The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (80 page)

On this night, they were.

When the ceremony finally ended, Saban descended the stage into a barricaded area reserved for family and friends. There was only one more place to go. And his security team pushed toward it against a crush of television cameras and photographers. Finally, Saban made it—to the exit, near Section 156, right behind a goalpost. The cheers and screams grew even louder. Before he left the field, Saban stood for a moment—only a moment—and let the sound of worship wash over him. Then he was on the move again. But just before he disappeared into the tunnel and out of sight, Saban’s right hand rose up, tentative at first, until a single index finger pointed straight to the sky. Saban’s way of saying that until somebody proved it on the field, when it meant the most, there was but one team, one coach, one system, in big-time college football.

For one night, everything glorious about college football was on display. The vivid pageantry, collective excellence, communal celebration and fierce competition provided the grand spectacle only NCAA football played at its highest level can deliver. One could almost forget the unremitting pressure, the scandals haunting the sport—the bidding wars for top recruits; the booster payoffs; the horrific injuries; the academic cheating; the rising tide of criminal acts; the brute fact that the young men who sacrificed on the field were interchangeable pieces who received exactly none of the billions of dollars of revenue the game generated.

Almost.

This book could not have been written without exceptional access to the individuals and programs profiled on these pages. We are indebted to them for their time, their hospitality and, most important, their trust. So we begin by thanking those who allowed us to see, hear and tell their stories:

Mike and Sharon Leach; Michael Crabtree; Graham Harrell; former Tennessee hostesses Lacey Earps and Charlotte Henry; Dave Brandon, Brady Hoke and Dave Ablauf at the University of Michigan; Don King in Austin, Texas; former BYU head coaches LaVell Edwards and Gary Crowton; detective Devon Jensen and prosecutor Donna Kelly in Provo, Utah; attorney Ted Liggett in Lubbock, Texas; Kent Hance and Guy Bailey at Texas Tech; Craig James; Rob and Jared Ambrose, Devin Crosby, Mike Waddell and David Nevins at Towson; Matt Doyle at Stanford; Zach Maurides from Duke; Cleve Bryant at Texas and his attorney Tom Nesbitt; Kyle Van Noy, Ezekiel “Ziggy” Ansah, Bronco Mendenhall and Tom Holmoe at BYU; T. Boone Pickens; Mike Holder at Oklahoma State; former Missouri tutors Teresa Braeckel and Lauren Gavin; prosecutor Andrea Hayes in Columbia, Missouri; Sarah, Donald and Derrick Washington; Bill Moos, Elson Floyd and Mike Marlow at Washington State University; Chance Miller, Brynna Barnhart and Rachel Newman Baker at the NCAA; Ohio State booster Bobby DiGeronimo; agent Gary O’Hagan; Joe Giansante; Nick Saban, the late Mal M. Moore and Jeff Purinton at Alabama; former Florida State lineman Jarad Moon; Marcus Lattimore and his agent Pat Dye Jr.; the entire Ricky Seals-Jones family; Alabama student Samuel Jurgens; Notre Dame alumnus Tom Seeberg; Coach Keith Donnerson and his players Alphonso Marsh, Brandon Beaver, Lacy Westbrook and Lavell Sanders at Dominguez High in Compton, California; LAPD’s Brandon Dean; Kyle Whittingham at Utah; the entire Washington State coaching staff; and ESPN’s John Skipper, Burke Magnus, Lee Fitting, Keri A. Potts and the entire team at
College GameDay
.

Behind the scenes there were many more who helped arrange and facilitate our reporting. We can’t possibly name them all. But we are especially
grateful to: Jay Rosser in T. Boone Pickens’s office; Sally Geymuller and Monica Long at Oklahoma State University; Brett Pyne and Kenny Cox at BYU; Stacey Osburn and Erik Christianson at the NCAA; Travis Van Noy; Debbie Nankivell, Robert Giovannetti, Linda Ann Nelson, Gil Picciotto, Ginger Druffel, Debra Jo Dzuck and William Stevens at Washington State University; attorney Bill Marler; agents Todd Semersheim and Jonathan Butnick; court officials Diana Taylor and Bonnie Adkins in Columbia, Missouri; paralegal Eunice McMillan in Ted Liggett’s law office in Lubbock, Texas; and George Pine, Ben Sutton, Sandy Montag, Kim Berard and Johnny Esfeller IV at IMG.

At
Sports Illustrated
, former editor in chief Terry McDonell and college football editor B. J. Schecter championed the feature stories we wrote on crime and gangs in college football. This book grew out of those projects. At CBS News, producer Josh Gaynor and associate producer Sarah Fitzpatrick collaborated with us on those stories. Gratitude to CBS News chairman Jeff Fager, CBS News president David Rhodes, former CBS News president Sean McManus and producer Craig Silver and his entire CBS Sports college football crew.

We also had a great team working with us in the trenches: reporters Timothy Bella, James Oldham and Michael McKnight; researchers J. J. Feinauer and Jeff Gasser; photographer Deanne Fitzmaurice; editor Craig Neff; fact-checker Alex Wolff; intern Hannah Waite, IT specialist Cameron Berry; and travel agent extraordinaire Mark Johnson.

Our agent Richard Pine at Inkwell Management was a visionary behind this book idea and a driving force to see it through to completion. We are grateful for his impossibly high standards and professional touch. We can’t say enough about William Thomas, publisher and editor in chief at Doubleday. He was involved in every step of this project and provided exceptional guidance and a skillful editor’s touch to the manuscript. His trusted assistant Coralie Hunter was indispensable. Publicist Todd Doughty and attorney Amelia Zalcman were valuable members of our team, too.

Deep and abiding thanks to the Flemings, Jonathan and Amy, two family members whose gracious offer to stay at their beautiful Cape Cod summer house on Wakeby Pond for seventeen quiet days and nights made all the writing difference in the world.

Finally, we pay tribute to our families. The book is dedicated to Lydia Benedict and Dede Keteyian for a reason. They put up with us and lived through every step of this two-year odyssey through big-time college football with us. We are two very lucky guys.

Much of this book is based on firsthand observations. Between September 2011 and April 2013 we spent more than four hundred hours shadowing and interviewing coaches, athletic directors, student-athletes, boosters, high school recruits, directors of football operations, ESPN
GameDay
crew members, NCAA investigators and fans. We attended spring practices, off-season workouts, team meetings, fall camps and 7-on-7 tournaments. We also traveled with teams (by charter plane and bus) and were present on the sidelines or in the locker room before, during and after games. In addition, we traveled and attended games with boosters, fans, athletic directors, university presidents and television broadcasters. In all, we attended fourteen regular-season games, the SEC Championship game and two bowl games (including the national championship game) during the 2012–13 season.

Throughout all of our reporting we carried tape recorders. In many instances we also chronicled our travels with still photography or video. Virtually all of the descriptions and dialogue from chapters that take place between 2011 and 2013 come from what we or our designated reporters saw and heard firsthand.

For this book we also conducted more than five hundred interviews, including multiple interviews with key characters. Some of those were done with individuals we were shadowing or observing. But many more were conducted for chapters that cover incidents and events prior to September 2011. Almost all interviews were on the record, and many of them were tape-recorded. Some cases were also videotaped as part of a story on big-time college football that aired on
60 Minutes
in the fall of 2012. Most of the quotations in the book are from our observations or our interviews. When they’re derived from a different source, we’ve done our best to cite it here. In instances where we reconstructed dialogue, we almost always attempted to interview both parties to the conversations. We also pulled quotations and dialogue from trial transcripts, grand jury transcripts, NCAA interviews, court depositions, affidavits, police reports and video-recorded press conferences, practices and games. The sources for quotations that did not come from our reporting—and were not public statements—are noted below.

Hundreds of people are identified by name in this book. We used pseudonyms in only four instances. The identities of a juvenile rape victim and a member of her family who was a witness for the prosecution were changed to protect their privacy in accordance with customary journalism standards consistent with the rape shield law. The other sexual assault victims who are identified by name in the book authorized us to do so. The names of a University of Texas football player and a stripper with whom he maintained a sexual relationship were withheld at their request because reporting their names would jeopardize their current employment.

With a couple exceptions, we did not use anonymous sources in this book.

Along the way, we had invaluable assistance from four reporters and one photojournalist who worked on the book. Timothy Bella, a former producer and investigative reporter for
CBSNews.com
in New York and now the lead digital producer/reporter for Al Jazeera America’s
America Tonight
, did extensive statistical research, conducted forty-two interviews and helped write the chapter on injuries. J. J. Feinauer is Jeff Benedict’s executive assistant. He developed and maintained a database that tracked player injuries, arrests and graduation rates. He also conducted twenty-five interviews and helped write
the chapter on injuries. Jeff Gasser, a former research assistant to Jeff Benedict, did extensive reporting for the
Sports Illustrated
cover story on college football and crime. Gasser also compiled a September 2011 research report that helped form the basis of the authors’ proposal for this work. James Oldham, a former reporter at the
Lantern
, the newspaper of record at Ohio State, conducted ten interviews and worked on one of the Ohio State chapters. Deanne Fitzmaurice is a Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer. She accompanied the authors while they shadowed players and coaches at Washington State, Alabama, BYU, Utah and Dominguez High in Compton, California.

In addition,
Sports Illustrated
executive editor B. J. Schecter oversaw the six-month investigation that led to the
SI
cover story on college football and crime, as well as the feature story on college football and gangs. Those two pieces were instrumental to the foundation of this book. Schecter, who also oversees college football for the magazine, had a direct hand in shaping the Ohio State chapters and providing input at various junctures of the project. Craig Neff, a former colleague of Armen Keteyian’s at
Sports Illustrated
and now an assistant managing editor who has edited some of Jeff Benedict’s pieces at the magazine, provided invaluable editing and editorial counsel on several chapters, including those involving Towson University, Ricky Seals-Jones and Alabama. It goes without saying that a book of this depth and scope is not possible without the groundwork laid by writers and reporters who cover college football on a regular basis. With that in mind we’d like to offer a heartfelt nod to, in particular, Andy Staples, Stewart Mandel and Pete Thamel of
Sports Illustrated
, Bruce Feldman of
CBSSports.com
, Dan Wetzel and Charles Robinson of
Yahoo! Sports
, Steve Wieberg at
USA Today
and Greg Bishop of the
New York Times
.

Finally, any mistakes are those of the authors and the authors alone.

The descriptions, conditions and play-by-play of the Notre Dame–Alabama game are based on firsthand observations by the authors and official game notes. The kind of stadium lights (halide) used was confirmed by the engineering department at Sun Life Stadium. The source of teams on probation for major violations came from the NCAA’s database on such matters. The Auburn graduation rate and white-black disparity came from an abstract written by Rodney K. Smith, a distinguished professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. The time demand figures were part of a GOALS study of approximately twenty thousand student-athletes conducted in the spring of 2010 and presented to the 2011 NCAA Convention. The October 2009 Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics report (“College Sports 101”) proved invaluable, as did
USA Today
’s extensive research and continued reporting on coaching salaries. The spending differential statistics between academics and athletics were the product of a 2010 research study conducted by the American Institutes for Research. Principal researcher Donna M. Desrochers was the author of the study.

The quotations attributed to Brent Musburger were taken directly from the ESPN broadcast.

The portrayal of Mike Leach is based on extensive interviews with Mike and Sharon Leach. Some biographical information was also taken from his autobiography,
Swing Your Sword: Leading the Charge in Football and Life
(New York: Diversion Books, 2011); Michael Lewis’s profile “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep,”
New York Times Magazine
, December 4, 2005; and a
60 Minutes
segment on Leach that aired on January 4, 2009.