The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football

by Jeff Benedict

  As Crowton left the press conference, it was all Mendenhall could do to keep his emotions in check. He felt the coaching staff had let Crowton down and the athletic department had thrown him under the bus. “There were kids who were making poor choices that we as assistants had brought here,” Mendenhall said.

  One day after Crowton stepped down, a Utah County grand jury indicted four players—B. J. Mathis, Karland Bennett, Ibrahim Rashada and William Turner—on rape charges, along with furnishing alcohol and pornography to a minor. Bail was set at $100,000 each. Turner, seventeen at the time of the incident, agreed to surrender and say what happened on the night in question in exchange for being prosecuted as a juvenile.

  News of the indictments hit like a bomb in Provo. Rashada, the only one of the four still on the team, was arrested the following morning and thrown in jail. BYU immediately kicked him out of school. Bennett and Mathis returned from Texas and were jailed pending a bail hearing.

  Salt Lake City defense attorney Greg Skordas got a desperate call from Karland Bennett’s mother, begging him to represent her son. Before becoming one of the city’s best criminal lawyers, Skordas had been a Salt Lake City prosecutor, where he was the Special Victims Unit chief. When Skordas visited Bennett in jail, he immediately observed three things: good looks, manners and, above all, fear.

  “He was scared,” Skordas said. “He’s a very good-looking kid and extremely respectful. He called me ‘sir’ and had a southern way about him.”

  Skordas wasted no time getting to the facts with Bennett. “I had him describe the events,” Skordas said. “The defense was consent, not that it didn’t occur. This was a ‘yeah, it happened, but’ case.”

  For Skordas, it sounded all too familiar: horny jocks versed in the pickup game cross paths with a vulnerable girl who gets in way over her head. “It was the other guys that jumped in that caused the problem,” Skordas said. “Karland wasn’t an active physical participant. On a good day he was an aider and abettor. He supplied the bedroom and the condoms.”

  Eventually, Skordas called Kelly and started talking about a plea deal. Then, on March 17, 2005, Bennett went with his lawyer to the prosecutor’s office and submitted to a lengthy interview. He was not put under oath. The prosecutors wanted him to speak freely, and Skordas didn’t want anything he said to be used against him if a deal wasn’t reached. First, Bennett told authorities that when Brown got sick, the reason he led her to his room was to protect her from the other guys. Second, he claimed that Brown had been taunted into drinking and that he later saw multiple teammates taking turns having sex with her.

  On August 9, 2005, Bennett pleaded guilty to obstruction and dealing harmful material to a minor in exchange for the state dropping the sexual assault charges against him. He also agreed to testify against Mathis and Rashada. His sentencing was delayed until after their trial.

  “The other lawyers were mad at me because my kid turned,” Skordas said. “But it’s business. It’s what you have to do.”

  The trial against Mathis and Rashada opened two weeks later. There was plenty of drama. Brown described her assault. Medical and criminal investigators testified, as did football players and BYU officials. But the state’s key witness was Bennett. He placed Mathis and Rashada at the scene and confirmed that they both had sex with Brown. But he did not go as far as to say it was the result of force.

  “He was a star witness, and he didn’t describe a rape,” Skordas said. “In the end, the defendants were happy because his testimony helped them.”

  The jury acquitted Mathis and Rashada on all counts.

  Mathis’s criminal lawyer, Jere Reneer, said, “I’ve never felt prouder to be a lawyer.”

  Outside the courtroom, Mathis’s grandmother cried and shouted: “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!”

  Brown was devastated. After leaving the courthouse, she collapsed and started sobbing. “They raped me. They raped me. They raped me.” She had to be carried to the car. Over the ensuing months, she became a recluse and gained seventy-five pounds.

  The verdict stung Kelly, too. Despite her long career, she had never tried a case against college football players. She saw things in the BYU case that were completely foreign to her. “There was something obviously very different about prosecuting football players,” she said. “The football dynamic was an undercurrent to everything we did. And it was ultimately football that had a very big influence on the jury.”

  After the courtroom cleared out, three jurors were still around. Kelly cornered them and asked why they had acquitted. “The jury said they had suffered enough,” Kelly said. “They lost their scholarships. They were kicked off the team.”

  Kelly said it was the most bizarre thing she’d ever heard—the idea that the players had been sufficiently punished when they lost their opportunity to play football. “That’s the power of college football,” she said.

  After the trial, B. J. Mathis and Ibrahim Rashada went on to play college football elsewhere. Mathis became a standout kick returner at Midwestern State, and Rashada went to Southwest Mississippi Community College.

  Karland Bennett never played football again. After watching his teammates go free, he withdrew his guilty plea on obstruction and dealing harmful material to a minor. Prosecutors threatened to try him. But Brown had no interest in taking the stand again. Ultimately, the state dropped the charges against Bennett, wiping his record clean in Utah.

  But back in Texas his life went downhill fast. He accumulated a lengthy criminal record, including multiple arrests for aggravated robbery, unlawful possession of a handgun, theft and possession of a controlled substance. Then, on April 16, 2010, a Dallas man was abducted, shot and killed in a drug deal that went bad. Bennett was arrested, jailed and charged with capital murder. On January 25, 2013, he pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to forty years in prison.

  *Jane Brown is a pseudonym.

  †Kim Smith is a pseudonym.

  Part II, Terminated

  The 2009 season was Mike Leach’s tenth at Tech. When it ended, Tech got invited to the Alamo Bowl to face Michigan State. It would mark Tech’s tenth straight bowl appearance under Leach.

  With less than two weeks remaining until he would take his team to San Antonio, Leach held a night practice on December 16, 2009. Afterward, reserve wide receiver Adam James tracked down Mark “Buzz” Chisum, one of the team’s athletic trainers. James said he had been injured on one of the final plays of scrimmage and felt dizzy and disoriented.

  Chisum took James to his office, pulled out a Sports Concussion Assessment Tool 2—known in college athletics as a SCAT 2—and recorded the time: 10:52 p.m. Then he asked James a series of questions and documented the following symptoms:

  mild headache

  very mild neck pain

  moderate blurred vision

  moderate balance problems

  Along with instructions to take Tylenol for pain, Chisum gave James his cell phone number and told him to call if symptoms got worse overnight. James went out that night with a friend. They ended up at IHOP. It was after midnight by the time James went to bed. The following morning he saw team physician Dr. Michael Phy and Tech’s head trainer, Steve Pincock. He reported that his headache had subsided a bit. But he said he had thrown up some time after eating at IHOP and he still felt a little nauseated. His dizziness hadn’t completely subsided either.

  Phy administered a standard diagnostic test, and James lost his balance. That, along with everything else Phy had heard and seen, led him to his diagnosis: mild concussion.

  With Pincock looking on, Phy instructed James not to practice for seven days. But he was cleared to follow the team’s protocol for players with a mild concussion—dress in team-issued workout clothing and walk laps around the field during practice. But no running or other strenuous activity that might elevate James’s heart rate or increase his stress level.

  That afternoon, practice had been under way for about twenty minutes when
James showed up wearing street clothes, a blue bandanna, a backward baseball cap and sunglasses. Leach spotted him walking nonchalantly around the practice field. Irritated, he turned to Pincock.

  “Why’s he dressed like that?” Leach said.

  “I don’t know,” Pincock said. “He just got here.”

  “Why’s he wearing sunglasses?”

  Pincock revealed that James had been diagnosed with a mild concussion. The shades, he said, were no doubt intended to deal with his sensitivity to light.

  The injury was news to Leach, but his dissatisfaction with Adam James was not. Just three days earlier, Leach had stopped practice and removed James and a few other receivers from the field for poor effort. In spring practice, Leach had kicked James off the field in an incident that was captured on tape. “I can’t even stand to watch you fucking stumble around,” Leach told James during a drill. “Shitty fucking effort. Like you fucking accomplished something.”

  Then, at the start of the regular season, James’s position coach, Lincoln Riley, called him into his office to inform him that he was being demoted to third string, citing poor effort in practice. James disagreed. So Riley showed him practice film to prove his point. When James left the office that day, he took his anger out on the door.

  Another coach confronted him. “Why did you break the door?”

  “What the hell do you think?” James said.

  Leach thought about kicking him off the team then but didn’t.

  Complicating the relationship between James and the coaching staff was the presence of Adam’s father, Craig James. The former NFL player was a college football analyst for ESPN. It wasn’t unusual for him to attend Tech practices and cover Tech games. Leach felt he meddled too much. “I heard more from Craig James than I did from the other 120 parents of players combined,” Leach said.

  Right after Adam got demoted to third string, he texted his father: “Bummer news. I’m third string.”

  Later that day, Lincoln Riley got a voice mail from Craig James: “If you have the balls—and I don’t think you do—call me back.”

  Leach found out and didn’t like it. “He was a helicopter parent,” Leach explained. “It was all about trying to get more playing time for his son.”

  Pincock’s report that James had a concussion guaranteed that he wouldn’t get much practice time leading up to the Alamo Bowl. Fed up, Leach told Pincock to isolate James from the team for the duration of practice.

  “Put his fucking pussy ass in a place so dark that the only way he knows he has a dick is to reach down and touch it,” Leach told Pincock.

  At Leach’s insistence, Pincock shared that statement with James. Then he led him off the field to a shed that housed blocking dummies, watercoolers, an ice machine and an ATV. Injured players would sometimes go there to ride a stationary bike. Virtually spotless, the brand-new structure had a tacky, rubberlike floor and an overhead, garage-style pull-down door, as well as a man door on the side. There were overhead lights but no windows. Aided by freshman student-trainer Jordan Williams, Pincock removed anything that James could sit on and made sure the lights were off. He told James that Leach wanted him to remain standing in the dark for the duration of practice. Then he closed the door.

  Pincock had Williams remain outside the shed to monitor James. “Leach had also instructed me to have a student trainer sit outside the shed to make sure he was standing and that he did not leave,” Pincock said. At one point, however, James did leave after requesting permission to use the bathroom. Otherwise, he stayed put for the duration of practice—roughly two hours. During that time he sent his father a text message: “You’re going to like this. Leach thinks it’s impossible for me to have a concussion. And I’m just being a pussy. So for punishment he had me locked in a pitch black shed for the whole practice.”

  Later, when asked to explain why he sent that message to his father, James said, “We have the same sense of humor and personality, and I thought it was funny. So I said, ‘You’re going to like this.’ I did find humor in it.”

  But Craig James wasn’t amused. It was the first he’d heard that his son had a concussion. He took exception to his treatment. He texted back to his son, “Think about what you will allow me to do.”

  “Okay, I’ll call you when I get out,” Adam texted. “Don’t do anything yet though.”

  Later that evening, Craig spoke to Adam, obtaining more details. But Adam made clear that he didn’t want his father intervening—that would only make things worse. Nonetheless, he told his father about the colorful language Leach had used with the trainer.

  As a former player, James was used to profanity from coaches. But as a father, he felt Leach had crossed the line. “You hear the f-bomb on the practice field all the time,” James said. “It just rolls off your back. But this here is an injured student-athlete with a concussion. Adam was humiliated.”

  Nonetheless, at Adam’s insistence, Craig promised to stay out of it.

  That night, Craig and his wife, Marilyn, couldn’t sleep. In high school Adam had sustained a concussion playing baseball. They worried about the effects of a second one. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, Marilyn peppered Craig with questions.

  “Why is he in a shed?

  “Why isn’t he in the training room?

  “What if he had fallen down and passed out?”

  Craig had the same questions. And he couldn’t help wondering what was in store for their son at the next practice.

  The team didn’t practice the following day. But on December 19, Tech practiced at Jones AT&T Stadium. Adam James felt much better, and this time he showed up in appropriate attire. But the doctor still hadn’t cleared him to practice. When Pincock asked Leach what he wanted done with James, he said to do the same thing.

  This time Pincock led James through the stadium tunnel to the media room, a space reserved for reporters to conduct postgame interviews. It contained numerous television screens, a table and some chairs. It also had a cramped electrical closet with wires, a panel of circuits and a pile of electronic devices. After removing the chairs from the media room, Pincock inspected the electrical closet and told James that the closet was off-limits.

  Over the next two hours, James remained alone, standing in the darkened media room. At one point, unbeknownst to anyone else, he entered the electrical closet, closed himself inside and used his phone to record a short video of himself. “I’ll turn the lights on real quick,” he said into the microphone on his phone. “So I got to be … I got to be fast.” When asked later why he made the video, he responded, “So I could show my friends.”

  Early that evening, Craig and Marilyn James had just sat down for dinner at a restaurant when Marilyn got a call from Adam. She asked how things went at practice. He reported that he’d been confined again. This time she put her foot down.

  “This will stop,” she told Adam.

  Craig looked on.

  “You’re an adult,” Marilyn continued. “But you are still our child. We are going to put a stop to this.”

  Craig agreed. “We never dreamed he would put him back in dark, solitary confinement,” he said.

  They decided to approach Tech’s chancellor, Kent Hance. Earlier in the season James had met Hance briefly after a game, but he didn’t know how to reach him. However, Marilyn had a connection to the vice chairman of Tech’s board of trustees, Larry Anders. She called a friend, and within thirty minutes Craig received a call from Anders. He was at a wedding reception in Dallas at the Belo Mansion & Pavilion for Texas governor Rick Perry’s son. Kent Hance was there, too. James told Anders that his son had been mistreated twice and he wanted the chancellor to put a stop to it.

  After speaking to James, Anders cornered Hance. “We’ve got a problem,” he began.

  Hance said he’d handle it. It wasn’t the first time he had dealt with a situation involving Leach. Back in 2007, after Texas beat Texas Tech 59–43, Leach called the officiating crew “a complete travesty” in his p
ostgame press conference. He pointed out that one official was from Austin and suggested that the Big 12 Conference take a serious look at using out-of-conference officials for future Texas–Texas Tech games. Commissioner Dan Beebe fined Leach $10,000 for questioning the integrity and competence of game officials. It was the largest fine in conference history. But Leach refused to back away from his comments. He also didn’t pay the fine. To resolve the matter, Hance paid the fine out of his pocket.

  Hance ducked out of the reception and called Leach. He explained that the James family had made a complaint. The idea that Craig James had gone to the board of regents set Leach off. He decided he’d had enough of Adam James. “I’m going to kick him off the team tonight,” Leach said.

  “You can’t do that,” Hance said.

  Leach rattled off a series of issues with Craig and Adam James, including the time Adam broke a door at the coach’s office.

  “Well, hell, you should have kicked him off the team back when he did those things,” Hance said. “But you can’t do it now.”

  The longer the conversation went, the more adamant Leach became. Hance, a former lawyer and congressman, was looking for a quick solution. He proposed some options for Leach to consider:

  1. Adam James could stay on the team if Craig James promised to stop calling and interfering.

  2. Adam could leave the team but remain at Tech as a student, and the university would honor his scholarship.

  3. Adam could withdraw from Tech, and Tech would release him from his scholarship, enabling him to transfer to another school, where he could begin playing the following season.