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

by Jeff Benedict

  The next possession gave a glimpse of No. 4’s skill set. He easily hauled in an over-the-shoulder catch and raced fifty yards down the sideline. He followed that little act by nearly making a phenomenal one-handed catch of an overthrown alley-oop pass in the corner of the end zone. A short field goal gave the Tigers a 10–0 lead.

  But with about four minutes left in the second quarter, frustration was building in the Jones section of the stands. Seals-Jones had seen only two more balls thrown in his direction. At the end of the half, Bellville was leading 13–10. Ricky’s decoy role continued well into the second half, and Sealy fell behind 27–10. Perhaps Sealy’s head coach, Jimmie Mitchell, was trying to protect his star’s bum ankle, but Chester could barely contain himself.

  “I don’t know what y’all coaches are doing,” he said out loud, not for the first time, to a chorus of agreement.

  With Bellville driving for a put-away score, Seals-Jones picked off a pass at his own ten and electrified the crowd with a weaving runback to mid-field. Dickerson, the effortless shift into a third and fourth gear. It seemed to jolt his coaches into action. Seals-Jones was now where he should have been all night, in the shotgun, behind center, giving the defense fits. But there was only 6:54 left to play. Seals-Jones had been handed the near-hopeless task of trying to pull this game—and the season—out of the fire.

  It took less than thirty seconds for him to produce another highlight: a shifting, dodging scramble leading to a twenty-yard strike into the end zone. The score was now 27–17.

  “They can’t tackle him!” yelled Chester. “Been waiting for them to do this all night!”

  The Tiger crowd was in an uproar—the rivalry on—when Sealy recovered the onside kick. With 5:50 to go, it was fourth and ten from the Bellville twenty-nine, the game on the line. Seals-Jones completed a pass to his best friend, Brown, a playmaker who dived headlong for a first down. The line judge rushed in and spotted the ball a half yard behind what looked to be Brown’s forward progress.

  “That’s a bad spot, Ref!” yelled Chester. “That’s a bad spot!

  “C’mon! Ref!”

  Bellville took over on downs, and by the time Sealy got the ball back, there were only about three minutes left. It was clear the ankle was a problem for Seals-Jones—he couldn’t explode—but he gave no quarter. He scrambled for six, then twelve, then again from one side of the field to the other before firing a bullet that was caught at the ten-yard line. The clock ticked down. The final offensive play of Seals-Jones’s high school career ended with an interception in the end zone.

  When the game was over, Seals-Jones was the first Sealy player to cross the field and shake hands. It was the kind of unscripted act that speaks volumes about upbringing and character.

  Several Tigers were in tears as they walked off the field embracing parents and friends. Later, outside the locker room, his own eyes puffy and rimmed in red, Seals-Jones whispered to his dad, “We could have won, we could have won.”

  A visitor suggested that his quarterback could have done a better job getting the ball into his hands when Ricky was playing wide receiver. Here, many a high school star of Seals-Jones’s stature would have agreed and called out a teammate, but the quiet seventeen-year-old again offered a class in class.

  “He’s just a sophomore,” he said. “He’ll get better.”

  Seals-Jones turned to find his mother, decked out in a sparkly white No. 4 jersey. They shared a long, emotional hug. All week she’d been tending to her son’s injured ankle, favoring old-fashioned remedies like rubbing alcohol to reduce the grapefruit-sized swelling.

  With the towel around his neck her boy wiped away more tears.

  “It sucks—it hurts,” he said. “It hurts to be a senior and lose against your rival. It just hurts.”

  Chester Jones always told his son if you put God first, family second and yourself third, you’ll be fine. In virtually every conversation over the course of many months, he has never failed to point with pride to something his son has done.

  “If he doesn’t play another down, I’ll be proud of him,” Chester said more than once.

  The way the system works, it was during that crazy summer of 2012 that Chester Jones found his own priorities—his belief in faith and family—put to a test.

  Paying players under the table in college football goes back to the days of leather helmets. The only things that have really changed are the methods and the amounts. And forget agents or financial or marketing advisers for the moment. That’s another dirty pile of laundry. Just stick with the bigtime schools. Within that world the $100 postgame booster handshake still exists. But the delivery system for the serious money—the up-front down payment, always in cash—has changed over time, becoming far more discreet and difficult for NCAA investigators to trace, like those involving the use of ATM cards with individual PIN codes and predetermined monthly withdrawal limits set up by a booster. Offers are rarely written and often passed on to relatives by intermediaries to better provide “plausible deniability” to coaches with the most to lose.

  The modern touchstone for the value The System had put on a top recruit was the $180,000 Cam Newton’s father allegedly solicited from Mississippi State in November 2009 just prior to his son leading Blinn to the national junior college championship. The NCAA investigated and, over the course of fifty Newton-related interviews, found that while it was clear Newton’s father had sought payments, no evidence existed that such payments were made. Or that his son was aware he was being shopped.

  At the time, the mega-programs were generating in the neighborhood of $70 million per year—not the $80 million to $100 million they were in 2012. For that reason, it was difficult to extrapolate the Newton numbers into 2012 dollars.

  Until now.

  According to a source with direct knowledge of the conversation, in late June 2012, Chester Jones said “people” representing a perennial top twenty program had approached him with an offer:

  • $300,000 in cash

  • use of a luxury suite during the football season

  • eight season tickets

  • $1,000 a month for Ricky and $500 a month for the family

  “He was trying to process it, to be honest with you,” the source said. “He was in conflict. Not about taking the money. Conflict from the standpoint of disbelief over the offer.”

  In the living room of the family home the offer was repeated back to Chester Jones. A digital tape recorder was running. The specific school was named.

  “Nah, they didn’t offer nothing to Ricky,” Jones said. “No, never. They never offered us a dime. It never did get to that …

  “We don’t want to hurt Ricky. We do something wrong … sooner or later you got to pay for it. I don’t want to do anything to hurt Ricky like that Cam Newton deal. That’s the thing—it ain’t about me, it ain’t about Buffy. It’s about Ricky. I don’t want to hurt Ricky.”

  The next morning Jones sat down to breakfast at Tony’s diner. Inside the front door a veteran from the local VFW Post 5601 was pinning red poppies on the collar of those kind enough to slip a dollar or two into his cookie jar.

  Chester Jones said he finally got to bed about 1:30 in the morning after sharing cake with some of the reporters from recruiting Web sites he’d come to know and like and sitting up talking with Buffy.

  “I must have got a hundred phone calls last night,” he said above the breakfast clatter.

  The subject of the alleged offer of money, tickets and use of a luxury suite if his son would commit to a certain school was raised once again. The tape recorder was on the table.

  “Man, we ain’t ever talked to [the school] about nothing like that,” he repeated once more. “They never did go at us like that. I had other schools tell you that stuff, other schools just came up and said, ‘What will it take?’ What kind of number would it take for Ricky to change his mind when he had committed to Texas?

  “I’m not the one. Somebody else would always talk. I did n
ot want to meet the people. [People] come back and tell me what they said. Some of the other coaches, AAU [basketball] coaches that I knew, they would talk to the guys, ’cause Ricky played basketball for them, and the college coaches would get to them guys, and they’d come back and tell me, you know, them guys, they want Ricky.

  “They’d catch me sitting at a game [and say], ‘I got to holler at you, Jones. That boy of yours, man, a lot of these coaches, man, they want that boy, and they are willing to do whatever.’ ”

  What is the definition of “whatever”? Was the number accurate? Three hundred thousand dollars?

  It was at that point Chester Jones opened a window into just how valuable some very special high school football players are to multimillion-dollar football programs dependent on their talent.

  “Oh, it was higher than that,” he said of the $300,000 figure. “It was a lot higher than that. Some of the guys, I know, one said”—he names a school in the ACC, another in the SEC—“they’ll double whatever someone else offers. Six hundred. Seven hundred. You know, Ricky wasn’t going to go to [that SEC school], so why would I get into that? I used to laugh, and they said, ‘You’re playing around and we’re serious.’ ”

  Jones was reminded of the obvious: $600,000 or $700,000 is a boatload of money.

  “Man, those people don’t care,” he replied. “You know, where if someone offers you seven, one guy said we’ll offer double whatever they offer you to change [your] mind. That kind of stuff.”

  It was put to Jones that what it boiled down to was this: Did he want to sell his son to the highest bidder?

  “No, I don’t want that,” he said. “The thing about it, you’ve still got to look yourself in the mirror and see yourself. And say why? I mean, we’re doing okay. We’re not rich. But we’re doing okay. And, ah, you know, my dad always told me an honest dollar is better than a fast dollar.

  “What a lot of people don’t understand is it’s not up to me. I know Ricky. When he goes somewhere to play football, that’s why he’s going to do it. You know what I told him? ‘You already got $200,000—they gave that to you. In a scholarship.’ ”

  A month later, on the day before Christmas, Chester Jones—a man of faith and family before all else—would offer one final reason as to why he said no.

  “God will punish me, punish me through Ricky. He will not bless Ricky for our faults,” he said. “I know what the consequences were going to be.”

  With the football season now over, Chester could see the pressure building on his son, taking a toll. Ricky had been playing it cool and cagey up to that point—wearing gloves that were maroon, an A&M color, for his final two high school games and a purple shirt and tie (a nod to LSU) when he accepted his invitation to the Army All-American Bowl in San Antonio. Quietly, Chester did some fishing, but Ricky wasn’t biting.

  “I ask him sometimes, ‘Ricky, what do you think? LSU or A&M?’ ” Chester said in November 2012. “He told me, ‘Dad, [if] I tell you, the whole world is going to know.’ ”

  Though Ricky had yet to make official visits to A&M and LSU, his unofficial visits had underscored how much each school coveted him. Students at the LSU–’Bama game in Baton Rouge suddenly chanted “R-S-J! R-S-J!” when Ricky walked by on the field before the game, playfully hauling him into the stands for some serious Death Valley love. The reception was even wilder at A&M. In the locker room following the dismantling of Missouri, half a dozen A&M players came up to Seals-Jones and said they wanted to show him around College Station (not surprisingly, Buffy put the kibosh on that, telling them, “Oh no, not this time”). Then quarterback Johnny Manziel and Seals-Jones huddled alone for a few minutes. Johnny let Ricky know just how much he looked forward to throwing to him the following season. “I saw your highlights; I know what you can do,” said Manziel. “You’re a big target, and when I’m moving, I see you out there, I’m throwing the ball to you.” They promised to stay in touch.

  In early December, Seals-Jones told his dad he wanted to change his cell phone number; the calls and texts never seemed to stop. Florida, Nebraska, Missouri and LSU were pushing right to the end. Two LSU assistants made two in-home visits, and A&M’s recruiting coordinator, Clarence McKinney, visited as well, strengthening the bond he’d built with the family, particularly Buffy. By the first Thursday of the last month of 2012, Ricky had had it. He called his father on the phone and told him he was ready to commit. On Sunday night he finally told him where.

  “My mind’s made, Dad,” he said of his decision. “That’s what I want to do.”

  On Friday of that same week Manziel sat surrounded by cameras and microphones in the O’Neill Room on the fourth floor of the Marriott Marquis in New York City. The redshirt freshman was on the verge of winning the Heisman Trophy thanks, in large part, to his Houdini-like performance in the Aggies’ upset of then–No. 1 Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The following night at the Downtown Athletic Club he would accept the award. On Monday morning, at exactly 9:45, Seals-Jones would call Kevin Sumlin at A&M. The phone rang four times before Sumlin picked up.

  “Coach, it’s Ricky. I’m calling to let you know I’m going to be an Aggie next year.”

  “That’s good,” answered Sumlin. “Like I told you, you’re going to be something special. Next year maybe you and me will be going to New York.”

  At 10:00 a.m. in the Tiger Room at Sealy High, Seals-Jones sat down before the cameras and reporters and pulled an A&M cap out of his jacket and onto his head, verbally committing to the Aggies. On February 6, 2013, he made it official, signing a National Letter of Intent.

  For better or worse the Ricky Seals-Jones sweepstakes was finally over.

  Part III, “The starting lineup is voluntary, too”

  Coaching changes most often occur in December, right after the regular season ends and just as the recruiting season hits its white-hot period leading up to National Signing Day in early February. New coaches must hire a staff and instantly go on the road in an effort to shore up commitments from high school seniors. The schedule leaves no time for things like finding a place to live, obtaining a new driver’s license or registering vehicles. Those details inevitably fall to a coach’s wife.

  Mike and Sharon Leach arrived with their two teenage children in Pullman in December 2011. They spent their first two months living out of a Holiday Inn. After Sharon got the kids enrolled in new schools, she went house hunting. Mike immediately left town with his new staff in search of new recruits. His most important target was Tyler Bruggman, a six-foot-two pro-style quarterback at Brophy College Prep high school in Phoenix. The top recruiting services all listed Bruggman as a four-star quarterback, as opposed to a five-star. But Leach didn’t pay much attention to the ratings services, especially when it came to quarterbacks. That position, more than any other, influenced the success or failure of a team. So Leach spent more time evaluating high school quarterbacks than anything else, studying them on paper and on film. There was no one he wanted more than Bruggman.

  But other schools wanted him too. He had offers from plenty of programs that traditionally throw the ball a lot—Houston, BYU, Purdue and Washington among them. A dozen schools in all had offered. Before Leach arrived at WSU, Bruggman had narrowed his choices down to Arizona State, Michigan State and Arkansas. Then his high school coach got a call from Leach in late December. That was enough to change Bruggman’s entire approach.

  “I had watched Coach Leach at Tech,” Bruggman said. “I knew he was a great coach, especially for quarterbacks. The opportunity to play for him would be an honor.”

  Suddenly Washington State was in the running for Bruggman’s services.

  On February 9, 2012, Leach had a couple of hours before a team workout, so Sharon drove him to a restaurant for dinner. It was a rare moment alone. But during the drive, Leach spent most of his time talking by phone with teenage boys. Every college football wife comes to realize that her husband will spend far more time talking to teenage boys than to her. It’s called recruitin
g, and it never stops.

  Leach’s cell phone buzzed the minute he sat in the passenger’s seat. It was an offensive lineman, a kid who had yet to commit to WSU.

  “I think you ought to come here for the same reason I came here,” Leach told him. “We are going to lead the nation in passing, in offense. The most cherished skill a lineman does is pass protect.”

  The kid asked about facilities.

  “We are building a brand-new football complex,” Leach said. “Our weight room will be thirteen thousand square feet. What’s really exciting here is they have a tradition of going to the Rose Bowl. We have a chance to get this thing back on track. As a head coach I’ve been to ten straight bowl games, and I plan on going to one this year, too. We need guys like you to help us usher that in. You are the type of guy we need to build a future with around here.”

  By the time Leach finished his fourth call, Sharon had pulled up to an out-of-the-way Mexican restaurant. They found a quiet table in the back. The discussion quickly turned to the kids, the new house, the new car, insurance and the movers. He ate while she updated him. She ate while he asked follow-up questions. Then they paid the bill. On the way out, the owner stopped Mike. “Good luck, Coach,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “If there is ever anything I can do for you, let me know,” the owner said.

  “I appreciate that. Do you guys cater?”

  While they chatted, three cute college-age girls entered the restaurant. They immediately recognized Leach and approached. “Can we get a photo with you?” one of them asked.

  As Leach posed, his wife stood off in the distance, unnoticed. “His time is not his own,” she said. “I have to share him with everybody.”

  Moments later they were back in the car, and he was back on his cell phone, returning a missed call that had come in during dinner.

  “Yeah, this is Mike Leach.”

  The kid on the other end started talking fast.