The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (44 page)

In April 2013, the University of Oregon released 515 pages of documents relative to the NCAA’s recruiting investigation. Both the school and the NCAA agreed “major” recruiting infractions had occurred tied to the football team’s improper use of Elite, New Level and Lyles’s Complete Scouting Services. In particular, the NCAA cited the fact that Lyles, whom it called a “talent scout,” had provided oral reports for his $25,000 fee rather than written quarterly reports as required. In June 2013, the NCAA Committee on Infractions placed Oregon’s football team on three years’ probation and levied a number of penalties, including the disassociation of Lyles from the program. Due in large measure to its cooperation in the investigation, the school avoided major scholarship reductions and a postseason bowl ban.

By 2009, Jimmy Smith had gotten serious about the Bootleggers. Asked how he funded the team’s travel during that period, Smith mentioned an LSU fan site he owned and work he was doing for a University of Miami Web site. (No record of Smith owning an LSU site could be found; he was listed as recruiting operations director for a Miami-affiliated site called Southeast Insider.)

“I’m kind of a one-man show,” he said. “Putting it together city by city.”

His motivation, he said, was to help the kids. The Bootleggers were also “self-funded,” Smith said, by parents chipping in for gas and hotels. Smith admitted that from time to time recruiters asked for special access to his players or pressed for “unofficial” visits to their schools. In return, they had offered some incentives—“small stuff, expenses for travel”—or the opportunity to work a coaching camp. Smith said he turned them all down.

“If you take money or something like that,” he said, “it’s almost like word spreads who will play the game and who won’t.”

Smith said it took about twelve hours to drive from New Orleans to the IMG National Championships in Bradenton. He had fourteen kids in the van, about two-thirds already with Division I scholarship offers, several from LSU. Still, Smith said, at least six schools had asked him to drop by during the trip.

“It just means they want to give the kids an unofficial visit on campus,” Smith said. “We will meet with coaches, give them a tour. Kind of like they went from their high school.”

NCAA rules allow for “unofficial” visits to college campuses as long as the “non-scholastic” coach received no compensation from the school. NCAA investigators and other sources said illegal unofficial visits—springing out of the 7-on-7 scene—had morphed into a huge problem. More and more schools were paying or otherwise rewarding “coaches,” street agents, outside “third parties,” even writers and owners of scouting services, to ferry kids to campus for a closer look. The scenario was the same as in summer league basketball: identify the top kids, find out who had the best access to those kids, then make your play.

As for Jimmy D. Smith, on September 27, 2012, the NOLA Media Group, which operated the
Times-Picayune
in New Orleans and its attendant NOLA.com Web site, announced that “James Smith” had been hired as a full-time employee as part of a new initiative to bolster prep and college coverage across the state. Given potential journalistic conflict-of-interest issues, Smith was asked if he planned to continue to coach the Bootleggers or be associated with other 7-on-7 teams. He said he no longer would.

Just a few weeks after that conversation, on the weekend of April 13, 2013, the Bootleggers came south to compete in a top 7-on-7 event in Tallahassee, Florida, where they reached the semifinals before falling to the eventual champions. One of the players on the Bootleggers was the sophomore Jacques Patrick, at six feet two inches and 210 pounds one of the most coveted high school running backs in the country. Patrick had more than forty offers from elite schools, such as Alabama, Florida, FSU and Ohio State, already on the table. According to his Twitter feed, he had
been driven to Tallahassee from his home in Orlando to play on Sunday. He didn’t say who was driving, but a source with knowledge of the situation pointed to a writer from the University of Miami–centric recruiting Web site, CaneInsider, with ties to New Level Athletics.

To make things even more interesting, the offensive coordinator on the Bootlegger team, according to several eyewitnesses at the event, was none other than—you got it—Jimmy D. Smith. And, oh, as Patrick made clear on his Twitter account, he would be dropping in at Florida State on Sunday for a “short” unofficial visit.

To complete the circle, on Tuesday night, April 16, Smith posted a story about the Tallahassee tournament on his NOLA.com recruiting blog. Three of the first four paragraphs in the story highlighted the Bootleggers, praising their performance. Smith went on to cite individual standouts. Third on his list was Jacques Patrick, who Smith said had dominated at wide receiver. “Has a chance to be the top prospect in the Sunshine State for the 2015 recruiting cycle,” he wrote. “There’s a lot of good things to say about the rising star.”

Rising star. Rising stakes. The sweet smell of cash. The cesspool deepens and darkens.

The System evolves.

If Mark Emmert was looking for a sledgehammer to pound home his “cheaters will not profit” message—and he most certainly was—he found it in the form of former University of Miami booster and convicted Ponzi schemer Nevin Shapiro.

In February 2011, Shapiro contacted the NCAA enforcement staff with a story straight out of
Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless
. The gist of it was this: Between 2002 and 2010 he had personally provided millions of dollars in “extra benefits” to at least seventy-two former Hurricane football and basketball players. At least $170,000 in cash. Hookups with prostitutes. Endless champagne-soaked nights partying on his multimillion-dollar yacht or in South Beach clubs. All with the knowledge or direct participation, said Shapiro, of at least seven Miami coaches. In other words, about a decade’s worth of rock star partying with a big-bucks booster as the host. It made the SMU cars and cash scandal seem quaint by comparison.

Five months earlier, in September 2010, Shapiro had pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud and one count of money laundering for his role in constructing a $930 million Ponzi scheme. Investors who believed they were buying into a grocery-distribution business were left holding an
empty bag. (In June 2011, Shapiro was sentenced to twenty years in prison for securities fraud and money laundering.)

A team of NCAA investigators went to work, interviewing Shapiro and digging through boxes of documents. Ameen Najjar, a director of enforcement, supervised the investigation. Najjar had joined the enforcement staff in 2004 after a career as a police officer and later as legal counsel to the Indianapolis Police Department.

As the investigation pressed forward, certain “third parties” identified by Shapiro as aiding and abetting the corruption at Miami either refused to cooperate or suffered an acute case of amnesia when confronted by the NCAA. Shapiro’s former bodyguard was one. Six months in, a potential game-changing case was beginning to stall out.

Emmert was not happy. And he was even less so when, in August, the
Yahoo! Sports
investigative reporter Charles Robinson delivered another blockbuster, publicly pulling the curtain back on a decade’s worth of Miami vice, based on hundreds of hours of jailhouse interviews with Shapiro.

The pressure on Najjar to produce increased. In late September 2011, Shapiro’s bankruptcy attorney, Maria Elena Perez, had an idea how to jump-start the investigation. She suggested using the bankruptcy proceedings in Shapiro’s case as a means to leverage sworn testimony from at least half a dozen key—uncooperative—third-party witnesses. Unlike the NCAA, Shapiro’s attorneys had subpoena power in the bankruptcy case—they could compel the witnesses to come in and give depositions. Why not use that power to question people about the alleged NCAA violations?

Najjar, the former Indy police officer, e-mailed the idea to Julie Roe Lach, the NCAA’s vice president of enforcement, and Tom Hosty, managing director of enforcement. According to an external review later conducted by a prominent New York–based law firm, Hosty found the idea “most intriguing … this could be a creative solution for bigger break-throughs on evidence.”

Lach forwarded Najjar’s e-mail to Jim Isch, the chief operating officer of the NCAA, requesting approval for funding. Isch told her to proceed. He later explained he was only authorizing an expenditure of money and not—as the second-highest-ranking officer in the association—sanctioning a backdoor approach. The plan was passed to the NCAA’s in-house legal staff for review.

What came back was not what Najjar wanted to hear: Forget it. Under no circumstances, he was told, could the staff hire Perez to take depositions on the association’s behalf. In an e-mail to Najjar, a deputy general
counsel for the NCAA wrote, “Any information obtained through such a manner for use in the NCAA process would be subject to significant scrutiny.” Moreover, it would likely circumvent the legal limits of the NCAA’s authority to compel people to testify. The legal counsel shared her opinion with both Lach and Hosty.

So what did Najjar do? According to the independent review, four days later, at 4:34 p.m. on October 25, 2011, he sent Perez this text: “I ran into a problem with our legal dept concerning retaining you but there is a way around it. I will call you tomorrow morning.”

Think about that text for a second and the message it sent. A high-ranking enforcement officer charged with upholding NCAA bylaws was proposing “a way around” the very bedrock principles of honesty and fair play he was hired to uphold.

For Najjar, the “way around” meant not to formally “retain” Perez but only to
reimburse
her for legal expenses. Perez took it to mean the NCAA could not officially “retain” her but would pay her “costs and fees,” including billable hours for depositions. Either way, the die was cast.

The external review later found Najjar never checked back with the legal staff to approve his way around the roadblock or informed Lach. Instead, he marched forward with Perez, telling Perez that “everything was approved.”

It would be August 2012—nearly two years into the investigation—before the NCAA discovered what Najjar had done. And not from Najjar, who was reportedly fired three months earlier. Rather from an invoice submitted by Perez for $57,115 for billable hours between October 2011 and July 2012. By then, depositions of two alleged eyewitnesses to Shapiro’s largesse, a former Miami equipment manager and Shapiro’s ex-partner, had taken place. Uh-oh.

In mid-January 2013, the NCAA notified Miami that Najjar had gone rogue; a week later Emmert offered an unprecedented mea culpa to the media.

“This is obviously a shocking affair,” he said in a conference call with reporters. “It’s stunning that this has transpired.”

So stunning that a month earlier the well-respected Lach had been fired by Emmert, even though the external review found she “never
knowingly
took any steps that were inconsistent with legal advice” and took “many steps” to ensure the proper legal procedures were taken. In her defense, the review cited her “daunting workload.”

In a statement issued to
Outside the Lines
in April 2013, Lach took
responsibility for what was nothing less than an unconscionable breach in ethics: “One misstep should not unravel the good work that’s already been done, and more importantly, remains to be done by a committed and ethical enforcement staff.”

In March 2013, Miami took the unprecedented step of seeking to have its entire case before the Committee on Infractions thrown out prior to a hearing in June. Columnists called Emmert’s leadership into question. And called for his head.

“I’m very concerned about it,” he said of the public’s confidence in his organization.

Inside NCAA headquarters, the enforcement staff was reeling. Morale was bottoming out fast—full of tension and distrust. The firing of Lach had touched off a fresh wave of anxiety, leaving at least one staff member in tears. Then Dave Didion walked out the door. Didion had been a respected, integral part of enforcement for more than twenty years. Now he was resigning for “personal” reasons to take a job as associate athletic director in charge of compliance at Auburn. Soon after, Chance Miller and Rachel Newman Baker left the NCAA for jobs elsewhere.