The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (82 page)

The opening section of the chapter—set around the Ohio State–Michigan game—was based upon interviews for this work and the personal observations of James Oldham, a former reporter for the
Lantern
. The authors also conducted interviews with Tim Collins, Cayla Hellwarth and James Larcus.

All of the information quoted in the chapter was pulled from a wide variety of NCAA, public and internal records associated with the “tattoo-gate” scandal. These include: transcripts of NCAA interviews (Jim Tressel and Gene Smith), legal memos, extensive communications (letters) between Bobby DiGeronimo and Smith and e-mails, exhibits and other documents. This information was backed by published reports on
Yahoo! Sports;
detailed reporting by Tim May in the
Columbus Dispatch;
Zack Meissel and James Oldham at the
Lantern;
the
New York Times; Sports Illustrated
magazine (specifically, “The Fall of Jim Tressel,” by George Dohrmann with David Epstein);
ESPN the Magazine;
ESPN.com
; press releases issued by the university’s in-house media relations department; and
NCAA.org
.

The Jim Tressel recorded interview with NCAA investigators took place on the Ohio State campus on February 8, 2011.

A request to interview Coach Tressel about his relationship with Bobby DiGeronimo and his experience at Ohio State was made via e-mail to the University of Akron athletic department on April 1, 2013. The following day Wayne Hill, the school’s associate vice president and chief marketing officer, e-mailed the authors stating Tressel had declined to participate.

Tressel’s Response to Notice of Allegations, Case Number M352, was offered by Gene A. Marsh and William H. King III of the Birmingham, Alabama, law firm of Light-foot, Franklin & White.

One of the authors attempted to speak with Chris Cicero. After a brief phone conversation on October 31, 2012, saying he would like to talk, Cicero declined to respond to further requests for comment. In a March 2011 interview with ESPN’s John Barr, Cicero
said that in his mind “confidential” meant the media or the public; it was not his intention, he said, to stop Tressel from going to the school or proper authorities. “I wanted him to know that the kids had been hanging out with a person who was the subject of a federal investigation,” Cicero told Barr.

The dialogue and discussions depicted during the 2012 national convention of directors of football operations at the Omni Hotel in Fort Worth on May 8, 2012, were witnessed by one of the authors. Multiple follow-up e-mails and interviews with Matt Doyle of Stanford and Zachary Maurides, founder and head of accounts for Logistical Athletic Solutions, formed the basis of both men’s profiles.

Doyle’s “Duties and Responsibilities” and “A Day in the Life” were provided as attachments to e-mails in May 2012.

The return on investment analysis cited by Maurides was done by LAS in the fall of 2011 and reviewed and approved by Duke University.

The main interview with Cleve Bryant took place at the Four Seasons hotel in Austin, Texas, on October 4, 2011. Both authors were present and took extensive on-the-record notes. Subsequent attempts to follow up with Bryant, who said he was considering writing his own book, were met with limited success. Bryant’s background information was available online.

An interview was conducted with Bryant’s attorney, Tom Nesbitt. Attorney Gloria Allred declined our request for an interview.

Reporting by Steve Delsohn for ESPN’s
Outside the Lines
in September 2011 was critical in detailing the harassment charge by Rachel Arena against Bryant. Equally important was Delsohn’s September 15 story posted on
ESPN.com
in which Arena’s formal complaint is quoted at length. Articles in the
Austin American-Statesman
proved important as well, including “Football Aide Cleve Bryant Fighting Dismissal, Lawyer Says” on June 23, 2011.

The three-page University of Texas “Summary of Investigation,” dated September 8, 2011, is cited and quoted extensively in this work. It was obtained through an Open Records request filed with the State of Texas. Attempts to obtain Rachel Arena’s formal complaint through the same office were resisted by the university’s chief legal counsel. According to June Harden, an assistant attorney general in the Open Records Division of the Attorney General’s Office, ESPN was able to obtain Arena’s complaint because at the time of its request the case was still ongoing and the Summary of Investigation had not been completed. Once it was, by law, the university said, Arena’s formal complaint was no longer available. The AG’s Office did not necessarily concur.

The University of Texas interview with Cleve Bryant took place in the law office of DeShazo & Nesbitt in Austin on November 3, 2010, and was part of the public record in the case. Bryant’s denial of the charges and his attorney Tom Nesbitt’s question about the availability of the texts are derived from that source. Follow-up e-mails were exchanged with Nesbitt, and interviews were subsequently conducted with his client’s approval.

The following individuals were interviewed for this chapter: Bronco Mendenhall, Gary Crowton, Tom Holmoe, Kyle Whittingham, LaVell Edwards, Kyle Van Noy, Kelly Van Noy and McQueen High defensive coordinator Jim Snelling.

One of the authors spent many hours with Kyle Van Noy and Bronco Mendenhall, chronicling their relationship, starting with their initial encounter at a church building in Reno, Nevada. All of the dialogue between them in this chapter comes from interviews with them.

Our reporting on Manti Te’o and BYU’s efforts to recruit him was based on interviews with Mendenhall, supplemented by published reports. Our reporting on the arrest of Shiloah Te’o was based on interviews with Mendenhall, supplemented by published reports in the
Deseret News
and the
Salt Lake Tribune
.

The following individuals were interviewed for this chapter: T. Boone Pickens, OSU’s athletic director Mike Holder, Robert “Bobby” Stillwell, Chief Justice Steven W. Taylor and OSU’s associate AD Jesse Martin.

One of the authors also spent time with the Auburn booster Jimmy Rane and attended his annual charity golf tournament and fund-raising dinner for the Jimmy Rane Foundation on May 17–18, 2012, in Georgia. But after numerous e-mail and personal exchanges over many months, Rane ultimately declined a lengthy on-the-record interview.

Published reports, as well as an independent investigation commissioned by the NCAA, were relied on for information on booster Nevin Shapiro at Miami. The SMU scandal material came from published reports.

All quotations and dialogue pertaining to the hiring of Mike Holder and the financial contributions to Oklahoma State by Boone Pickens are based on interviews conducted by the authors. One exception is the statement “I want us to be competitive … I’d bet my ass on it,” attributed to Pickens. That appeared in the
New York Times
. Background reporting was also obtained from T. Boone Pickens,
The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America’s Energy Future
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2009).

One of the authors spent a weekend traveling with Pickens, which entailed shadowing him at his office, riding in a car with him, flying on his private plane on two occasions and sleeping at his home on his ranch. The author also attended the Oklahoma State–Texas game in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on September 29, 2012. The material from that weekend—all quotations, dialogues and scenes—is based on firsthand observations by one of the authors.

The following individuals were interviewed for this chapter: Teresa Braeckel, Lauren Gavin, Sarah Washington, Derrick Washington, Donald Washington and prosecutor Andrea Hayes. Interviews were also conducted with tutors at Georgia, South Carolina and Miami. Both Braeckel and Gavin gave permission for their names to be used.

Attorneys Christopher Slusher and Bogdan Susan declined to be interviewed. Missouri’s football coach Gary Pinkel did not respond to an interview request.

Details of the assault and the events leading up to it were taken from interviews with Teresa Braeckel, Derrick Washington and Lauren Gavin, along with hundreds of pages of court records and trial transcripts. Courtroom scenes and statements attributed to Judge Kevin Crane were obtained from trial transcripts. In all, the authors reviewed more than five hundred pages of court records and trial transcripts.

The information about Missouri basketball player Michael Dixon was obtained from court records and interviews. The domestic violence incident involving Derrick Washington was obtained from court records and published reports. The description of Gary Pinkel’s arrest is based on published reports.

The following individuals were interviewed for this chapter: Bill Moos, Elson Floyd, Kevin Weiberg, Dave Brown and Tom Holmoe.

Dialogue between Bill Moos and Phil Knight is from interviews with Moos. Dialogue between Moos and Floyd is based on multiple interviews with them. The dialogue from the Pac-12 meetings and the negotiations on conference realignment and the new television contract are based on nearly a hundred pages of minutes and notes from the Pac-12 meetings held in 2010 and 2011, along with interviews with Moos and Weiberg.

Both authors visited NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis on May 23, 2012, and jointly conducted interviews with Rachel Newman Baker, Chance Miller and Brynna Barnhart. President Mark Emmert’s quotations and thoughts are derived from numerous public
sources and NCAA sources. One of the authors attended the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in December 2012 in New York, where Mark Emmert participated in a one-on-one discussion moderated by Abraham Madkour, executive editor at Sports
BusinessDaily.com
. Emmert’s NCAA convention speeches were available at
NCAA.org
and highlighted in
USA Today
.

Reporting on the world of 7-on-7 was centered on one of the authors’ three-day visit to the IMG National Championships in the summer of 2012 and a subsequent visit in 2013. Interviews there were conducted with former IMG vice president Odis Lloyd; Chris Ciaccio, then vice president of marketing and outreach for IMG; Chris Weinke, director of football at IMG Academy; performance coach Trevor Moawad; and Josh Clark and Johnny Esfeller of IMG.

A lengthy interview with Coach Dave Schuman, founder of the New Jersey–based National Underclassmen, the largest and most comprehensive touring combine system in high school football, proved invaluable in understanding the growth of scouting combines, camps and the culture of 7-on-7. NUC had grown from just five events in 2007 to more than a hundred events and twenty thousand kids by 2012.

Brett Goetz, founder of South Florida Express, was interviewed multiple times on a variety of 7-on-7 subjects.

The Jimmy D. Smith/James Smith reporting included two interviews with Smith, an NCAA investigator and Charles Fishbein of Elite Scouting Services. It was supplemented with a deep dig into various high school recruiting Web sites. Smith’s employment at
NOLA.com
was confirmed in a September 25, 2012, background interview with James O’Byrne, the
Times-Picayune
editor in charge of high school sports.

From the beginning the Will Lyles story belonged to Charles Robinson and Dan Wetzel at
Yahoo! Sports
. We just followed in their footsteps.

Descriptions of Baron Flenory’s power and the rise of New Level Athletics could be found online at “7-on-7: Recruiting’s New Battleground,”
Foxsports.com
, March 13, 2011; “Is 7-on-7 King Baron Flenory the Next Sonny Vaccaro?,”
LostLettermen.com
, June 28, 2011; “Flenory on Recruiting Controversy: I Feel Targeted,” March 14, 2011,
CBSSports.com
; and other Web sites, such as
oregonlive.com
.

The description of the NCAA’s investigation into booster Nevin Shapiro and the University of Miami was based largely on the independent report issued by Kenneth L. Wainstein of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP on February 17, 2013: “Report on the NCAA’s Engagement of a Source’s Counsel and Use of the Bankruptcy Process in Its University of Miami Investigation.”

Media criticism of Mark Emmert based upon the NCAA’s investigation of Miami was best summarized in two articles on
SI.com
posted on January 24, 2013. One column, written by Andy Staples, was headlined “It’s Time for the NCAA to Make Sweeping Changes.” The other, by Stewart Mandel, was headlined “Emmert’s NCAA Loses More Credibility After Miami Misstep.”

The description of certain feelings of frustration and tension inside the NCAA enforcement staff was derived from conversations with members of that staff.

Attorney Larry H. James was interviewed at his Columbus law office on May 24, 2012, and several times by telephone. The Cleveland attorney James P. Conroy, a former Buckeye lineman, was also interviewed about Bobby DiGeronimo.

The memorandums cited in the chapter in defense of DeVier Posey and Daniel Herron, and containing things such as the “family tree,” a spreadsheet of deposits, time cards and cellular records, were written by Larry James and provided to the authors. They were sent to Doug Archie and either Chance Miller or Tim Nevius. They are dated July 8, 2011, September 26, 27, 30, 2011. The “$3.07” memo was dated October 11, 2011, and sent to Doug Archie at Ohio State.

The recorded Gene Smith interview with investigators took place on October 14, 2011, on the Ohio State campus. A request to interview Smith about his decision to dissociate
Bobby DiGeronimo and discrepancies between Smith’s account of their conversations and that of DiGeronimo was made to the Ohio State athletic department via e-mail on April 1, 2013. On April 4, 2013, senior associate athletic director Diane Sabau e-mailed the authors that Smith had respectfully declined the request.