The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (7 page)

Earps and Johnson made such a good impression that the father of one player invited them to spend the night with his family. But the Byrnes team mother stepped in. “Look,” she told Earps and Johnson, “you girls need to get a hotel tonight and get out of town in the morning.”

“If only Lane had given me his credit card,” Earps joked.

The team mother didn’t laugh. Instead, she led the girls to a local hotel and paid for their room. The following morning Earps and Johnson trekked back to Knoxville. But before they got home, they heard from Coach Reaves. He told them that the Byrnes coach had called him and expressed concern about Tennessee hostesses being at the game.

“Reaves said that we were basically too obvious,” Earps said. “But he told us that he denied knowing anything about it.”

Earps was puzzled. “I thought, ‘And you are just going to cover it up?’ I just felt, well, if he’s going to play dumb, so will I.”

Nonetheless, it didn’t sit well with Earps. It was as if they were trying to hide something. If that had been the point, they would not have held up signs saying come to Tennessee. Earps and Johnson didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. If the coaches knew otherwise, why did they compliment the signs? And why give them gas money for the trip? And why did Kiffin encourage the whole thing in the first place at the team luncheon?

Later that night, Miller and Willis traveled to Knoxville for the Tennessee–Ohio game. Earps and Johnson met up with them on campus. And they continued to maintain steady contact with both recruits through social media. Both players committed to Tennessee midway through the season. By that point, the trip to Byrnes High seemed like old news. Besides, the program had a more urgent public relations mess on its hands.

On November 12, three of Kiffin’s prized freshman recruits—including receiver Nu’Keese Richardson—were arrested by Knoxville police for felony attempted armed robbery outside a convenience store. One of the players approached a parked car, opened the driver’s-side door, brandished a weapon and told the individual in the driver’s seat, “Give me everything you have.” The other player opened the rear passenger’s-side door and told the occupant, “Give us everything you’ve got.” A store security camera captured the entire incident. And police recovered a powered pellet gun from the car driven by the players. Richardson pleaded guilty to reduced charges. All three players were kicked off the team.

At the same time, coaches continued to recruit players of questionable character, which put increased pressure on the members of Orange Pride. At one point, one of the assistant coaches approached Earps with a particularly onerous request. “One recruit was coming into town, and one of the coaches actually asked me if I knew any girls that would ‘show him a good time.’ ”

Earps was not naïve. She’d certainly heard stories about hostesses having sex with recruits. But intimacy with high school athletes was something she never considered and never witnessed. Nor did she appreciate seeing a coach actively on the hunt for a girl to go to bed with a recruit. “He wasn’t expecting an Orange Pride hostess to do that,” Earps said. “He was looking for other girls that might do that.”

Still, the whole idea turned her off, and she put the coach in his place. “No, absolutely not,” Earps told the coach.

Charli Henry said she was never outright asked to sleep with a player either. But the expectation of sex to lure high school recruits was something she felt almost immediately after she joined Orange Pride. “I am a competitive
person,” Henry said. “I did not want to be a mediocre recruiter. I wanted to be a top recruiter.”

Henry felt compromised, the reality far from the television fantasy she admired growing up. “It’s kinda like a Catch-22,” she said. “You wear high heels and your blazer. You look your best. I could always see myself as one of those beautiful women on the football field. But when you get into it and you learn the real reason you dress like that, the real reason your pants are tight, it’s just warped. That was the reality for me.”

As the 2009 season wound down, Henry began to question the whole idea of using hostesses to help recruit. “These are high school boys,” she said. “They have one thing on their mind. So if you can show them that if you’re a UT football player, this is what you get …

“What I realized in my experience was that it wasn’t really what I expected,” she said. “It really altered my opinion on the whole thing. From the athletic department’s perspective it didn’t matter how the recruit got there. Whatever it took. A lot of people turned a blind eye. That was very unsettling to me.

“I could recruit, but I couldn’t do what I was supposed to do, something that was ethically wrong to me in my mind. So at that point I was just disgusted, completely disgusted.”

Henry decided she would not return to Orange Pride after the season ended.

Tennessee played its final regular-season game on November 28, defeating Kentucky 30–24. The win gave Tennessee a 7-5 record and earned the Vols an invitation to a bowl game against Virginia Tech. As soon as the regular season ended, Earps turned her attention to final exams. On December 8 she was studying in the library when she got a message over Facebook from a friend: “OMG—did you see article?” The message contained a link to a
New York Times
story:
N.C.A.A. PUTS TENNESSEE
’
S RECRUITING UNDER SCRUTINY
.

Earps opened the link and began reading: “The N.C.A.A. is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into the University of Tennessee’s football recruiting practices, according to interviews with several prospects, their family members and high school administrators. A significant part of the investigation is focused on the use of recruiting hostesses who have become folk heroes on Tennessee Internet message boards for their ability to help lure top recruits.”

The article centered on the trip to Byrnes High to recruit Willis and Miller. The article named the players but not the hostesses. “It is not clear whether the university sent the hostesses to visit the football players,” the
Times
reported. The piece also mentioned the recruitment of Bryce Brown and made reference to a picture of him with an unnamed hostess (Earps) that had surfaced on a social media Web site.

Earps was horrified. “The story didn’t name me, but I knew it was about me,” she said.

Unable to concentrate, she packed up her laptop and left the library.

The university promptly issued a statement acknowledging an NCAA review and promising full cooperation. “We are concerned about the alleged activities of some members of the Orange Pride,” the university said. “Both university and NCAA guidelines are a part of the Orange Pride’s orientation and training. If those guidelines were violated, we will take appropriate action.”

The next day, Corey Miller’s father spoke to the
Knoxville News Sentinel
. “Nobody put these girls on these boys,” Miller said. “It wasn’t like they came to our boys. Our boys started talking to them.”

Miller said he was unsure whether his son was dating one of the hostesses. “They became friends,” the elder Miller said. “I know they talk an awful lot. I don’t know if he calls it dating or not. I don’t think there’s anything wrong.”

Miller may have intended to downplay the situation. But by that point the story had legs. After Kiffin had accused Urban Meyer of recruiting violations, the specter of his program being caught playing fast and loose with the rules was garnering national attention. It was a particularly explosive story in Knoxville. Later that day, Earps went to a local supermarket to pick up some groceries. While checking out, the clerk recognized her. “Hey,” he called out, “it’s her.” He held up the sports section of the Knoxville paper.

Mortified, Earps hurried out of the store. “I was on the front page of the sports section,” she said. “I thought my life was over. I felt like people were staring at me everywhere.”

Earps returned to her apartment and locked the door, afraid to show her face in public. She didn’t even come out to take her final exam. More than anything, she just wanted the situation to die down.

But it didn’t. Three days after the
Times
story appeared, SI.com published the photograph that Andy Staples had taken of Earps and Johnson standing with Willis and Miller. “I did not know who the women were at the time,” Staples said in his SI.com piece, “and did not put two and two together until the
Times
published its story.”

The SI.com photograph instantly went viral. The next morning Earps got a call from Lane Kiffin. “I didn’t answer, because it was early in the morning,” Earps said. “He left a message: ‘Hey, Lacey, it’s Coach Kiffin.’ He said, ‘This will pass. My dad has always told me to give it the forty-eight-hour rule. The media will talk about it for forty-eight hours, and then it will pass. It will go away.’ ”

Earps hoped Kiffin was right. “I just remember feeling the coaches are going to help us,” she said. “Everything is going to be okay.”

Lacey Earps never heard another word from Lane Kiffin. But just before Christmas, assistant athletic director David Blackburn called her and Dahra Johnson into his office. “I’m going to have to temporarily suspend you until this investigation is over,” he told them.

The girls were crushed. “He asked me not to have contact with recruits,” Earps said. “I couldn’t work anymore.”

Earps couldn’t help feeling as if she’d been thrown under the bus.

“Orange Pride was something I loved,” Earps said. “I never did anything to be ashamed of. I just wish I had never gone to Byrnes. And I would have never done that without being encouraged. That is the main reason I did go. I wasn’t planning on going. Then I got talked into it. So I went.”

A week after Earps and Johnson lost their jobs, Tennessee lost to Virginia Tech 37–14 in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, capping off a 7-6 season that included close losses to Alabama and top-ranked Florida. Kiffin pledged that he and his staff were just getting started. But on January 10, USC’s head coach, Pete Carroll, announced he was jumping to the NFL to coach the Seattle Seahawks. Two days later, Kiffin accepted an offer to become the Trojans’ new head coach.

Eight freshman recruits—the best players Kiffin and his staff had recruited—had just arrived on campus and enrolled in classes in order to be eligible to participate in spring practice. When Kiffin told them and the rest of his team that he was leaving, they were confused and angry. By signing letters of intent, they were not eligible to simply transfer to another school.

On the evening of January 12, Kiffin held a press conference at the Neyland-Thompson Sports Center. “This was not an easy decision,” he said. “This is something that happens very quick. We’ve been here fourteen months, and the support has been unbelievable here. I really believe the only place I would have left here to go was … Southern California.”

His remarks lasted fifty-nine seconds. He did not take questions.

As he turned to leave, a reporter shouted, “What does this mean for recruiting, Lane?”

Kiffin just walked off.

The news didn’t go over well on the Knoxville campus. Students rioted outside the sports center, burning mattresses and trying to block Kiffin from leaving the building. Campus police had to drive him home, and police security had to be positioned around his home that night.

Suddenly the program was in shambles. Bryce Brown, after rushing for 460 yards as a freshman, transferred to Kansas State. Byrnes recruit Brandon Willis de-committed and signed with North Carolina instead.

As Kiffin and players he had recruited left town, NCAA investigators showed up. The university contacted Earps and Johnson, requesting that they turn over their cell phone records. It also informed the girls that an NCAA investigator wanted to talk with them.

Earps knew one thing: The forty-eight-hour rule may have worked for Kiffin. But it wasn’t working for her. She figured she’d better find a lawyer.