The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (2 page)

“I really don’t know what to do, but I’m really concerned about it, really, really concerned about it,” said Emmert. “It’s not healthy at all.”

As for the players, they have paid a heavy price for what has become a year-round job. A staggering 282 players from eight of the ten Bowl Championship Series (BCS) conferences and major independents suffered season-ending injuries. And those were just the officially reported ones. Plenty of other players were carted off practice fields, never to return to action.

Meanwhile, in March 2013, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic released a study showing 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 concussions. The findings were based on blood samples, brain scans and cognitive tests performed on sixty-seven college football players before and after games during the 2011 season. As the debate over the long-term effects of head injuries in football continues to escalate, it is now an established fact that college football players who never make it to the NFL are at risk of being diagnosed with degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma.

But none of that mattered as Notre Dame and Alabama squared off for the national championship on ESPN. The last time the two storied programs had met with so much on the line was the 1973 Sugar Bowl, remembered for the gutsiest call of Irish head coach Ara Parseghian’s career, a third-and-eight pass from the shadow of his own end zone, enabling the Irish to run out the clock and outlast Paul “Bear” Bryant’s Tide 24–23. Epic.

Four decades later, Brian Kelly and Nick Saban had come to power. Kelly, in his third year, was a former women’s softball coach at Assumption College before making a name for himself at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. Six hugely successful seasons at Central Michigan and Cincinnati helped propel the son of a Boston politician to South Bend. Kelly had more than a bit of the Irish in him and, like his father, was wise to the media game. He offered smooth, thoughtful answers to almost every question, even ones he had heard for the third time in an hour. He also spoke of the importance of “painting a vision” of success at Notre Dame.

“Your program is defined by consistency and Alabama is that model,” he said two days before the championship game. “I concede that. It’s where we want to be.”

Saban, on the other hand, was the reigning heavyweight champ of college coaching, 60-7 since 2008, and gunning for his third national title in four years and his fourth in the last decade. His way had become
the
way in the game. Melding body and mind through “The Process” into a new breed of “Built by Bama” athlete, Saban had his players hardwired to perform at their best when it mattered most.

All of this had helped propel Saban to the front of the roaring, seemingly unstoppable race in coaching salaries. He had earned north of $5 million in salary, bonuses and other perks in 2012, just ahead of Mack Brown at Texas. By July 2013, at least seventy-nine head football coaches made $1 million or more annually. Fifty-two made more than $2 million, while sixteen cleared $3 million. Assistant coaching salaries had routinely reached into the high six figures or more.

“Athletics has gotten so disproportionate to the rest of the economy
and to the academic community that it’s unbelievable,” said Dr. Julian Spallholz, a distinguished professor of nutrition and biochemistry at Texas Tech. “The students pay more tuition. The faculty pay for not having a pay increase. And the football coach gets a half-million raise. I think that speaks for itself, doesn’t it?”

Well, not exactly. College professors have tenure, and they are not expected to single-handedly fill stadiums in order to offset the eight-figure investments being made these days in stadium facilities. On the other hand, a college football coach may be the most insecure job in America. Between 2009 and 2012, seventy-two Division I head football coaches were fired. Auburn’s Gene Chizik was among those let go in 2012—following a winless season in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and just two seasons after leading Auburn to the national championship. The pressure to win—and win right away—had never been greater, and it was getting worse. A four-team postseason playoff was finally here, with Cowboys Stadium selected to host the first national championship game in January 2015. The conference “pool” payout for the eventual winner tripled to $75 million.

It was against this ever-changing landscape—in arguably the most tumultuous period in college football history—that the authors secured an all-access pass inside several mega-programs. We spent months behind the scenes with the coaching staffs at Alabama and Michigan and with top recruits headed to Texas A&M and Utah. We went on the road with BYU, Washington State and even up-and-coming Towson University; we traveled on a team charter, listened and observed inside locker rooms and team meetings and from the sidelines during games and practices. We traveled with the game’s most powerful booster and hung out with ESPN’s
College GameDay
crew. We also dug into some serious dirt at Ohio State, Tennessee and Missouri. We talked with tutors, hostesses, college presidents, agents, walk-ons, strippers, trustees, fans, directors of football operations and even a “janitor.”

In all, with the help of four additional reporters, we conducted more than five hundred interviews and logged well over two hundred hours observing programs at every facet and level of the game to gain a wider, deeper understanding of the power of The System and all its component parts.

In the end, we hope, we have produced an enlightening, unvarnished, deeply detailed look at the pageantry, pressure, pain, glory and scandal that make college football the most passionate, entertaining game in America today.

Green streamers and white hankies filled the stadium as Notre Dame lined up to kick off to Alabama.

“This crowd is ready,” said ESPN’s Brent Musburger against a deafening crescendo of “O-H-H-H-H-H-H.”

The stadium fell instantly silent the moment Notre Dame’s kicker Kyle Brindza sent the football sailing toward Alabama’s Christion Jones.

“Game on,” Musburger said.

O
n Saturday afternoons in the fall of 1981 the roar of the crowd would echo across campus every time BYU scored a touchdown. It happened a lot that year. BYU led the nation in offense, scoring more than five hundred points, thanks to the arm of two-time all-American quarterback Jim McMahon. On his way to setting seventy NCAA passing records, McMahon had put Provo, Utah, on the college football map.

Twenty-year-old Sharon Smith hardly noticed. But one evening that fall she was outside her apartment when a rugged-looking guy with wavy, shoulder-length hair approached. He introduced himself as Mike Leach, a twenty-year-old junior from Cody, Wyoming. He lived in the apartment complex next door. They even used the same laundry room. Turned out they had been neighbors for months.

Smith was surprised they had never crossed paths. But Leach traveled a fair amount. He was a member of BYU’s rugby team.

She was intrigued. Leach didn’t look like a BYU student. For one thing, his hair was too long. It should have been above his collar, according to BYU’s honor code. But Leach ignored the rule. That got him repeatedly summoned to the dean’s office. Still, Leach didn’t cut his hair. He didn’t talk like a BYU student either. His vocabulary was a little more colorful. So was his upbringing. He grew up in Wyoming with boys who spent Friday nights popping beers and getting in fistfights. Ranchers wearing sidearms would come into town for lunch at the local diner.
Gunsmoke
reruns were all the rage. Marshal Dillon was Leach’s boyhood hero.

Smith had met lots of guys at BYU. None was as authentic—or as funny—as Leach. They ended up talking until after midnight, and she accepted his invitation to go out the following night.

Their first date was a meal at an A&W restaurant in Provo. That’s when
college football entered the picture. Over hot dogs and a couple cold root beers, Leach started talking about coaching. His idol was BYU’s head coach, LaVell Edwards. During Leach’s freshman year he had entered his name in a drawing and won season tickets on the forty-yard line. From that perch he began studying BYU’s offensive scheme: a controlled passing game with somebody always in motion before the snap; lots of receivers running a combination of vertical routes and crossing patterns; throwing to the backs in the flat. Edwards’s innovative system was a forerunner of the West Coast Offense ultimately popularized by Bill Walsh in the NFL. But at the college level in the early 1980s, no defensive coordinator in the country had figured out how to stop it.

To the casual fan BYU’s system looked pretty complicated. And to a certain extent, it was. But Leach had figured out that the genius of Edwards was the way he packaged his plays. He used an endless number of formations to disguise about fifty basic plays. That made it easy for the offense to memorize and difficult for defenses to recognize.

Smith had no idea what Leach was talking about. But one thing was obvious to her: the guy sitting across from her sipping root beer through a straw was no casual fan of the game. He wasn’t some armchair quarterback either. In high school Leach had started a “coaching” file, filling it with newspaper clippings from the sports pages and schematic ideas he scribbled on loose sheets of paper. By the time he got to Provo and could watch LaVell Edwards up close, he was mapping out his future. “BYU had a state-of-the-art offense,” Leach said. “The best in the country. I started studying it very closely. LaVell Edwards had a major impact on me.”

After one date with Leach, Smith never saw anyone else. “Of all the people I dated at BYU, he was the only guy who knew exactly what he wanted to do,” Smith said. “He told me right away that he knew he was going to be a lawyer or a college football coach. I found it very attractive that he had a plan and was very confident about achieving it.”

Never mind that Leach had never played college football and his only coaching experience was as a Little League baseball coach back in Wyoming. Smith wasn’t worried. “He could analyze the game and the way coaches were coaching, and he had it in his mind that he could do it better at a young age,” she said. “Confidence is a very attractive feature.”

In June 1982, Mike and Sharon were married in St. George, Utah. After BYU, they moved to Southern California, and Mike attended law school at Pepperdine. But just before he got his law degree, he posed a practical
question to Sharon: “Do you want me to come home miserable and making a lot of money or come home happy and not earning as much money?”

She told him that being happy was more important than making a lot of money.

Leach didn’t bother taking the bar exam. Instead, he and Sharon headed to Alabama so Mike could attend the U.S. Sports Academy. After he obtained his master’s, they returned to California, and Mike talked his way into a part-time assistant’s position with the football team at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, then a Division II school. The fact that Leach had a law degree intrigued the head coach enough to offer him a job helping out for $3,000. Sharon figured that was a monthly salary. But it was $3,000 for the season.