The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (27 page)

Often Bryant dealt with problems that had nothing to do with the players. At the 2000 Holiday Bowl in San Diego, Texas was down late in the game to Oregon—it would eventually lose 35–30—when Arthur Johnson (now UT’s associate athletics director for football operations) approached Bryant on the sideline.

“Cleve,” said Johnson. “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

“Give me the good news.”

“The good news is the postgame snack is here.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“The plane we were supposed to take home right after the game is still in Minneapolis.”

Shit, thought Bryant. Johnson’s next question dealt with who was going to inform Brown. Bryant knew that answer. But first things first.

“Okay, call the hotel,” he told Johnson. “I don’t give a fuck what it costs, get Mack his room back. Then get a room downstairs and fill it with pizzas and food.”

“Do you want me to tell you when the plane leaves Minneapolis?” asked Johnson.

“No, tell that son of a bitch to call me when he’s on the ground in San Diego.”

After the game Bryant walked up to Brown and delivered the bad news.

“You’re shitting me,” said Brown.

“You got your room, don’t worry,” Bryant said.

After the game the team and the travel party bused back to the hotel and hung out until the plane finally arrived. It was only after Bryant had every single player accounted for and every single person in the travel party on the bus that he knocked on Brown’s hotel door.

“Okay, Coach,” he said. “Let’s roll.”

At the time of his departure Bryant estimated Texas was netting at least $8 million per home game, plus concessions. The fifty-seven luxury suites surrounding the field go for around $56,000 a year, he said, not counting food and tickets. The fact the players,
his players
, didn’t see a dime of that money, of any outside money, bothered Bryant.

“It’s basically slave labor,” he said.

To that end he explained how if he could find a way to skirt the rules from time to time, to put a little extra cash in a kid’s pocket, he would. Sometimes it meant playing games with the way plane tickets were purchased.
Sometimes it meant knowing a place where the star running back could buy a $500 suit for $50 to look good at an awards dinner or setting up a good deal on a used car.

It’s in those ways, and countless more, that Bryant’s loss to the Longhorns program cannot be measured. Those in the know argued the early-morning incident involving quarterback Case McCoy and linebacker Jordan Hicks, accused of sexually assaulting a twenty-one-year-old woman in a hotel room at the Alamo Bowl at the end of the 2012 season, would never have happened under Bryant’s watch (no charges were filed in the case). He would have seen trouble coming three steps ahead and put an end to the party before it started.

Which makes his personal undoing all the more ironic.

“I got terminated on March 23 [2011],” he said. “A young lady in the athletic department asked me for an $11,000 raise. I told her it wasn’t going to happen. She went to the AD and others and was told no.”

That “young lady” was twenty-four-year-old Rachel Arena, a former Angel, UT’s version of a recruiting hostess, who, shortly after graduating from Texas in 2008, had been hired to work as an administrative assistant in the football office. Bryant was her supervisor.

It was August 2010 when Arena first alleged that during the two years she worked in the football office, Bryant had made repeated sexual advances in the form of unwanted texts and verbal and physical acts of sexual harassment, charges Bryant vehemently denied at the time.

In its “Summary of Investigation,” the university reported that in October 2010 it received a formal letter of complaint from attorneys representing Employee 1 (Arena). One of those attorneys was Gloria Allred. Known for teary-eyed press conferences and her fearless, brass-knuckle approach, Allred only added to the anxiety brought on by Brown’s first losing season in Austin.

According to documents obtained by ESPN’s
Outside the Lines
, in her formal complaint Arena charged the harassment began with inappropriate texts from Bryant and escalated from there. “It progressed to more and more personal questions and at all hours, including weekends,”
Outside the Lines
reported Arena had said. “He would ask me when I was going out, where I was going, and what I was wearing. He would ask me if I went home with anyone and about my sex life.” She told investigators he would repeatedly text her. At least one of the texts allegedly read “IW2KY”—short for “I want to kiss you.”

In September 2011,
Outside the Lines
reported Arena told Linda Millstone, the school’s associate vice president for institutional equity, that she showed some of Bryant’s texts to her mother the previous April but never informed Longhorns head coach Mack Brown of the unwanted advances.

“I was upset,” Arena was said to have told investigators, “but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him [Brown] what had happened.”

In her complaint Arena charged the harassment continued until July 2010. On July 15, she alleged, during a closed-door meeting in Bryant’s office dealing with her request for a raise—to $38,000 a year—that Bryant, whose wife works in the athletic department’s athletic services unit, pulled down the top of her dress and bra and fondled her breast. She also charged that another time, in a break room, Bryant came in, stood in front of the door and, as Arena started to leave, kissed her neck.

Bryant insisted the allegations were untrue. “I’m guilty of a lot of shit,” Bryant said. “But I’m not guilty of this.”

About a month later Arena would take a paid leave of absence from her job.

According to documents obtained by ESPN, the formal university investigation uncovered at least two other female office workers who charged Bryant had attempted to kiss them as well. Another woman described Bryant to investigators as “old-freak-nasty.”

A formal interview with Bryant took place on November 3, 2010, at the office of his Austin attorney, Tom Nesbitt. Bryant repeatedly denied any form of verbal or physical harassment had taken place or sending inappropriate text messages, including the one that allegedly read “IW2KY.”

Late in the sixty-five-minute interview Nesbitt asked university attorney Jeff Graves a rather important question: “Has anyone told you they have seen text messages from Cleve Bryant that were of an inappropriate, sexual or romantic nature?”

Responded Graves, “Well, this is not the appropriate time for information to go that way.” He then moved on to another subject.

Based upon that interview and those with some sixteen other individuals, on November 29, 2010, investigators working on behalf of the university submitted an “initial written review” to President William Powers Jr. The review found that “sexual harassment had occurred.”

Mediation between university counsel and Allred began almost immediately. On January 11, 2011, according to the summary report, a formal settlement was reached, and Arena was paid $400,000, a figure that included a full release for the university and all officers and employees.

Two months
after
that agreement was completed, Powers met with Bryant
and Nesbitt to discuss their concerns about the university’s conclusion. Three weeks after that meeting, on March 23, 2011, Powers wrote to Bryant and advised him that “sufficient reasonable and credible evidence” existed that Bryant had sexually harassed Arena. The most compelling evidence, Powers wrote, was the interview investigators had conducted with Arena. Bryant, who had been on voluntary leave, was immediately terminated. At the time of his dismissal Bryant was the highest-ranking African-American employee on campus, earning around $250,000 a year.

Oddly, it wasn’t until five months later—on August 17–18, 2011—that a “full evidentiary hearing” was held in the case. In that hearing both sides were given “a full opportunity” to present “all evidence and testimony.” That hearing took place more than eight months
after
the university had already paid $400,000 to Arena.

“UT rushed to settle the claim before it even finished its investigation,” Nesbitt said. “Having paid a fat settlement, the university could come to but one conclusion.”

Nesbitt added: “I never saw any allegedly inappropriate texts between Cleve and the complainant. There never were any. All texts I saw were routine business communications related to athletic department business. The complaining party never produced any texts to UT or to us. Not one. No witness ever said they had seen inappropriate texts from Cleve. The complainant ultimately claimed that she deleted the allegedly incriminating texts. Our view is that is ridiculous. You get these texts. You hire Gloria Allred to seek a cash settlement. That person deletes the texts? Not likely.”

University officials declined comment on the case. In response to several Open Records requests the Texas Attorney General’s Office ruled the university “must release” both the summary of the investigation and the statement of the accused. Despite such an order the University of Texas withheld Arena’s statement, citing privacy issues.

“It will always be a privacy issue,” said a legal spokesperson for the school. “The privacy of the victim or alleged victim must be protected.”

In October 2011, shortly after news of the settlement was released, Gloria Allred told ESPN, “I am very proud of my client and the courage that she demonstrated to stand up for her rights in this case. Her willingness to do the right thing has benefited other women and the University as well.”

As for Bryant, he said the university never asked one person about his character and did not allow Brown to speak on his behalf. And despite his oft-heard comment about leaving if Bryant ever did, Brown remained firmly entrenched at Texas.

B
YU’s football program was reeling after the 2004 season. Two players were in jail awaiting trial on rape charges. The head coach had been forced out. And it had been three years since it had posted a winning record. Adding insult to injury, its archrival, Utah, under head coach Urban Meyer, had finished the 2004 regular season ranked No. 5 in the country with an 11-0 record. Dubbed the original “BCS Busters,” Utah was the first team from a non-BCS conference to get invited to a BCS bowl game.

While Utah basked in the national headlines as it prepared to face Pittsburgh in the Fiesta Bowl, BYU was desperate to get its program back on track. The task of finding a new head coach fell largely to Tom Holmoe, a BYU alum who had won two Super Bowls as a defensive back with the San Francisco 49ers before becoming a head coach at Cal. Holmoe was chosen to lead a transition team put in place after BYU fired its athletic director at the outset of the gang rape investigation. Holmoe had no interest in hiring anyone from Gary Crowton’s staff. There was only one man Holmoe wanted—Utah’s defensive coordinator, Kyle Whittingham.

Holmoe and Whittingham went way back. In 1981 they were the two best players on BYU’s defense: Holmoe a gritty corner; Whittingham the team’s intense, emotional leader and captain. He had that same fiery brand of leadership as an assistant under Urban Meyer at Utah. Hours after Crowton resigned, Holmoe offered Whittingham the BYU job.