But he was far too smart to assume logic would carry the day with the NCAA.
At ten thirty we walked into a small classroom that probably hadn’t changed since the building was constructed in 1938, right down to the black chalkboards at the front of the class. The room barely fit fifteen people, thirteen of whom were Asian or Asian-American, all of whom wore glasses. The remaining two were John Urschel and yours truly. Once class started, I quickly discovered that fourteen of the fifteen people understood what the hell was going on.
You can guess who the fifteenth person was.
My life has given me the opportunity to feel stupid many, many times—but I can say, without equivocation, that I have never felt dumber than I did that day. Walking the streets of Taipei, Tokyo, or Thailand, staring at signs I couldn’t possibly read, I felt more literate than I did in that class, staring at Professor Xu’s incomprehensible squiggles, running endlessly across those boards.
Near the end of class, Professor Xu said something that must have been a whopper of a joke, because it made the entire class chuckle.
After class, Urschel explained it to me, more or less. “It was a ‘determinant joke,’ ” he said—and really, who isn’t a sucker for a good ol’ determinant joke? “It usually includes complex sums involving cofactors, but when put in context in differential forms, it came out to a very simple equation. And that was the joke.”
Get it?
I didn’t, either.
Walking out together, on a beautiful day, Urschel said to Professor Xu, “The last few classes were very abstract, so it was good to see some concrete, real-world examples.”
For the first time all day, I could not stifle my laughter—even if it was at my own expense.
Urschel bid Professor Xu good afternoon and continued across the quad. “Penn State has been really good to me,” Urschel said, clearly satisfied with his decision. Given everything the university had already gone through in 2012—from Paterno’s passing to Sandusky’s trial to the NCAA sanctions and now an 0-2 start—that was saying a lot.
If the NCAA was, in fact, setting up an obstacle course to test the faith of the Penn State players like Job himself, Urschel’s conclusion might constitute the gold standard for student-athlete testimonials.
He still believed in the student-athlete ideal—and not because of the NCAA, but in spite of it.
• • •
Probably no critique of the NCAA was more withering and garnered more attention than the cover story Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch wrote for the Atlantic monthly in the fall of 2011.
In his piece, titled “The Shame of College Sports,” Branch laid out the case against NCAA control of college athletics. He started with an anecdote from a 2001 gathering of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, which had been formed in 1991 to save college sports from being swallowed by the money it was generating.
Sonny Vaccaro, a sports-marketing executive who had made a name for himself setting up lucrative sponsorships between Nike, Adidas, and Reebok and the top college athletic programs, addressed an august body of former college presidents and NCAA and USOC directors.
“I’m not hiding,” he told them. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is to buy your school. Or buy your coach.”
“Why,” Penn State president-emeritus Bryce Jordan asked, with thinly veiled contempt, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”
“They shouldn’t, sir,” Vaccaro said, with a smile. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir, but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”
“Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” former UNC system president William Friday told Branch. “I never will forget it.”
Of course, it’s not just the sneaker companies pouring millions into college athletic departments. Just about every major television network does, too, not to mention countless donors, sponsors, and bowl backers. Most of them get their money back, many times over, or they wouldn’t write the checks in the first place. They make so much—the TV contract for March Madness alone has grown from $16.6 million a year to $770 million in just thirty years—they could still leave enough crumbs on the table for the SEC to gross more than a billion dollars a year in 2010, and the Big Ten to do so two years later.
Head football coaches at Division I public universities now average more than $2 million a year, an increase of 750 percent (adjusted for inflation) since 1984, which is about twenty times more than professors’ salaries increased over the same period. In 2012, the highest-paid state employee in twenty-seven states was a football coach, and in thirteen it was a basketball coach. The number of states whose highest-paid public employee was a university president? Four. The explosion in CEO pay, and the rationales that go with it, would be a fair comparison.
As Branch writes, “When you combine so much money with such high, almost tribal, stakes—football boosters are famously rabid in their zeal to have their alma mater win—corruption is likely to follow.”
The twist is that temptation has subsumed the enforcers, too, transforming the NCAA from mere sheriffs to saloonkeepers, too.
If you can’t guess which of those two jobs they’re more passionate about, you need only heed Deep Throat’s maxim: follow the money. Of the NCAA’s $777 million budget, only 1 percent of it is earmarked for enforcement, which hardly serves as an endorsement for its priorities, or its efficacy in keeping college sports clean. It’s all the more revealing to study just where the NCAA spends its relatively paltry resources for investigations.
When the Detroit Free Press ran a big, Sunday-front-page story six days before the 2009 season opener, alleging that the storied Michigan football program had blown past the limits for practice—sparking stories in almost every national media outlet—the NCAA spent fourteen months, and cost the university and former head coach Rich Rodriguez about a million dollars in legal fees, to determine that, yes, the Wolverines had unwittingly exceeded the NCAA rules by performing stretching exercises an average of fifteen minutes more per week than the rules allowed.
Yet when it came to the NCAA’s attention that dozens of University of North Carolina football and basketball players had, from 2007 to 2011, availed themselves of either “aberrant” or “irregularly” taught courses, defined by ESPN.com as those which entailed “unauthorized grade changes, forged faculty signatures on grade rolls and limited or no class time,” the NCAA did nothing. It argued that because a few of the students in those classes were not athletes, it was a university matter, not an NCAA one, and left the scandal for the university to clean up. The UNC chancellor decided it was a big enough blemish to warrant stepping down, even though he had had nothing to do with it.
If ensuring that athletes are bona fide students is not part of the central mission of the NCAA, from its very inception in 1905, you have to wonder what that mission might be. But there was little coverage or outrage over the UNC academic-fraud case, so the NCAA paid little price for ignoring it.
Likewise, the NCAA also refrained from making any judgments on the Baylor basketball case in which one player killed his teammate and the head coach lied about it and the Virginia lacrosse case in which one player killed his girlfriend, a member of the women’s team. In both cases, the NCAA suffered no public outcry for its inaction.
When the NCAA does go after someone, as Branch pointed out, it typically focuses its “public censure on powerless scapegoats.” Not the athletic directors or the head coaches—whose millions can buy teams of topflight lawyers—but the assistant coaches, the low-ranking administrators, the poorly paid tutors, and the players.
That’s when you realize: the NCAA is no longer an enforcement agency, but a marketing company. Once you grasp that, everything the NCAA does—and doesn’t do—suddenly
makes sense, including its decision to all but dismantle the Penn State athletic program. As ghastly as Sandusky’s crimes were, followed by the potential cover-up by university leaders who should surely have known better, these are serious criminal matters, better suited for the FBI than the NCAA. But the country was understandably apoplectic, at a time when criticism of college athletics and the NCAA was reaching a fever pitch.
The NCAA’s decision to suspend its own convoluted due process—the same one that can investigate fifteen minutes of stretching for fourteen months—and rely entirely on a report Penn State itself had commissioned to come up with sweeping sanctions, in just nine days, went a long way toward quieting those critics, at least for a time.
• • •
Mike Mauti didn’t have to read Taylor Branch’s piece to understand the house of mirrors the NCAA had become, because he’d been living in it for almost a year.
“The people who run college football, the NCAA, they’re so far removed, they have no idea what it’s really like,” he told me, as he sat on the couch under the window in Fitz’s office, just off the weight room, before Thursday practice. “The bottom line is, you can’t have that much power and that much money and look out for the best interest of the college athlete at the same time.
“If they were, they wouldn’t be letting other coaches camp out on our campus to recruit our players. The sanctions had nothing to do with our program, with what we’re doing here—but they’re letting boosters at Miami pay for their players’ abortions.”
As of April 2013, the NCAA was in the middle of botching an investigation of reports that University of Miami alums provided gifts to athletes including “memorabilia, cash amounts both large and small, dinners, strip-club trips, prostitutes, and even an abortion.”
“I know for a fact there are players getting paid,” Mauti said. “Guys I know are getting tens of thousands of dollars a year. They give you credit cards until they run out. There’s a lot of money involved. One hundred thousand dollars? Over the course of five years? Easily.
“I was offered money. They don’t come out and say they’re gonna give you this money. Players at other schools, they know the way things work. It’s a different culture at other places. They go through the churches, and the [car] dealerships, and the good old hundred-dollar handshakes.”
The NCAA’s leaders seem entirely unable, unwilling, or both to pursue the stories those of us inside the industry hear constantly. They rarely act on such rumors until local reporters, working with a tiny fraction of the NCAA’s resources, do the job for them and shame the NCAA enforcers into action. This familiar cycle does little to bolster our faith in the enterprise. (Mark Emmert and the NCAA declined to answer my questions.)
“They’re not serious,” Mauti said. “If you really wanted to discipline the teams that are doing the cheating, if they really wanted to cut out the corruption, they’d do their investigations and punish the schools that do that. It can’t be that hard. Everyone knows who they are.
“But they have to want to go after the cheaters. It’s not up to the public to determine that—it’s for them. Otherwise, what is the NCAA for? What do they do?”
Joe Paterno surely had his blind spots, but how to run a clean program was not among them. He had trained the whole town—not just the team, but the town—so thoroughly in the oddities of the NCAA rulebook that to this day even the baristas at Starbucks know they can’t give the players so much as a free latte. (I’ve witnessed this scene at the counter a few times—a must-see for cynics.)
The team’s longtime adherence to even the silliest of NCAA rules—and there are plenty—is rightly a point of pride in Happy Valley. But for decades it was also a point of pride for the NCAA, which often held up Paterno’s Penn State program as a shining example other schools should aspire to.
Again, if you view the NCAA as a marketing organization, this also makes sense. If they are occasionally forced to admit that some of their member schools’ alumni pay for abortions in Coral Gables, that boosters give six-figure “gifts” to Cam Newton’s father, and that USC’s “friends” bought Reggie Bush’s family a house, the NCAA needs at least some successful programs—Duke basketball, Notre Dame football—to wear white hats. Otherwise, we would have to conclude that nice guys can only finish last in big-time college sports. For decades, Penn State football stood as proof that the system could work.
Thus, when the Sandusky scandal broke, Penn State fell so far, and so publicly, the NCAA’s leaders felt they had to do something big and dramatic to—as they say—“protect the brand.” And so they did.
Yet, in spite of the kangaroo court that is the modern NCAA, I am struck by how many schools, coaches, and athletes play by the rules anyway and are quietly proud of it. Perhaps most surprising, despite everything that has happened in the past twelve months, the people in State College have continued to follow their strict orthodoxy, whether anyone cares or not.
• • •
Mauti returned to where he almost always returned: his teammates. “We’ve had great locker-room guys here, guys who knew what it was all about. Sean Lee. Devon Still. But this is the best locker room I’ve been around in my five years. Really.”
He pointed to a phrase on the weight room wall, BURN THE SHIPS, coined by Spanish general Cortés, who, legend has it, told his men they could not go back the way they had come because they had ignited their boats. Retreat was not an option. They would conquer, or die trying.
“Burn the ships? Man, we already did that,” Mauti said. “Sink or swim? We’re not going to sink no matter what happens on Saturday, or any day.
“For our senior class, we know our days are numbered. We only have a certain number of these practices and games left.”
Looking back on his decision to commit to Penn State in July of 2008, did he think he made the right decision?
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”
• • •
Friday, September 14, 2012: O’Brien had two basic problems: the present, and the future.
Atop the first list was Saturday’s game at home against Navy. But by Fridays, as Bo Schembechler used to say, “The hay is in the barn.” The game plan had been installed, the big practices were behind them, and they were down to fine-tuning. Every coach still worked to get an edge, but by the end of the week that edge was most likely to be found in executing fundamentals, not reinventing the wheel.
This realization left them a slice of time to look ahead to the most urgent item on the second list: recruiting. O’Brien opened the session by stating the obvious: to fill next year’s roster, they had serious needs “up and down the line.” But with only fifteen scholarships, they did not have the luxury of simply bolstering weak positions. Like Northwestern—though for different reasons—they would have to get creative.
“It’s imperative we find good football players—especially in the situation we’re in—wherever they play,” O’Brien said. “And we need to crank up the walk-on program. It’s an honor to be a walk-on player here. Maybe we can find a diamond in the rough.”
He mentioned one such diamond in the rough he’d talked with the previous night, who had boiled his choices down to Harvard or Penn State. “That’s the kind of guy we’re looking for.”
O’Brien’s plan was two-pronged: compete for the Academic All-Americans like John Urschel, the kind Harvard, Stanford, and Northwestern recruited; and get the best players in the region who grew up dreaming of playing for Penn State, guys like Pittsburgh native Mike Farrell, and then try to find talented walk-ons like Matt McGloin and develop them. O’Brien no longer regarded battling Alabama and Ohio State for Florida’s five-star recruits an efficient use of their limited resources.
“I know you guys have connections in Georgia and Florida and Texas,” O’Brien said to his assistants, “and that’s great—but we need to focus on the kids nearby. Two thousand players have signed D-I scholarships within six or seven hours of here. A lot of top teams get good p
layers from our area. We’ve got to make sure we get the bulk of our roster from our backyard.
“You look at Zordich, from Youngstown. Football is important there. They live it and they breathe it. Those are the guys we’ve got to get.”
O’Brien’s to-do list for the present and the future overlapped on Saturday, when they had scheduled recruits to see Penn State’s game against Navy. A win would help their cause on both fronts.
“If we win the coin toss, we’ll take the ball,” O’Brien said, returning to the game plan. “We’re going to take our chances. We’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, playing our asses off, but we are the better team. We have better football players than Navy. There is no question about it.
“We’ve got to win this one Saturday,” he said, for the hundredth time that week.
• • •
The roller coaster of energy the coaches and the players must ride every Saturday bottomed out once they walked into the library-quiet locker room, having to kill the Hour of Death before they could run out the tunnel.
“We just need to get a lead,” O’Brien said to Ted Roof, explaining why he wanted to take the ball first. On defense, O’Brien added, “They can run, but they can’t pass. Let’s make ’em pass, get ’em out of the triple option,” the offense Navy used to great effect.
Then, to everyone else in the room, and to no one at all: “We just need a win. I don’t care if it’s six to three. Just give us a win.”
“Any win,” Coach Mac agreed, “is a good win.”
During warm-ups, a big cheer went up, then another. What could they possibly be cheering about during warm-ups? Kicker Sam Ficken, who went 1 for 5 at Virginia, made his first warm-up kick—then his second. That’s all it took.
Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football Page 21
