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

by Jeff Benedict

  But Spurrier had another candidate in mind. “He told me, ‘You should go hard for Saban,’ ” said Moore.

  Moore found this ironic. A few months earlier, midway through a second season with the Dolphins, Saban had sent word through Jimmy Sexton, his powerful agent, he was leaning toward leaving the NFL. Saban’s first year of marriage in Miami had ended on a happy note: the Dolphins had reeled off six straight wins to finish the season 9-7. But his second year had dissolved into a difficult grind—a 1-6 start precipitated by problems at quarterback and players grumbling about the intensity of practice and what they saw as Saban’s dictatorial style of coaching. Actually, the Sabans weren’t all that happy either. Both Nick and Terry discovered they missed campus life and the spirit of the college game. Saban told a friend in Miami he felt as if he were going to work at a factory every day; he missed the camaraderie of college coaching and realized he felt much more comfortable building young men than fighting the habits of professional athletes.

  So Moore set about trying to convince Saban to make Tuscaloosa his new home. He told Sexton, with whom he often spoke, he was prepared to make his client the highest-paid coach in the Southeastern Conference. “Well, you can stop right there,” Moore said Sexton told him. “We need to be talking about the country, not the conference.”

  Moore made it clear he “absolutely never spoke with” Saban during the 2006 NFL season as he knew the coach was committed to focusing on the Dolphins. But that didn’t stop Moore from working on a deal sheet with Sexton. They laid out a prospective salary, bonuses, access to private airplanes and all the rest. Then Sexton suddenly stopped returning his calls. So Moore shifted to Plan B and heated up conversations with Rodriguez, who had expressed a strong interest in the job. Talk to my agent, said Rodriguez. Again, another deal sheet was constructed. Then Sexton called back. Moore told him he was about to hire Rodriguez. It was the last thing Sexton wanted to hear. The NFL season still had a month to go; Saban needed more time. Time Moore frankly didn’t have. Alabama’s president, Dr. Robert E. Witt, had been quietly urging Moore to make a choice.

  So on Thursday, December 7, 2006, Moore made one: He reached an agreement with Rodriguez, a rising star with back-to-back Big East titles under his belt. The reported offer was $12 million over six years, $700,000 a year more than his pay at West Virginia.

  As Moore told it, he and Rodriguez sealed the deal with what Moore called a “blood oath” not to utter a word of what had transpired. By mid-afternoon on December 7 the paperwork had made its way to the Alabama administrative building for vetting by university lawyers. Then, said Moore, within two hours, around 5:00 p.m., news broke on ESPN that Alabama had reached an agreement to hire Rodriguez. Moore was anything but pleased with that piece of news.

  The next day Rodriguez publicly denied any agreement had been reached, saying he had declined an offer. “This is my school, my alma mater, my dream,” he said of West Virginia.

  In Moore’s mind it didn’t matter what Rodriguez said. He knew. An oath had been broken.

  “I never spoke to Rodriguez again,” he said.

  The clock continued to tick. Alabama was set to play in the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, Louisiana, on December 28. Miami’s season ended three days later with a loss in Indianapolis to drop the Dolphins’ final record to 6-10. Moore made his move. Instead of flying home with the team after the bowl game, he drove to Tuscaloosa to avoid the press and hopped on a friend’s Gulfstream for a one-way recruiting mission to South Florida.

  Upon landing, he reached Saban by phone. Terry joined them on the call.

  The former Terry Constable had first met her husband in middle school science camp; she was in seventh grade at one middle school on the uptown side of the tracks and he was in eighth near the other side. As Saban liked to tell it—with one of his wry smiles—the woman affectionately known around Alabama as Ms. Terry “didn’t know what a first down was when we first started dating, and there’s no doubt in my mind she thinks she should be the head coach at Alabama right now. No doubt. And she is a hell of an assistant, even though she thinks she’s the head coach, which, when she’s around, I always make her think that.”

  But in many ways Terry Saban was the head coach—certainly of access to their home and her husband’s off-field charity work. She was also the unquestioned force behind the Sabans’ commitment to charity, particularly Nick’s Kids Fund, which had distributed some $2.5 million to more than seventy-five Alabama charities. Said Saban, “I would say she’s probably as big a part of the program as anyone in terms of her time, her commitment and all the things she does to serve the people in a very positive way that is helpful for us to be successful, not only in football, but in the community and what we can do to serve other people.”

  Moore spoke with husband and wife for about thirty minutes. Saban was struggling, clearly caught up in the persuasive powers of Dolphins’ billionaire owner Wayne Huizenga whose business empire contained Waste Management, Blockbuster Video and AutoNation. “Nick told me he [Huizenga] knows how to close a deal,” recalled Moore. “He said, ‘I tell him I want out, and he talks me back in.’ ” But the call ended on an upbeat note. Saban told Moore he would call him the next day at noon.

  Noon came and went. Ninety more minutes passed. Still no call. Moore checked out of his hotel and readied to return to Tuscaloosa. He called Sexton one last time.

  “Hang in there,” said the agent.

  So Moore hung. He checked into another hotel closer to Saban’s home, just in case. Saban called back. He told Moore to meet him at his home that night. He gave Moore the pass code to get inside the gated community.

  That night, just as Moore was pulling in front of Saban’s house, his phone rang. It was Paul Bryant Jr., Bear’s only son and a member of the Alabama Board of Trustees.

  “How you doing?” asked Bryant.

  “I’m right out front of Saban’s house,” Moore whispered.

  Nobody had to tell Bryant about the timing of his call. “I’m just afraid you were going to have a heart attack,” he told Moore before hopping off the phone.

  Once Moore was inside the house, he and Terry talked. Terry brought Moore coffee. They had never met. The conversation ranged from Huizenga to her husband’s frustration with his job. Then the phone rang. It was Saban, still struggling over what to do.

  “I called Terry and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to talk to him [Mal] tonight,’ ” he said. “She said, ‘Oh, Mal’s already here. We’ve been talking for an hour.’ That was the first step in the right direction.”

  The next big step came when Saban finally arrived at home.

  “If I made a pitch, it began with the way I see it you don’t have a choice but to come to Alabama,” said Moore. “If you get beat with the Dolphins, they’re going to blame you. And if you don’t and we win at Alabama, you’re going to wish you were at Alabama.”

  Saban excused himself and went to another room to make a call. At that point, Moore recalled, Terry Saban grabbed his right arm and shook it hard with both hands. “We’ve got to get him on that plane!” she said.

  Moore let out a big laugh. “I knew right then I was in a helluva lot better shape than I thought I was,” he said.

  Saban returned to say he had a meeting the next morning with Huizenga. He wanted Moore to return to the gated community and wait down the street for a call. The next morning Moore found himself waiting under an oak tree as television trucks gathered just outside the gate and helicopters circled the sky above.

  Somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m. his phone rang. It was Saban. We’re coming with you, the coach said. Give me until two o’clock.

  Saban later said he never directly told Huizenga he was leaving, but Huizenga finally said, “Nick, if that’s what you want, I want you to do it.”

  Moore headed back to his hotel to pack. The television trucks stayed put. The helicopters circled. By 2:00 p.m. he was back under the old oak tree. His phone rang once more. Moore
told Saban they needed to get moving. Did he want to take two cars? No, said Saban. Back your car into our garage; the luggage is ready.

  So that’s what Moore’s driver did, only to find the Sabans, their daughter and one of her friends waiting. Somehow the driver stuffed the luggage into the trunk, the Sabans and friend piling into the back. Off they went. Reporters followed. Helicopters chased. On the way to the airport Moore made two calls, one to the owner of the Gulfstream, the other to a name synonymous with Alabama football. He handed the phone to Saban.

  “Congratulations, Coach,” said Joe Willie Namath.

  Half a dozen camera crews were waiting when Moore’s car pulled up to the private plane entrance at Fort Lauderdale Airport. As the Sabans scrambled inside the jet, Moore reached into his pocket and pulled out a few hundred dollars. He handed them to his driver, his lone companion for three frantic days. By accident a $10 bill fluttered away. One of the airport workers picked it up and handed it back to Moore, shaking his hand.

  “Great job, Coach Moore,” he said. “I’m from Anniston, Alabama!”

  Seven years later Moore let out another long laugh at the pure pleasure he derived from the oddity of that moment.

  “I really could have hugged that man’s neck,” he said.

  Inside the plane Moore popped his head into the cockpit. The pilot of the plane was the brother-in-law of Richard Todd, a former Crimson Tide quarterback. Welcome to the small world of the SEC.

  Then Moore uttered a line that should live forever in Alabama football lore.

  “I told him if I didn’t come back on this plane with Nick Saban, he might as well have flown my ass straight to Cuba!!”

  But there he was, one of the brightest minds in the game, sitting with his back to the cockpit. As the wheels rolled up, Moore said his new coach eased back in his chair and closed his eyes, finally allowing his emotions to unwind.

  “Well, Mal,” said Saban after he opened his eyes. “I guess you think I’m a helluva coach.”

  Yes, Moore said. Certainly. You’re an outstanding coach.

  Saban looked Moore straight in the eye. “You need to understand one thing,” he said. “I’m not worth a damn without players.”

  “Thank God you understand that,” thought Moore.

  In a tribute to Moore shortly after he passed away, Saban told ADAY, the official game-day program of Alabama football, that his happiest moment with his friend came when Moore was honored as the nation’s top athletic director in 2012.

  Saban said Moore had tears in his eyes when he told Saban he had changed Moore’s life by accepting the Alabama job.

  “No, Mal, you changed my life,” Saban said. “I’m a better coach. I’m a better person. I’m a better teacher for the lessons I’ve learned in partnership with you.”

  Pain is relative

  The discussion around significant injuries in football hit a fever pitch during the 2012 season. The pressure to improve player safety reached a new level when President Obama weighed in.

  “I’m a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” Obama said in a January 2013 interview with the New Republic. “And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence. In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won’t have to examine our consciences quite as much.”

  This time, the conversation wasn’t strictly about the NFL and the well-documented cases on long-term injuries and concussions. Instead, the president made it clear that college football players may well have the most to lose.

  “I tend to be more worried about college players than NFL players in the sense that the NFL players have a union, they’re grown men, they can make some of these decisions on their own, and most of them are well-compensated for the violence they do to their bodies,” Obama said. “You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.”

  The president’s concerns were supported just two months later. A March 2013 study from researchers at the Cleveland Clinic found that college football players are likely to experience significant and long-term brain damage from hits to the head even when they do not suffer a concussion. Blood samples, brain scans and cognitive tests were given to sixty-seven college football players before and after games during the 2011 season. The forty players thought to have absorbed the most serious hits showed spiked levels of an antibody that has been linked to long-term brain damage. The study, which was published in PLOS ONE, came after the NCAA had provided a $400,000 grant to the National Sport Concussion Outcomes Study Consortium.

  But in some cases, the BCS still controlled when and where the message about head injuries could be released. Prior to the 2013 BCS championship game, Ramogi Huma, president of the National College Players Association, attempted to hold a news conference to talk about head injuries, but the Marriott, where the press conference was scheduled, caved under pressure from the BCS, according to the Birmingham News.

  “The contracts were all ready to have a room [sic], but before they executed the contract, they checked with the BCS and Marriott pulled the plug,” Huma told the News in January 2013. “We needed to inject the conversation of the health of these football players. The BCS has tried to actively silence us on this. That was pretty disturbing.”

  Significant injuries are nothing new to college football, but the aftermath and long-term effects continue to be felt long after players take their last snaps. During the course of the 2012 season, the authors and researchers for this book sent out individual surveys to 283 living starters from thirteen BCS title-winning teams between 1998 and 2011. Of the 283 living starters from those teams, 34, or 12 percent, responded to our inquiries. The players were interviewed about significant injuries they suffered during their college playing days and whether they continue to suffer from them. They were also asked if they graduated from college, how many hours per week were dedicated to football-related activities, and whether they were influenced to choose a major.

  Of the thirty-four players interviewed for this book, nineteen (56 percent) said they suffered a debilitating injury of some sort as a result of their college football playing days. They described a wide array of injuries that continued to affect them to this day. For example:

  • Miami defensive tackle Matt Walters from the ’Canes 2001 national title team suffered a third-degree separation in his shoulder, a broken clavicle and an injury in his pelvis that restricted him from getting out of bed in the morning. (He still hasn’t fully recovered.)

  • Donnie Nickey, Ohio State’s free safety during its 2002 title run, suffered multiple concussions and still has arthritis in his knees and back.

  • Darrion Scott, one of Nickey’s defensive teammates on that Buckeyes squad, had three shoulder surgeries during his career in Columbus.

  • Matt Mauck, who was under center for LSU’s 2003 national championship team, suffered a Lisfranc injury while in Baton Rouge that still causes him problems today.

  • Justin Vincent, Mauck’s backfield mate on that LSU team, still gets excruciating headaches, causing him to become light-headed from time to time.

  • As a starting tight end for USC’s 2004 BCS title team, Alex Holmes would go on to have a litany of injuries, including a broken back and separations of both shoulders.

  • Florida guard Jim Tartt from the Gators’ 2006 title team had shoulder surgery every spring he was in Gainesville and no longer has cartilage in one of his shoulders.

  Even before the creation of the BCS, injuries were commonplace among perennial powers. In July 1996, Florida State center Jarad Moon knew something was wrong moments after he snapped the ball during his first
practice. Defensive lineman Andre Wadsworth slashed through Moon’s double-team. Fullback Drew O’Daniel saw Wadsworth coming and cut left to have leverage in the collision. But Wadsworth came at him low and O’Daniel’s cleat dug deep into the grass, forcing the fullback’s body to spin while his foot remained planted, tearing his MCL, LCL and ACL. O’Daniel never played football again.

  It was an unforgettable lesson to Moon on just how fragile a college football player’s career can be. In his senior year Moon was reminded of that lesson again. In a game he was hit so hard that he went airborne. When he landed on his tailbone, Moon’s hips and back twisted, causing his L4 and L5 disks to bulge. Like a soldier, he was trained to endure the pain and play through the injury. But the pain was unbearable. He couldn’t even bend over, so he approached the team doctor while the game was still in progress and asked for something to dull the pain. He was not examined or X-rayed. The team doctor prescribed Cataflam, an anti-inflammatory drug, and sent Moon back onto the field. From that moment on, Moon said, he couldn’t play without the painkilling drug.

  Despite the lingering neck injuries, Moon made it to the NFL. In 2001, he signed a three-year contract as an undrafted free agent for just under $1 million with the Carolina Panthers. Despite an increased dependence on Cataflam, the rigors of the NFL proved too much. That summer, Moon left the Panthers before playing a down in the NFL. Moon was finally finished with football. But, as his chiropractor would say, football was not finished with him.

  Today Moon feels every one of those college injuries. There’s chronic weakness in his left shoulder, tightness in his neck, his back locks up at least once a year. He still can’t bring himself to call it pain, though; he simply sees what he feels as “annoyances,” because pain, well, pain is a relative thing.

  Athletic training staffs from Seattle to Syracuse were busy in 2012. According to data collected from injury and media reports, there were at least 282 season-ending injuries among the eight BCS conferences and independents between January 1, 2012, and January 7, 2013, the day of the BCS championship game.