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

by Jeff Benedict

  It’s a sales and marketing strategy that Nike has spread throughout the country. Of the 125 top teams, Nike exclusively outfits 79 of them, including 9 schools in the SEC, 8 in the Big 12, 10 in the Pac-12 and 7 in the Big Ten. Nike’s nearest competitor—Adidas—outfits just 29 teams.

  At WSU, Nike gifts the university more than $1 million worth of shoes and apparel for the sports teams each year. In exchange for that, WSU agreed to exclusively outfit all coaches and players in Nike gear from head to toe. The agreement forbids coaches and players to wear any other brands. Nor are they allowed to “spat”—wear anything that covers the Nike swoosh on athletic wear.

  With the apparel deal in place, Moos and Van Horne spent months rebranding WSU’s uniforms and apparel. The goal was to roll out the new look in time for the start of the conference’s new television deal.

  On May 4, 2011, the Pac-12’s commissioner, Larry Scott, held a news conference in Phoenix and announced a new twelve-year television contract with ESPN and Fox worth $3 billion. It marked the largest TV contract in the history of college sports. Thanks to the Pac-12’s newly adopted equal revenue-sharing plan, every school in the conference stood to receive between $15 million and $20 million in television revenue starting with the 2012 season. Overnight, schools like WSU, Oregon State, Cal and Utah were flush with an unprecedented cash flow.

  But these schools also had some scheduling work to do. Under the new deal, ESPN was insisting on each Pac-12 school playing nine conference games. There was room in the schedule for three nonconference games. But looking ahead to the 2012 season—the year the new TV contract would take effect—WSU had just two nonconference games on its schedule. Moos needed to find a third opponent. Many other schools were in the same situation.

  Moos called ESPN’s scheduling guru, Dave Brown. They knew each other well from Moos’s Oregon days. Brown had helped orchestrate the Oklahoma–Oregon home-and-home series. Moos wanted his help this time setting up a home-and-home series for WSU with BYU.

  Brown liked the idea. BYU had just gone independent and was trying to fill out its schedule. It needed opponents. Brown also thought the matchup was a good draw for ESPN—a Pac-12 school against a major independent with a national fan base. Brown said he’d approach BYU’s AD, Tom Holmoe.

  Before becoming AD at BYU, Holmoe was the head coach at Cal when Moos was AD at Oregon. Holmoe liked Moos. More important, he trusted him. When Brown proposed the home-and-home series with WSU, Holmoe said BYU was in. The two sides agreed that WSU would play at BYU in 2012 and BYU would go to Pullman in 2013.

  Elson Floyd liked what he was seeing. With the new television contract in place and the Pac-12 Network set to launch, he met with Moos before the start of the 2011 season to discuss capital improvements. Floyd agreed to bring a proposal to the board of regents for an $80 million addition to and renovation of Martin Stadium. It would include a new press box, luxury suites, loge boxes and a club level with amenities for fans with premium seating. That was phase one. Phase two would be construction of an eighty-thousand-square-foot football operations building. (This at a time when the state legislature was dramatically cutting funding to the university.)

  The good news was that Floyd felt there was a very good chance that the regents would approve the plan. The bad news was that new luxury boxes and premium seating would be nearly impossible to sell if the football team didn’t start winning more games. Floyd didn’t say it, but Moos knew what he was getting at: it was time to look at replacing the head coach.

  Paul Wulff had been head coach at WSU for three years. Between 2008 and 2010 his overall record was 5-32. In the conference he was 2-25. The team had yet to show improvement under his leadership. But Moos wasn’t ready to pull the trigger. Wulff had played at WSU as a lineman. He’d been loyal to the program. And he kept stressing that it takes more than a couple years to turn around a losing program. The Cougars were about to embark on year four under Wulff. Moos decided that the 2011 season was make-or-break for Wulff.

  Big-game hunting

  The national headquarters of the governing body of intercollegiate athletics sits on the southwest edge of downtown Indianapolis. It’s an impressive-looking place tucked off a redbrick path with more than a little Ivy League mixed with artistic distressed-copper columns. The surrounding White River State Park is a soothing mélange of walking paths, man-made canals and culture trails. There’s even a slow-food garden.

  If only life were so peaceful inside the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

  From 2010 to 2012, leaders of the thousand-member organization, which traces its roots back to 1906, had been under pressure as never before. President Mark Emmert candidly described the NCAA as a “very weird organization,” ten times the size of the United Nations, with twice as many voting members as Congress, and no one felt more pressure to reform the weird, unwieldy, increasingly divided group than he did, facing daunting challenges on seemingly every front.

  The first major blow arrived in the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic in the form of a blistering expose by Pulitzer Prize–winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch. His article “The Shame of College Sports” denounced “the noble principles” on which he said the NCAA justified its existence—amateurism and the student-athlete—as “cynical hoaxes,” while making a powerful argument that college athletes should be paid. After Branch’s piece, influential New York Times op-ed columnist Joe Nocera began methodically hammering the NCAA over its treatment of select student-athletes, portraying the NCAA as an uncaring “cartel” similar to Big Tobacco. Major college athletic directors across the country openly—if anonymously—complained about being squeezed out of the decision-making process by what they saw as an increasingly imperial president.

  Then there was that little matter of the fourteen-year, $10.8 billion television contract the private, nonprofit tax-exempt organization had signed with CBS and Turner Sports for the rights to televise what was, essentially, three weeks of March Madness. The NCAA was expected to generate nearly $800 million in 2012, mostly from media rights payments, 95 percent, which it said got funneled back to members’ schools. Didn’t matter. Bottom line, for better or worse, college athletics seemed all about the money.

  In the scandal race, football had grabbed the lead: there was academic fraud at North Carolina; a booster gone rogue at Miami; an extra-benefits mess at USC; players trading game-used jerseys and other memorabilia to a suspected drug dealer for free tattoos at Ohio State. Legal land mines were present as well. In federal court the NCAA faced a potentially game-changing, bank-breaking lawsuit filed by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon—joined by the legendary likes of Oscar Robertson and Bill Russell—over the alleged exploitation of player likeness and images for enormous commercial profit.

  “I don’t recall a time where there has been less optimism about how the NCAA operates,” Josephine Potuto, the former chairwoman of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions and a law professor at the University of Nebraska, told the New York Times in February 2012. “Whether that’s on merit, or a confluence of events hitting at the same time, the fact is there’s an overwhelming feeling that everything is wrong.”

  Ironic, given that since becoming president in October 2010 Emmert had pushed the glacial-paced organization to get things right—or at least move into the twenty-first century.

  “I consider him an incredible change agent, the right man for the right time,” said IMG’s Ben Sutton. “I do consider him an activist.”

  In an August 2011 retreat in Indianapolis with more than fifty college presidents, Emmert had laid out his three-pronged activist attack: improve the academic performance of athletes; crack down on the outlaw programs; and simplify an archaic, complex rule book that had laws about whether there could be cream cheese on a bagel and the exact number of texts a coach could send during certain times of the year. In sum, Emmert wanted all that silliness replaced with a contemporary “values-based” approach to legislation and enforcement.
He wanted a modern-day NCAA—an association that balanced the booming commercial and academic sides of college sports.

  In a January 2012 speech at the NCAA’s annual convention in Indianapolis, the former University of Washington president and chancellor at LSU went public with his plan. Emmert spoke of fundamental “story lines” that had served to shape public opinion and sparked the need for major reform: an association “powerless and unwilling to make change”; the term “student-athlete” “described as an oxymoron used with absolute derision … not even capable of getting educations”; the perception that all college presidents and administrators cared about was money. And, oh yeah, everybody cheats.

  “The summary of all these story lines is essentially there are no ethics, no integrity in collegiate sports and the whole system is broken,” said Emmert. “[And] here’s some really bad news. There is some truth to those criticisms. We are at a curious fork in the road,” he told more than thirty-four hundred attendees. “And we have to decide: Are we going to … make changes that we have to make, even ones that are hard to make but bring the collegiate model up to date in the 21st century, consistent with our values as academic enterprises. Or are we going to wave the white flag, throw in the towel, and say, ‘Look, it’s too much. Let’s just pretend this is all about playing the games. It’s all about driving the most attention we can to football and men’s basketball. Take the money and run.’

  “I know where all of you stand on that issue. You know where I stand on that issue. What we have to do is work together to make sure we act on those values. That we let the world know which fork we have chosen in the road.”

  In late October 2012 the NCAA Division I Board of Directors granted the first of Emmert’s wishes. It approved sweeping changes to the enforcement model and staff.

  The new approach went into effect on August 1, 2013, and expanded the level of violations from a two-tier system to four. It drew a hard line for head coaches who break rules in hopes of a multimillion-dollar BCS or salary payoff. The new penalty structure ranged from a severe breach of conduct (seriously undermine or threaten the collegiate model or provide a substantial or extensive competitive or recruiting edge) to incidental issues (isolated minor infractions and negligible, if any, advantage). Smart stuff.

  More important, the threat of losing bowl revenue or scholarships had a new enforcement friend. If the money pouring into the sport was rising like Hurricane Sandy, well, so would the punishment for those caught cheating. Now if a program—no matter who committed the crime—was found guilty of buying players or some equally egregious misdeed, the head coach could be suspended for up to a full season. Programs could be fined as much as 5 percent of their total budgets. In the case of big-time football, that number could reach $5 million or more.

  In addition, the Committee on Infractions was expanded from ten to twenty-four working members to facilitate the faster handling of cases. To that end, the NCAA had beefed up its enforcement staff by nearly 50 percent since 2010—from forty-one investigators to a record fifty-nine by the spring of 2013. More than 70 percent of the investigators had law degrees. Many arrived with law enforcement backgrounds.

  This was good, because they had their work cut out for them.

  Much like the cat-and-mouse game played in the world of performance-enhancing drugs, the cheaters in college football were always on the lookout for ways to stay one step ahead of the posse. Player payoffs and academic fraud had moved into the darker corners of the system. The days of depositing checks or providing equally traceable car loans or no-show jobs had long since been replaced by more creative payment methods. The big money moved almost invisibly now, impossible to trace, unless somebody screwed up or somebody started talking. According to sources, it moved in and out of personal debit or ATM cards or through the passing of chips easily cashed at a local casino. The payments were always in cash. Even the six-figure sums needed to close on a kid, collected from “friends” of the program and funneled to an assistant coach or another bagman to be delivered to a designated “uncle” or “adviser” three or four times removed from the recruit, were paid in cash.

  But Emmert didn’t care how it was done. He wanted it stopped or at least slowed down. He could be a blunt, caustic, sometimes sarcastic man. Like it or not (and at times he didn’t much like it), he was the face of college sports, big-time college sports. He was tired of wasting time chasing penny-ante crime and sending penny-ante messages in a world of $100 million football budgets. He wanted to remove what he called “the risk-reward” calculus that tempted coaches to break the rules because they rarely paid the price.

  Forget it. The gloves were coming off.

  In May 2012 three members from the NCAA’s football enforcement group settled around a large second-floor conference table at the association’s headquarters in Indianapolis. In one seat was assistant director of enforcement Chance Miller, a University of Tennessee graduate whose résumé included a law degree and defending civil litigation cases for the fire, police and transportation departments in New York City. To Miller’s right was assistant director Brynna Barnhart, thirty-one, a former basketball and softball player at Knox College in Illinois. After law school Barnhart had done defense work for large insurance and electrical companies. Also seated at the table was Rachel Newman Baker. An ex-investigator and former director of agent, gambling and amateurism issues, Newman Baker was now managing director of the seven-person football group.

  In keeping with Emmert’s “risk-reward” mandate, the enforcement group had shifted its focus to developing larger, “more meaningful” cases. The staff’s approach had changed as well—more aggressive and innovative in the pursuit of violations and closing cases. In Emmert’s war on corruption, the enforcement group had become the tip of the spear.

  “We’re trying to get smarter because you’ve got to expose one of those [big cases] to have it start resonating with people,” said Newman Baker. “So if we get smarter in how we’re doing our business, which is what I think we’re doing … the penalties make it not worth the risk.”

  As part of its approach, NCAA investigators no longer waited for a blockbuster case to drop into their lap. No longer were they just following the leads of enterprising reporters or following up with renegade boosters or coaches with a story to tell. More and more they were doing their biggame hunting. On their own. Developing sources. Tracking down leads. Ear to the ground.

  “I think we’re doing business differently,” said Newman Baker. “And we’re trying to get a better handle on what’s going on in the real world. By doing the outreach, by developing the relationships with sources, we’re trying to not just base policy, or legislation or cases based upon what we think, but what we know is going on.”

  Lo and behold—and the sound you heard was certain college presidents, athletic directors, coaches, student-athletes and defense lawyers falling out of their chairs—NCAA investigators were actually becoming people persons.

  “In this job that component is extremely critical,” said Newman Baker. “Especially as we talk about football, out in the world with head coaches, assistant coaches, agents, trainers, prospects, their families. You need somebody that knows how to interact with people and can develop relationships.”

  “It’s being able to sit down and put a face with a name,” said the twenty-nine-year-old Miller, who had been hired by Newman Baker in February 2009. “When an agent hears NCAA, they only think bad things. So, it’s going out and showing them, hey, we’re human beings. We’re personable. And acting as a resource for them.”

  High on the list of the NCAA problems was identifying and eliminating so-called third parties from the recruiting and eligibility process. They could be boosters. They could be street agents. They could be handlers. Increasingly, they were “runners” working on behalf of player agents. The arrival of financial advisers or marketing representatives looking to cash in on player contracts had only upped the corruptive stakes. The latest dodge had become
under-the-table marketing “guarantees” or signing “bonuses” paid to players while they were still in school. Some of those guarantees or bonuses reached six figures.

  For much of the last three years Miller had been digging into the agent underground in hopes of making a score. He started cold-calling agents.

  “You could hear a pin drop on the other end when I said, ‘Hi, this is Chance Miller from the NCAA,’ ” he said.

  When the person on the other end finally found his voice, the first words were invariably “What did I do?”

  Miller explained he was just trying to better understand the culture, the trends. Barnhart, meanwhile, attended all-star games and the Senior Bowl with her eyes open and mouth shut. The NCAA had investigators on the recruiting trail as well.

  “I think everything comes back to third parties,” she said. “Money comes back to third parties. Recruiting comes back to third parties. I think everything we’re seeing as issues has a nexus to third parties—be it agents, financial advisers, the uncle who is getting involved, the local town guy who takes advantage of a kid’s family situation. I really do think everything we see boils down to it.”

  Nowhere was the third-party problem more present than in the shadowy world of 7-on-7, the hybrid spring and summer touch football passing extravaganza that had flipped the college recruiting game upside down the last five years.

  The basic rules of 7-on-7, or 7v7, made for a fun, fast, wide-open, often fiercely intense athletic contest:

  Maximum twenty-four members per team.

  Forty-yard field.

  Twenty minutes’ running time until the final two minutes of the game.

  Fifteen yards for a first down.

  No more than four seconds to throw the ball (timed to the tenth of a second).

  Six points for a touchdown. One- or two-point conversions.