mother is preoccupied. So the kid is on the street.”

Gangs typically fill the void left by broken homes. But at Dominguez, football offers an alternative. “We try to create a family-type atmosphere,” Donerson said. “We do a lot of things together. We lift weights, we run, we condition, and we go to camps. We spend a lot of time together.”

At the start of the 2011 season, Donerson sat down with four of his best players—offensive tackle Lacy Westbrook, linebacker Lavell Sanders and cornerbacks Brandon Beaver and Alphonso Marsh—to discuss the unique pressures of living in Compton. None of them had ever belonged to a gang, but all of them had witnessed gang violence.