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

by Jeff Benedict

  “Harvey is like an older brother to me,” Van Noy said. “He told me that I didn’t want to have regrets about not finishing my senior year.”

  After talking with Unga, Van Noy told his parents he’d made up his mind. He wanted to finish what he started. That meant obtaining his degree. He also felt as if he had unfinished business on the football field. The team, he felt, was on the verge of something big in 2013. He wanted to be part of it. But the main thing on his mind was his legacy.

  “Especially with my past, staying will have an impact on a lot of younger people,” Van Noy said. “There will be kids who say, ‘If Kyle can graduate, then I can, too.’ ”

  His parents took out an insurance policy in case Van Noy was injured during his senior year. Then Van Noy called Mendenhall. “I’m staying for my senior year,” he told him. “I’m coming back.”

  All thirty-two NFL teams were present at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, on January 26, 2013. All eyes were on Ezekiel Ansah. He had only started nine games in his college career. This was an opportunity to see him compete against the best offensive players in the nation. In the third quarter he left no doubt about his ability to get after the quarterback when he shed two blockers and tracked down Syracuse’s Ryan Nassib, hammering him as he scrambled, forcing a fumble in the process.

  But the play that solidified Ansah as a first-round pick came on a run play. The North handed the ball to Michigan speedster Denard Robinson on a reverse. Initially, Ansah had been fooled by the misdirection. Still, he planted his toe in the ground, changed direction and gave chase. Despite having no angle, he chased down Robinson with ease and threw him to the ground. It was a remarkable display of speed, strength and agility.

  Three months later Ansah sat between his mother and Bronco Mendenhall backstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. At the lectern, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell turned the microphone over to Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders.

  “With the fifth pick of the 2013 NFL draft, the Detroit Lions select Ezekiel Ansah, defensive end, BYU.”

  The audience went wild.

  Ansah stood and hugged his mother. Then he turned to Mendenhall, who gave him a bear hug and congratulated him.

  “We have coming out of the greenroom a young man who just a couple years ago hadn’t even played the sport,” said a commentator from the NFL Network. “We have a fifth overall pick in this draft with four and a half career sacks.”

  “Please understand the magnitude of this story,” chimed in another NFL Network commentator. “The reason he’s playing football is that the BYU basketball team cut him twice. Then he went to the track team. He never came to football until 2010 as a walk-on. He’s six feet five inches. He weighs 270 pounds. And he has frightening physical skills. Coming off the edge at the Senior Bowl, he dominated the Senior Bowl.”

  Ansah stepped to the stage wearing a Lions cap and his trademark lens-less glasses. First Goodell hugged him, then Sanders did. Holding his new Lions jersey, Ziggy faced the crowd and smiled.

  Twenty-four hours later he entered Ford Field in Detroit to chants of “Ziggy! Ziggy! Ziggy!” It was Draft Fan Fest, and the place was rocking.

  “You can’t explain this,” Ansah said. “It feels warm. I feel the love. I’m ready to fall in love with this place.”

  The genius of ESPN

  “All right, let’s see the open, let’s walk through the open.”

  The clock inside the production truck read 9:48:40.

  Game time for ESPN’s College GameDay was less than thirteen minutes away.

  “Signs, fellas, we need signs,” said the thirty-eight-year-old producer, Lee Fitting, long and lean with some age around his eyes.

  Like magic, I WASH MY DIRTY CLOTHES WITH TIDE popped up on one of a dozen monitors in front of the director, Tom Lucas. SABAN WEARS CROCS. AJ MCCRYIN’.

  “Clip those off,” Lucas said.

  “Signs, signs, everywhere signs,” Fitting sang softly to himself.

  He downed some coffee and set the Starbucks cup inside a roll of masking tape. Fitting was a senior coordinating producer at ESPN, in his ninth year at the helm of the gold standard of pregame shows. The challenge was keeping a show in its twenty-sixth season looking and feeling fresh and unscripted. “Organic,” he called it.

  “Hey, how about these guys get to the set one week on time!”

  “These guys” were Chris Fowler, in his twenty-third consecutive year as anchor and host of GameDay and his twenty-sixth overall at the network; Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard; Kirk Herbstreit, the game’s top analyst; and crazy-as-a-fox Lee Corso, known to the crew as “Coach” or “LC.”

  Fitting pressed a small button on a communication console, enabling him to speak directly into the ear of talent.

  “LC, good morning,” he said. “I need you to play to the crowd.”

  Fitting did not have to ask twice. Corso grabbed an Alabama helmet from the GameDay desk and raised it over his head. Well, that certainly woke up the early-morning crowd that had gathered in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park. Then, for good measure, Corso gave the same salute to the Georgia fans.

  Since it first hit the road in 1993—No. 1 Florida State versus No. 2 Notre Dame in South Bend, on NBC no less—GameDay had rolled onto virtually every major campus in college football, some a dozen times or more. Austin, Tuscaloosa, Eugene, Ann Arbor, Knoxville, Gainesville, South Bend, Baton Rouge, Boise State, the Bayou Classic in Houston, a terrific trip to the Division III Amherst-Williams clash, the MEAC and the MAC. Only one spot remained on the crew’s collective bucket list—The Grove at Ole Miss.

  “Ah, sundresses and alcoholic beverages,” Fitting said with a sigh.

  Week in and week out the editorial and emotional tone of the two-hour show was set by what’s known in the business as the “open”—a two-minute or so video montage at the very top of the broadcast. Fowler always wrote and narrated the open. Hell, he wrote the entire show. But the open was critical. GameDay set the tone for Saturday’s biggest games, and the open set the tone for GameDay. Nobody took that responsibility more seriously than Fowler.

  “Our audience is very rare,” he said during a quiet moment on the GameDay bus. “We have to work really long and hard—that’s where the late hours come in—to make the show 2 or 3 percent better [every week] because our audience is so informed.

  “I think of myself as the conscience of the show,” he said when asked about his role. “The show very clearly knows what it is. And I think too many shows forget what they are—or never figure it out. We are a pregame show. We are what the fan on the couch wants to talk about, hear about, two hours before kickoff. That’s what we are. We are not a magazine show. We are not a show of record. We are not all things to all people. We are counting down to the [game] sites of the day.”

  On the first Saturday in December 2012—championship Saturday—the GameDay circus was in Atlanta, counting down to the SEC title game later that afternoon. By the time two jam-packed, fun-filled hours were over, GameDay had offered its audience three terrific features, snappy game highlights, a complete breakdown of the Alabama–Georgia game, high-octane opinions and signature nods to Michael Jordan, Ray Charles, Tupac and the Kardashians, all the while showcasing the best on-set chemistry of any pregame show on the planet.

  “It’s really like a team; you’ve got to check your egos at the door,” said Corso. “You know, in television, some guys have big egos, and when they do, it hurts the team. I think ours are very much kept under control. We don’t have egos. I think that’s very important.”

  “None of it’s contrived,” Fitting said, relaxing on a hotel hallway couch after a two-hour Friday production meeting. “The guys on the set act the same way in the meeting. They act the same way on our Monday conference call. They act the same way when we go out to dinner. It’s real, natural, chemistry.”

  The clock in the truck read 9:55:29. Four minutes and change to air.

  Herbstreit had finally made an a
ppearance on the bright orange Home Depot set it took six hours to construct. Fitting saw himself as the “orchestra leader” of the show. He loved the locker room banter, the chance to bust chops. On the fourteenth and final show of the regular season, Herbstreit had unwittingly provided the first opportunity of the day.

  “Hey, Herbie! Nice of you to fuckin’ join us! Every week! I’ve had it with you!”

  The clock was ticking. The conductor wanted to see and hear the open one more time.

  “Do it again,” said Fitting. “Let’s treat this as a real read.”

  Live sports programming is among the most deceptive of arts. Done right, it flowed like a superhighway on the screen, a rapidly moving sequence of what’s called “traffic”—plays, replays, sideline reports, graphics and promos—unfolding before the viewer’s eyes without the slightest stumble or interruption.

  Pregame shows are even more difficult to produce than games because there’s no particular pattern to the traffic; it’s free-form television art. And without question in the last decade or so GameDay had grown into the highest form of that art. Bucking the cable TV trend that more is better—more stats, more graphics, more, more, more on the screen—under Fitting and Fowler, GameDay had stripped away the clutter and gone increasingly old-school. Less was more. Their goal: simple and clean. A show bursting with talent and opinion driven by the energy of its unique live audience and the passion and commitment of the man Fitting saw as the “quarterback” of the GameDay team.

  “It starts with Fowler,” he said. “He always says, ‘We can’t make the show the same as last week.’ ”

  “In ten … nine … eight …

  “Roll X.”

  “Sound full, open Chris’s mike.”

  “Have a good one, fellas,” said Fitting. “Let’s finish strong.”

  “Take music.”

  Setting the big picture of college football for that weekend, a “beauty” shot of the serene campus of undefeated and top-ranked Notre Dame filled the screen. Fowler’s strong, expressive voice took it from there.

  “All’s calm and quiet at Notre Dame today … where prayers have been answered. Resilience rewarded. Perfection achieved …”

  In Fowler’s right hand was a blue index card the size of a paperback book. On the inside was the open. Every word was capitalized in thin black ink. Words Fowler wanted to emphasize had been underlined. It looked exactly like this:

  THE DOGS DEFENSE IS WOOFING! TALKING UP THEIR TALENT—VOWING TO BRING ENOUGH SWAGGER FOR A SIXTY MINUTE TUSSLE W/THE TIDE. ARE WE BUYING THEY CAN BACK IT UP?

  Fowler had been up until 2:30 tightening the text and transferring the notes and wordplay he’d sketched out on his iPad during the week to his cards. He liked to work late for a couple of reasons: it assured the latest possible information, and what he wrote stayed fresh in his mind. At a point of his career when he could have easily just mailed it in, Fowler religiously called coaches and sources during the week while living online digging for the latest college football news. He also employed the son of a tennis partner, a Cal grad with an eye for what Fowler called “very different” information, to augment his own research and reporting. He loved his work and it showed. He was living in what he called the golden age of GameDay.

  “This thing has taken a lot of twists and turns over the twenty-three years of doing it,” he said on the bus. “There were the experimental years. The wild and woolly years, when we really didn’t know what we were doing, it was growing so fast, and people were just sort of catching on. [Now] we are all very much middle-aged, mature. We know what we’re doing. It’s well-oiled in every facet of it. From the stage to the truck to the set.”

  “I’ve been around ESPN since ’96, and nobody is as committed to the product as he is,” said Fitting. “Strictly committed to serving the college football fan. And he will push back at me at times—push back at management at times. When I sit back and really think about what he’s doing, it’s always for the betterment of the show for the fan. Period.”

  “That’s very nice,” Fowler said after the compliment was relayed. “First of all, it starts from not just me, but everyone has a genuine passion for the sport. If this was a weekly assignment for somebody, they need to go someplace else. This is where all of us want to be on Saturday and no place else. For fourteen weeks we want to be at the biggest game. Talking about it. Setting the table. Analyzing what’s going on that Saturday. It’s a labor of love for all of us.”

  Fowler absolutely killed the open, knocked it out of the park, leading to the show’s rowdy Comin’ to Your Cit-taaay theme song by country stars Big & Rich.

  “That a boy,” said Fitting into Fowler’s ear. “Hum that cheese.”

  Translation: In the baseball equivalent of his final start of the regular season, Fowler had brought his fastball.

  “Chris brought his heater to the show today,” Fitting said. “Chris Fowler, bringing that four-seam cheese.”

  Fitting had grown up on the North Shore of Long Island dreaming of becoming a sports announcer, the next Chris Berman. At James Madison University in Virginia, he entered a Dick Vitale soundalike contest. Now, as the “guys” were about to come on camera for the first time to discuss the story lines of the Alabama–Georgia game, he channeled his inner Dickie V.

  “Don’t let Herbie get going early, boys! He’s like Adrian Peterson! He gets eight or nine early … don’t give him too many carries early, he’ll be calling for the rock all day!”

  “Nine to Fowler.”

  “Stand by on camera, gentlemen … stand by, here we come.”

  Fowler welcomed the audience at home and thousands more cheering and chanting behind the set. “Great to be here in Centennial Park—Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard and the Coach, Lee Corso.”

  Just one small problem: Howard’s microphone had suddenly gone dead.

  “We don’t have Desmond’s mike right now?” asked Fitting.

  No, he was told. He pressed a button on his console.

  “No opening comment from Dez,” he told Fowler.

  All fine and good except at the exact moment, just as Fitting’s words were hitting Fowler’s aural canal, the anchor had turned to his right, toward Howard, for the first comment of the day. No problem. As if by remote control Fowler glided left and looked toward Herbstreit.

  “Good, everybody,” said Fitting. “That’s how you bob and weave. Always have a backup to the backup.”

  Not GameDay. In virtually every other pregame show the anchor copy was scripted and rolled from a teleprompter. After the open, Fowler’s blue index cards contained little more than bullet points and plays on words. There was no teleprompter, no cue cards, no safety net on the GameDay set. The backup to the backup was Fowler.

  To an experienced television eye he had the gift, the savant-like ability to process rapid streams of information spoken into his ear while moving seamlessly between elements—from highlights to graphics to commercial countdowns. Most important, he kept the GameDay train on track—no easy task given the personalities—never once giving a glimpse of the controlled chaos in the truck to the audience at home. In the world of network television you could count the number of other broadcasters with such skill on one hand: Bob Costas, the brothers Gumbel (Bryant and Greg) and Matt Lauer. That was about it.

  “He does things on the spur of the moment that are unbelievable,” said Corso. “You don’t see them. He does so many things that keep us under control.”

  “Chris Fowler can do anything,” Fitting said, and he wasn’t blowing smoke. “He could host the Olympics. He could host a morning show. He could host the evening news. He’s brilliant. Without a doubt there’s never a situation on the show that I’m worried about. With Chris you don’t have to put the ball on the tee. He can hit the ball when it’s falling off the tee.”

  Now in his early fifties, Fowler had arrived at ESPN in 1986, a golden boy out of the University of Colorado with a bachelor of science in radio/televisi
on news, already with two years of production and on-air experience at KCNC, a big NBC affiliate out of Denver. He spent his first two years at ESPN as the host/reporter for Scholastic Sports America, a high school sports magazine show. In 1988, he moved to the college football sidelines. Since then, he had hosted ESPN’s Final Four coverage for thirteen seasons, Grand Slam tennis (a favorite), Triple Crown coverage, the World Cup and its Heisman award show.

  “I think the best compliment people can say is you make things easy,” he said. “This isn’t going to sound right, but if the quarterback knows what he’s doing and he’s been doing it a million years, he’s not going to forget the snap count.”

  Sitting in a black leather chair at the back of the GameDay bus, his feet outstretched, Fowler said, “It’s not different from playing quarterback. There were many years you can’t check down to our third or fourth option because the pass rush was in your face. It’s not all that different from this job. You see it. It’s a very tough thing to adapt and learn. There are a lot of moving parts. In order to make it work, and feel organic, you have to have a presence of mind.”

  Like it or not, the acid test of a news or sports reporter comes during moments of crisis. (See Al Michaels, 1989 earthquake, World Series, San Francisco.) Fowler’s biggest test arrived unexpectedly in November 2011 near the end of a short commercial break. Watching the wires, a news editor in the production truck noticed an Associated Press story out of New Haven, Connecticut. A rental truck carrying kegs of beer driven by a student had suddenly gone out of control and run into a tailgating crowd at the Harvard–Yale football game. A thirty-year-old woman had been killed, and three others had been injured.