The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (30 page)

Mendenhall agreed. But he was also convinced that he would not be helping Van Noy by glossing over the arrest and making an exception to the rule. Besides, what message would that send to the rest of the team?

They took their proposal to BYU’s dean of students, Vernon Heperi. He signed off. Then Mendenhall called Van Noy and told him his options.

The prospect of sitting out a year had not entered Van Noy’s mind. He had every intention of starting as a true freshman. He wanted some time to think it over.

Later that evening Mendenhall’s phone buzzed. “I’ll do it,” Van Noy told him. “I’ll sit out a year.”

“I honestly don’t know what made me say yes to that,” Van Noy said. “But I did, and once I gave my word, I was committed to it.”

The next day—February 4, 2009—when BYU announced its recruiting class for 2009, Mendenhall read off Van Noy’s name. Then he brought the media into a private room and read them a letter Van Noy had written
the night before: “This past weekend, I received a DUI citation, which will delay my arrival. I know that I have disappointed you, my family and friends. You have my firm commitment that I will do what it takes to earn back your trust and be part of BYU’s winning tradition.”

One month later Van Noy went out with friends. They had alcohol. It got late. Van Noy didn’t go home. He ended up on a park bench on the streets of Reno, where he fell asleep. The next thing he remembered was waking up to police sirens and flashing lights. Scared, he took off running. Officers gave chase. Trapped in an alley, Van Noy shrugged off an officer and broke free. Then from behind he heard the clicking of a Taser gun. He dropped to the ground. Before he knew it, he was in police custody for a second time in a one-month span, this time cited for eluding an officer.

He was not charged with an alcohol offense this time, however. And when the authorities considered his juvenile status and the fact that he was already facing DUI charges, they opted not to bring a second case against Van Noy. Charges were dropped. And this time the local press did not find out. Under Nevada law, the report in the second incident was sealed. Fortunately for Van Noy, no one would find out about his second arrest, especially not Coach Mendenhall.

But Van Noy was uneasy. Mendenhall had given him a second chance. He felt he owed it to him to come clean, even though he knew that would likely end his football career at BYU before it started.

He talked to his parents and decided to fly to Provo and confess to Mendenhall.

“Up until that point I didn’t want to be helped,” Van Noy said. “But suddenly I felt like a kid who needed help. I wanted help.”

He went straight to Coach Mendenhall’s office. The door was ajar. He knocked and Mendenhall looked up and grinned. “C’mon in, Kyle. Why are you here?”

Van Noy looked away, biting his lip.

The grin left Mendenhall’s face as he stood and walked toward him.

Van Noy’s eyes welled up. So did Mendenhall’s.

“Kyle, talk to me. Let me help you.”

Van Noy took a seat. His voice shaking, he revealed every detail about the second run-in with the law. “I need help,” he said.

Mendenhall recalled the opening lines to a favorite speech by BYU’s former president Jeffrey R. Holland: “It is the plain and very sobering
truth that before great moments, certainly before great spiritual moments, there can come adversity, opposition, and darkness. Life has some of those moments for us, and occasionally they come just as we are approaching an important decision or a significant step in our life.”

He looked Van Noy in the eye and told him not to worry about the second incident. “That’s why I gave you the one-year plan,” he told Van Noy.

“There are no words to describe how bad I felt before I got to his office,” Van Noy said. “And no words to describe how good I felt when he accepted me.”

Mendenhall and Van Noy put their arms around each other.

After reaffirming his commitment to Van Noy, Mendenhall informed the athletic director and the dean of students. Both had reservations. But Mendenhall held his ground. “He never hides when his mistakes come,” Mendenhall said. “He has been honest from the minute our relationship started. I’m always the first to know when he makes a mistake.”

The dean had two simple questions: “Is this someone you believe needs to be at BYU?”

“He needs help,” Mendenhall told the dean and the AD. “He wants help. I want to help him. And I believe he can make it. He’s giving up a chance to go elsewhere.”

“Is this someone you believe will represent this institution and our faith?” the dean asked.

“Unlike so many people I deal with that will hide behind texts and e-mails and half-truths, he admitted what he did,” Mendenhall said. “Not only is he trying to do something about it, he’s already done something about it. He’s here.”

The dean and the AD signed off.

“Our administration knew the situation,” Holmoe said. “When you bring someone here who is high risk, you have to wonder. This is a different culture than Kyle was used to. But we trusted Bronco. And Kyle made a commitment to hang in there. That was Bronco’s risk, not mine.”

BYU opened the 2009 season in a nationally televised game against third-ranked Oklahoma at Cowboys Stadium. It was precisely the kind of stage that Van Noy had always longed to play on. Instead, he was back home in Reno, preparing to start school in January. All he could do was watch on
TV. That only made things harder as BYU pulled off a big upset, winning 14–13. For a kid who always started and never missed games, he was finding accountability to be a bitter pill to swallow. He couldn’t get over the idea that he could have been on the field making plays.

One BYU linebacker who was there making plays was Shiloah Te’o. But a week before the Oklahoma game, Te’o had been arrested for DUI in Provo. Police pulled him over on August 29 after he pulled out of a liquor store parking lot without stopping. A field sobriety test indicated his blood-alcohol level was over the legal limit.

Mendenhall didn’t know about the arrest before taking his team down to Arlington. It hadn’t made the local papers. But weeks later Mendenhall heard a rumor that Te’o might be in trouble with the law. By that time BYU had played five games, and Te’o had been on the field in all of them. Mendenhall confronted Te’o about the rumor. He denied any involvement. But a couple nights later Mendenhall learned otherwise. And on October 8, Mendenhall kicked Te’o off the team for violating team rules.

Te’o ended up transferring to Oregon State.

C
ollege football has a long, checkered history with boosters. Back in the 1980s, the NCAA issued the death penalty—a one-year ban—to SMU’s football program after athletic department staffers paid twenty-one Mustang players from a secret slush fund set up and funded by boosters. The total amount of money involved was $61,000.

The SMU scandal seems quaint by today’s standards. In 2011, the NCAA began investigating University of Miami booster Nevin Shapiro for allegedly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on seventy-two Miami football players between 2002 and 2010. Shapiro claimed he gave players money for everything from big hits against opposing teams (bounties) to cover charges at nightclubs and entertainment at strip clubs. He claimed he even paid for an abortion after a Miami player impregnated a stripper.

Yet something as innocuous as giving student-athletes grocery money or treating them to lunch violates NCAA rules. Those rules define “boosters” as “any individual, independent agency, corporate entity, or other organization” that promotes or makes financial contributions to athletics, assists in recruiting or provides benefits to student-athletes or their families. Under this broad definition, everyone from a season ticket holder to a nonprofit that prints and distributes T-shirts that say
GO BUCKEYES
is a booster.

In other words, there are hundreds of thousands of boosters or, in NCAA parlance, “representative[s] of the university’s athletic interests.” The overwhelming majority of them—easily 99 percent—are rank-and-file supporters whose school spirit and financial backing form the backbone to every college football program. They are students who paint their faces and purchase season tickets all the way up to wealthy alumni who shell out thousands of dollars for luxury suites and donate to nonprofit fund-raising
organizations set up to support the athletic department. Boosters from this group are rarely the subjects of NCAA investigations.

The remaining 1 percent of boosters fall into four basic categories:

POWER BROKERS
.
Few individuals have more power than Jimmy Rane and his counterpart at Auburn, Robert “Bobby” Lowder. Rane, sixty-eight, is a self-made multimillionaire who made his fortune at Great Southern Wood Preserving Inc., building its signature product, YellaWood, into the world’s best-selling pressure-treated pine. Rane has been a trustee at Auburn, his alma mater, since 1999. Lowder, a former banking executive, spent two decades on Auburn’s board of trustees. Guys like Rane and Lowder are insiders who raise money, influence decisions and have direct ties to the university or to private foundations that raise money for athletics. And they rarely, if ever, speak to the press. “I’m not a big man on campus and I have no intention of portraying myself that way,” Rane said. “I am not a power broker. I’m trying to do good. I don’t need the money. I don’t need anything. I’m trying to leave the world a better place than I found it.”

JOCK SNIFFERS
.
These are boosters who have no direct ties to a university and tend to give money directly to players. Their primary motive is to gain access to student-athletes, particularly ones with the promise of becoming future pros. Nevin Shapiro at Miami was a prime example of this type. This group is most often responsible for scandals.

BUILDERS
.
These guys write eight-figure checks and have their names on things—stadiums, practice fields and statues erected on campus in their honor. This group includes James “Bill” Heavener, a member of Gator Boosters Inc. and the CEO of the Heavener Company. Florida’s football complex is named after him. At Tennessee, Jim Haslam is the most prominent booster. The founder of Pilot Oil gave $32.5 million to the university in 2006, the largest single donation in the school’s history. Part of that gift was used to renovate Neyland Stadium. And Tennessee’s practice field is named Haslam Field. Michigan has Stephen M. Ross, a global real estate developer. Among the many properties he developed was the Time Warner Center in New York, and he is the owner of both the Miami Dolphins and Sun Life Stadium. The Ross name is on the academic center for athletes at Michigan as well as its school of business.