The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (60 page)

The special Thursday night telecast had opened with ESPN analyst Tom Luginbill singing the praises of Seals-Jones and with Sumlin making a dramatic entrance via helicopter onto St. Pius X’s Parsley Field. A graphic listed Seals-Jones’s top choices: Texas, A&M, LSU, Baylor, Oklahoma and TCU, with Oregon and USC in the mix. But Luginbill said he believed Seals-Jones was still “75 percent” committed to Texas. The truth was nobody knew. Not even the kid behind center, who on his very first carry glided for nine yards and moments later, on a QB draw, hit a crease and sped seventy-one yards for a 7–0 lead.

By late in the third quarter Seals-Jones had accounted for 213 yards rushing on just twelve carries. He had run for two more touchdowns (sixty-one and four yards). Still, the Tigers trailed the Panthers 31–21 when Seals-Jones, making a tackle from his safety position at the end of a St. Pius running back’s thirty-one-yard gain, fell awkwardly. “I knew he was hurt when he came down,” said Chester. The fall caused Ricky’s left kneecap to pop out of its socket.

Strapped into an air cast, Seals-Jones was carted off the field on a stretcher and taken to a local hospital, where a doctor reset the knee. The family didn’t get home until 5:00 a.m. Chester watched the replay over and over on local news and ESPN until he couldn’t stand it anymore. But a new day brought encouraging news: no structural damage to the knee and a recovery time of three to four weeks.

Ricky was “freaked out” by the injury, but fortunately for him his cousin Eric came to town the following week. Dickerson helped calm Ricky down. He told him the injury had come at the best possible time, early in the season. “Don’t go back until you’re well, all the way right,” he
said. “If they want you, they know what you can do. High school doesn’t matter.”

Sure enough, the phone never stopped ringing, and texts kept flying in at all hours of the day and night. Ricky received so many scholarship offers that it was hard to keep track. Florida State one day, Baylor the next. Texas was still after Ricky, and according to Chester, Longhorns’ assistant coach Oscar Giles pushed too hard during a phone conversation.

At this point Chester said another assistant coach came on the line with an ultimatum: if Ricky doesn’t commit, Texas is going to stop recruiting him.

To which Chester said he replied: “Well, you gotta do what you gotta do. We gotta do what we gotta do.” Then he hung up the phone.

Two days later OrangeBloods.com, a UT fan Web site, reported the team was no longer recruiting Seals-Jones.

“Boy, that deal there, we don’t know what happened,” Chester said. He said Giles tried to contact him again through Ricky’s high school coach and also tried reaching out to Ricky directly. But Chester Jones is a proud man. He told his son not to return any calls from anyone at Texas. In Chester’s mind the Longhorns had gone all in at the wrong time with a bad hand. They were out of the game.

On Senior Night at Sealy High, the cheers rang out loudest when Seals-Jones walked onto the field arm in arm with his mom and dad.

A few minutes later, sitting with other family members and friends near the twenty-five-yard line behind the Sealy bench, Chester was asked if he was nervous.

“Little bit,” he said.

On paper Bellville was no pushover, although in the first drive the Brahmas offered little in the way of resistance. The Tigers took less than three minutes to open up a 7–0 lead with Ricky switching between wide receiver and quarterback, content, it seemed, to act as a decoy or to hand off to the hard-charging running back Kris Brown.

The next possession gave a glimpse of No. 4’s skill set. He easily hauled in an over-the-shoulder catch and raced fifty yards down the sideline. He
followed that little act by nearly making a phenomenal one-handed catch of an overthrown alley-oop pass in the corner of the end zone. A short field goal gave the Tigers a 10–0 lead.

But with about four minutes left in the second quarter, frustration was building in the Jones section of the stands. Seals-Jones had seen only two more balls thrown in his direction. At the end of the half, Bellville was leading 13–10. Ricky’s decoy role continued well into the second half, and Sealy fell behind 27–10. Perhaps Sealy’s head coach, Jimmie Mitchell, was trying to protect his star’s bum ankle, but Chester could barely contain himself.

“I don’t know what y’all coaches are doing,” he said out loud, not for the first time, to a chorus of agreement.

With Bellville driving for a put-away score, Seals-Jones picked off a pass at his own ten and electrified the crowd with a weaving runback to mid-field. Dickerson, the effortless shift into a third and fourth gear. It seemed to jolt his coaches into action. Seals-Jones was now where he should have been all night, in the shotgun, behind center, giving the defense fits. But there was only 6:54 left to play. Seals-Jones had been handed the near-hopeless task of trying to pull this game—and the season—out of the fire.

It took less than thirty seconds for him to produce another highlight: a shifting, dodging scramble leading to a twenty-yard strike into the end zone. The score was now 27–17.

“They can’t tackle him!” yelled Chester. “Been waiting for them to do this all night!”

The Tiger crowd was in an uproar—the rivalry
on
—when Sealy recovered the onside kick. With 5:50 to go, it was fourth and ten from the Bellville twenty-nine, the game on the line. Seals-Jones completed a pass to his best friend, Brown, a playmaker who dived headlong for a first down. The line judge rushed in and spotted the ball a half yard behind what looked to be Brown’s forward progress.

“That’s a
bad
spot, Ref!” yelled Chester. “That’s a bad spot!

“C’mon! Ref!”

Bellville took over on downs, and by the time Sealy got the ball back, there were only about three minutes left. It was clear the ankle was a problem for Seals-Jones—he couldn’t explode—but he gave no quarter. He scrambled for six, then twelve, then again from one side of the field to the other before firing a bullet that was caught at the ten-yard line. The clock ticked down. The final offensive play of Seals-Jones’s high school career ended with an interception in the end zone.

When the game was over, Seals-Jones was the first Sealy player to cross the field and shake hands. It was the kind of unscripted act that speaks volumes about upbringing and character.

Several Tigers were in tears as they walked off the field embracing parents and friends. Later, outside the locker room, his own eyes puffy and rimmed in red, Seals-Jones whispered to his dad, “We could have won, we could have won.”

A visitor suggested that his quarterback could have done a better job getting the ball into his hands when Ricky was playing wide receiver. Here, many a high school star of Seals-Jones’s stature would have agreed and called out a teammate, but the quiet seventeen-year-old again offered a class in class.

“He’s just a sophomore,” he said. “He’ll get better.”

Seals-Jones turned to find his mother, decked out in a sparkly white No. 4 jersey. They shared a long, emotional hug. All week she’d been tending to her son’s injured ankle, favoring old-fashioned remedies like rubbing alcohol to reduce the grapefruit-sized swelling.

With the towel around his neck her boy wiped away more tears.

“It sucks—it hurts,” he said. “It hurts to be a senior and lose against your rival. It just hurts.”

Chester Jones always told his son if you put God first, family second and yourself third, you’ll be fine. In virtually every conversation over the course of many months, he has never failed to point with pride to something his son has done.

“If he doesn’t play another down, I’ll be proud of him,” Chester said more than once.

The way the system works, it was during that crazy summer of 2012 that Chester Jones found his own priorities—his belief in faith and family—put to a test.

Paying players under the table in college football goes back to the days of leather helmets. The only things that have really changed are the methods and the amounts. And forget agents or financial or marketing advisers for the moment. That’s another dirty pile of laundry. Just stick with the bigtime schools. Within that world the $100 postgame booster handshake still exists. But the delivery system for the serious money—the up-front down payment, always in cash—has changed over time, becoming far more discreet and difficult for NCAA investigators to trace, like those involving the
use of ATM cards with individual PIN codes and predetermined monthly withdrawal limits set up by a booster. Offers are rarely written and often passed on to relatives by intermediaries to better provide “plausible deniability” to coaches with the most to lose.

The modern touchstone for the value The System had put on a top recruit was the $180,000 Cam Newton’s father allegedly solicited from Mississippi State in November 2009 just prior to his son leading Blinn to the national junior college championship. The NCAA investigated and, over the course of fifty Newton-related interviews, found that while it was clear Newton’s father had sought payments, no evidence existed that such payments were made. Or that his son was aware he was being shopped.

At the time, the mega-programs were generating in the neighborhood of $70 million per year—not the $80 million to $100 million they were in 2012. For that reason, it was difficult to extrapolate the Newton numbers into 2012 dollars.

Until now.

According to a source with direct knowledge of the conversation, in late June 2012, Chester Jones said “people” representing a perennial top twenty program had approached him with an offer:

“He was trying to process it, to be honest with you,” the source said. “He was in conflict. Not about taking the money. Conflict from the standpoint of disbelief over the offer.”

In the living room of the family home the offer was repeated back to Chester Jones. A digital tape recorder was running. The specific school was named.

“Nah, they didn’t offer nothing to Ricky,” Jones said. “No, never. They never offered us a dime. It never did get to that …

“We don’t want to hurt Ricky. We do something wrong … sooner or later you got to pay for it. I don’t want to do anything to hurt Ricky like that Cam Newton deal. That’s the thing—it ain’t about me, it ain’t about Buffy. It’s about Ricky. I don’t want to hurt Ricky.”

The next morning Jones sat down to breakfast at Tony’s diner. Inside the front door a veteran from the local VFW Post 5601 was pinning red poppies on the collar of those kind enough to slip a dollar or two into his cookie jar.

Chester Jones said he finally got to bed about 1:30 in the morning after sharing cake with some of the reporters from recruiting Web sites he’d come to know and like and sitting up talking with Buffy.