The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (34 page)

I
n March 2012, the NCAA sanctioned the University of North Carolina for academic fraud and impermissible benefits to student-athletes. The scandal centered on Carolina’s football program. In a lengthy Public Infractions Report detailing the most serious violations, the NCAA zeroed in on three primary culprits: a sports agent, an assistant football coach and an academic tutor.

The agent and the coach were working in concert. It took lawyers and investigators looking at bank records to verify that the agent had paid the coach for access to players. The tutor, on the other hand, acted alone and was far less sophisticated. She basically did schoolwork for football players and gave a couple of them a modest amount of money.

As a result, the university was censured, fined and placed on probation until March 2015. The football program was stripped of fifteen scholarships and banned from postseason play in the 2012 season. The university also vacated the football program’s wins from the 2008 and 2009 seasons.

The transactions between the agent and the coach involved significant sums of money. Plus, thousands of dollars in impermissible benefits were given directly to football players. The actions of the agent, the coach and a handful of top football players prompted the NCAA Committee on Infractions to write: “This case should serve as a cautionary tale to all institutions to vigilantly monitor the activities of those student-athletes who possess the potential to be top professional prospects.”

The NCAA and member institutions have gone to great lengths in recent years to tamp down improper relations between sports agents and student-athletes. But there are just as many minefields inherent in the relationship between student-athletes and tutors. Only elite athletes are at risk of getting in trouble with an agent. On the other hand, every freshman football player and many upperclassmen spend significant time with tutors. Most regulations
for tutoring address academic fraud. But the NCAA seldom mentions the elephant in the room—widespread opportunities for intimate relations between athletes and tutors that can lead to abuse, heartache, tarnished reputations, lawsuits and criminal prosecutions.

But NCAA investigators steered clear of the real danger zone. According to the NCAA, the tutor at the center of the probe “committed multiple major violations involving football student-athletes.” Those so-called major violations consisted of writing paragraphs for papers, revising drafts and composing “works cited” pages. She also paid $1,789 in outstanding parking tickets for one player and helped another purchase an airline ticket. Pages and pages of evidence support these violations in the NCAA report.

But you have to dig deep to find this passage about the tutor: “Her supervisors in the academic support center began having concerns that the former tutor was possibly socializing with the student-athletes off campus, which was prohibited for tutors in the program.” The truth is that every tutoring program for student-athletes prohibits socializing between athletes and tutors. The reality, of course, is that socializing is near impossible to regulate. In the end, socializing—not academic fraud—is what caused the tutor at North Carolina to lose her job.

Yet other than a one-line reference to rumors of her being “too friendly” with football players, the NCAA report avoids this issue. The only other mention in the entire report was this one: “Because of the rumors, the institution in July 2009 made the decision not to renew her employment contract. No further investigation into her activities was conducted at that time.”

The bottom line: There is plenty of gray area when a tutor has to show an athlete how to properly compose a “works cited” page. Showing can easily entail doing. Sex between athletes and tutors, on the other hand, is pretty black-and-white. In plenty of programs it is quite common, too.

But a far more serious issue is nonconsensual sexual contact between student-athletes and tutors.

Teresa Braeckel was simply following the advice of a professor. The twenty-year-old junior was majoring in hotel and restaurant management at the University of Missouri. She had stellar grades and an outgoing personality—a perfect combination, her professor insisted, for tutoring student-athletes. “The schedule’s flexible,” her professor said. “Would you be interested in taking an interview?”

Braeckel was already working twenty hours a week at the university’s recreational center, mainly as a swim instructor and lifeguard. She also helped out with swim meets. That was on top of her full course load. But she was putting herself through school, and a little extra money wouldn’t hurt. Besides, she was an overachiever. With her professor’s help, she landed an interview with one of the academic coordinators at the university’s Total Person Program, the outfit that oversees tutoring for all Missouri student-athletes.

The job description sounded pretty straightforward—roughly ten hours per week doing one-hour, individual sessions with a handful of athletes. The pay was minimum wage. After completing some paperwork, Braeckel was offered the job.

A compliance officer went over the guidelines governing proper relations between tutors and athletes:

Braeckel was the type who wouldn’t think twice about offering someone she tutored a lift. She’d also been known to make cookies for her friends on the swim team. When she signed the agreement promising to abide by the rules, she made a mental note—
never give an athlete a ride and no more warm plates of cookies
. A week later she reported to the academic center and was paired with athletes from numerous teams. One of the names on her list was Derrick Washington, a freshman football player. He needed to maintain a 2.0 GPA to remain eligible to play. Braeckel was assigned to help him with an entry-level agriculture class.

In the summer of 2007, Derrick Washington arrived in Columbia with great expectations. Rated by Rivals.com as one of the top high school running backs in the nation, he had rushed for over fifty-five hundred yards and scored eighty-three touchdowns at Raymore-Peculiar, a top Kansas City area prep school. Missouri was primarily a passing team. Tigers’ coaches assured Washington that the offense would become more run-oriented. It was some of the coaches’ other promises, however, that resonated with Washington’s parents.

“They told Derrick it was like a family atmosphere,” Sarah Washington said. “And they assured us they were going to take care of him and he would get his education. They explained the tutoring situation and that it was mandatory for freshmen to have tutoring.”

Derrick’s grades meant more to Sarah and Donald Washington than how many touchdowns their son scored. Sarah was a systems administrator at a hospital. Donald was a benefits specialist for the government. Derrick was the second oldest of their five children. The family lived in a blue-collar neighborhood, and every Sunday they attended the Emmanuel Baptist Church. Their life revolved around family, religion, school and sports. Derrick’s scholarship to Missouri was a source of pride, both in their congregation and in their neighborhood.

But Donald stressed that football would take his son only so far. He spoke from experience. Donald had played college football for Louisiana Tech in the 1980s. He graduated with a degree and wanted his son to do the same. Academics were high on Sarah’s priority list, too. That’s why she favored Missouri over the other schools that recruited her son: Missouri stressed its academic support system for athletes. And support was exactly what Derrick needed to get him through the transition from high school to college.

“The first year was kind of rough,” Sarah said. “Even though they had tutors and he went to class, the first year academically was tough.”

One reason Derrick Washington made it through his freshman year was Teresa Braeckel. She met with him regularly, encouraged him and helped him through a couple classes. The sessions always began with some small talk, usually consisting of him telling her how he had done that week on the field. Then they’d get down to business. She was professional, and he was polite and earnest. They respected each other.

Then, in 2008, Washington’s college football career really took off. He led Missouri in rushing as a sophomore and established himself as one of the top backs in the Big 12 Conference. By the fall of 2009—Washington’s junior year—he was an offensive star and a household name on campus. He also had women vying for his attention.

Braeckel tutored Washington for the last time in spring 2010. Her interest in tutoring had diminished. For one thing, she was turned off by all the off-color jokes and sexual innuendos between student-athletes and tutors.

The guidelines called for all tutoring sessions to take place at the academic center. But the atmosphere there was hardly conducive to learning.
Male athletes would show up in small groups, physically exhausted and totally disinterested in studying. Instead, they’d sit around, egging each other on with vulgar cracks about anatomy or the lyrics from the latest music booming through their headphones. Girls who got into tutoring for the wrong reasons played along, flirting and dressing provocatively for tutoring sessions. The place had become a hotbed for hooking up.

The situation was not unique to Missouri. The long hours and intense physical demands placed on football players are not conducive to sitting through tutoring sessions. A former tutor at the University of Georgia described how football players there would show up for tutoring sessions completely drained after workouts and practices. “The tutoring center has nice leather couches and chairs,” the tutor said. “You would see these six-foot-five, three-hundred-pound guys sprawled out on the couch because that’s the only sleep they were going to get. Tutors had a hard time motivating their students.”

One result of this situation, according to a tutor at the University of South Carolina, was that tutors would end up doing the work for the athletes. “Some tutors would complete homework assignments for the football players,” the South Carolina tutor said.

Even more common, tutoring sessions would morph into flirting sessions. “The undergraduate female tutors liked the flirting going on as someone recognizable on campus was noticing them,” the tutor from Georgia said. “The players took advantage of the female tutors in that they could skirt by without doing a whole lot of work or not showing up for a meeting when they were supposed to.”

In a twist on the sexual theme, tutors at some schools were the ones making the advances on players.

A former tutor at the University of Miami said that sex between football players and tutors was not uncommon. Things got so out of hand that Miami’s tutoring coordinator told female tutors to minimize the amount of makeup they put on and to stop wearing skirts and low-cut shirts to tutoring sessions. The big concern was that tutors who slept with athletes would cheat for athletes. “There was definitely cheating that took place,” said a female tutor at Miami. “There were female tutors who would offer sexual favors to the athletes in return for doing a paper. Miami was big for that.”