The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (63 page)

“Pump the arms,” Leach shouted at Wilson as he ran a route. “Pump the arms. It gives the illusion of speed. As you slow down, the defense thinks you are speeding up. It’s an optical illusion. It works every time.”

Wilson nodded.

“Marquess can be really good,” Leach said, one of his assistants standing beside him. “The kid has real potential. He just needs to be tougher. He’s got to see the physical part of things.”

As far as Leach was concerned, the entire roster needed to increase its toughness. Thirty minutes into practice he blew his whistle. “Bull in the ring,” he shouted. “Bull in the ring.”

The drill is as old as the game itself and a favorite among players at top programs throughout the country. Hooting and hollering, players formed a circle in the center of the field. Defensive line coach Joe Salave’a, a six-foot-three, 350-pound Polynesian wearing shorts and his trademark muscle shirt, took charge of the drill. A ten-year NFL veteran, Salave’a is an intimidating hulk of a man with no neck; his arms rival the size of some players’ thighs. He stepped to the center of the ring, and Leach called the names of two players: receiver Marquess Wilson and a linebacker. They stepped into the ring and faced each other. On the whistle, they plowed into each other at full torque.

“Go right through that mothafucka,” Salave’a thundered. “Right through the bitch.”

After the initial collision, the linebacker drove Wilson to the turf.

“It ain’t a fuckin’ church,” Salave’a shouted. “Get your asses up. Let’s go.”

Leach called off the next two names. A running back and a defensive player stepped into the ring. On the whistle their helmets collided, and the shorter running back drove his opponent backward.

“Hell, yeah,” Salave’a yelled. “Hell, yeah.”

Both players pumped their legs, grunting and hammering away at each other, as the rest of the team shouted at them.

“Let’s go mothafucka,” Salave’a yelled, pounding his hands together. “Go. Get him! Run through the mothafucka.”

The players forming the ring fed off the energy, shouting and egging each other on.

After fifteen minutes, Leach blew the whistle—time for the next drill.

Tyler Bruggman had notified Leach that he planned to attend a couple days of spring practice in Pullman. He was leaning heavily toward committing to WSU. But he wanted a firsthand look at Leach’s methods. His parents, intimately involved in their son’s recruiting process, flew up with him from Phoenix. “Quarterbacks have to commit early,” Bruggman said. “I wanted to see Washington State before I made my decision.”

Leach invited him to sit in on a quarterbacks meeting. Bruggman stood in the back of the conference room while Leach and the quarterbacks huddled around a conference table, going over film from the previous day’s practice. The first sequence was a series of plays in the red zone.

“Here’s one thing,” Leach said, freezing the video. “When we get down here and start moving the ball, there can’t be this hoping that we’re gonna score. It has to be
Now we’re gonna score
. And it has to start with you guys. You are the ones doing the talking. It can’t be
Maybe we’re going to score
. No. We’re scoring!”

He fast-forwarded to the next play. Two receivers ran seven-yard patterns, side by side, forcing an outside linebacker to cover both players. But neither receiver bothered blocking the backer. “If we want this piece of real estate,” Leach said, highlighting the outside linebacker, “and we pay double the value”—he highlighted the two receivers in the area—“somebody has to block.”

Leach’s passing game hinges on creating open passing lanes, a point he kept stressing to his quarterbacks. “The most important thing is space,” Leach said. “Space and personnel. You have to utilize your personnel and figure out where you have space. The defense may try and fill the space. But if you have a combination of routes and there is integrity to the routes, when they try to fill up one space, they will give up another space. So you want routes that attack a variety of spaces—high, low, right, left. As you go through the priorities of the play, it will take you to the right route.”

The quarterbacks nodded. One of them asked to see the previous play one more time.

Leach went through a few more sequences until coming to a play where two receivers in the middle of the field hadn’t bothered to block because the play was going away from them. “Are you shittin’ me?” Leach said, freezing the video on a safety running across the middle of the field. “You can knock
the hell out of this guy,” he continued. “Wouldn’t it be kind of nice to find out what their No. 2 safety is like? Let’s find out if he’s any good.”

The quarterbacks smiled.

On the next sequence, Leach froze the film on a simple eight-yard crossing pattern that left one receiver wide open. “There’s more space than it’s possible for them to cover,” he said.

The quarterbacks pointed at the screen, focusing on the wide-open lane.

“Just make routine plays,” Leach said. “Not super plays. Routine plays. Besides the eight yards we get, now they are unraveled in terms of the pass rush lanes. It all comes unraveled.”

By the end of the film session it was easy to see the fatigue factor setting in among many of the players. “That’s why we have highly conditioned athletes as opposed to the Swedish bikini team,” Leach said.

The guys laughed. Leach shut off the film.

Bruggman had never seen a film session like that. He wished he could put on pads and play for Leach right away. “I always knew he was a great coach,” Bruggman said. “But I was surprised at how funny he was. I didn’t realize what his personality was like. He is very funny.”

Leach gave the quarterbacks a parting story.

“When I was in law school, I hated the Dodgers,” Leach told them. “But I lived fifteen minutes from Dodger Stadium and I like baseball. So I went and watched them and rooted for the other team. That’s when the Dodgers were rolling and going deep into the playoffs and winning the World Series. There was game after game that the Dodgers won that they should not have won. But they won because they were the Dodgers and good things happened at the end of the game. They just expected to win. They had this whole expectation thing. That’s what has to happen with us. One of the quickest places for our team to get that way is for you to talk to them as a quarterback. ‘We’re gonna win this.’ ”

After the visit Bruggman talked to his parents. He told them he was leaning heavily toward WSU. They thought that was wise.

S
amuel Jurgens had a sunny disposition. The twenty-year-old history major loved being a student at Alabama. He especially revered ’Bama football. A month after the Crimson Tide won its third national title in four years by manhandling Notre Dame, Jurgens left a friend’s dorm and headed toward home on the other end of the Tuscaloosa campus. It was just past midnight on February 11, 2013. Walking swiftly, Jurgens had on headphones and a backpack over his jacket when he came upon an African-American man wearing a red beanie and a navy-blue jacket. As Jurgens passed him on the sidewalk, he noticed the guy was saying something. He quickly removed his headphones.

“Hey, do you have a lighter?” the man asked.

“I don’t smoke. I’m sorry.” Jurgens put his headphones back on and resumed walking. After a few more strides, out of the corner of his eye he saw a second man approaching from an adjacent parking lot. He was big and burly and was wearing a raincoat and jeans. Again, Jurgens removed his headphones.

“Do you have a lighter?” the larger man asked.

Jurgens thought the situation was odd. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t smoke.”

He put his headphones back on and took a few more steps, unaware that a third man had come up behind him. The next thing Jurgens knew he was on the ground, fading in and out of consciousness, unsure how long he’d been there. His lip was split open. His left eye was swollen shut, and the entire left side of his face was numb, bruised and enlarged. He’d been struck with such force that he was knocked unconscious. Then he was kicked in the back and chest. But he had also sustained a concussion and had no memory of the attack when he came to on the sidewalk. All he knew was that his jacket and headphones were drenched in blood. The men were gone. So were his glasses and his backpack containing his Apple MacBook Pro.

Dazed and struggling to see, Jurgens used his cell phone to call his friend. “Something bad has happened to me,” he told him.

Moments later, his friend found him and led him back inside the dorm. The police were called, and Jurgens, still confused and disoriented, was taken to the ER.

An hour later, another Alabama student—Caleb Paul, a civil and construction engineering major—encountered the same trio along Seventh Avenue, near the UA Energy, Mineral and Material Science Research Building. Two of the men looked on from a dark-colored SUV while one of them approached Paul and asked him for a light. Then Paul was punched in the head and face and knocked to the ground before his wallet was stolen.

The University of Alabama police promptly issued an advisory reporting two robberies. Physical descriptions of the suspects were posted on the campus police Web site.

By 5:00 on Monday, Sam Jurgens had finally been released from the hospital. His parents had driven from Birmingham to retrieve him. They took him back home to rest and recover. But hours after they arrived back in Birmingham, Jurgens received a call from the University of Alabama police. They informed him that the suspects were in custody and would be held overnight in the local jail. The police wanted Jurgens to return to Tuscaloosa right away to sign an affidavit. Jurgens’s parents wanted him to spend a few days in bed before traveling.

“Is this that big of a priority?” Jurgens asked the police.

“Normally, no. But in this case, yes,” an officer told him. “This is a high-priority case.”

Jurgens asked if the assailants were on the FBI Most Wanted list or something of that nature.

“No,” an officer told him. “They are football players.”

The three men who had attacked Jurgens and Paul the previous night were on Alabama’s championship team:

All three were booked on two counts of robbery and jailed.

Williams, it turned out, was already in trouble. The day before the robberies he had gotten into a dispute with a BP gas attendant, who reported
that Williams had become erratic and was “threatening that he had something in the trunk of his vehicle.” The Tuscaloosa police later stopped Williams in a Honda Accord and frisked him. He had a gun on him and was charged with carrying a concealed weapon without a license and released on bond.

A fourth player, twenty-year-old running back Brent Calloway, had no role in the robberies. But he was charged for knowingly using a stolen debit card taken from Caleb Paul’s wallet. Calloway had previously been arrested during his freshman year when police discovered marijuana stuffed in his sock after they had stopped him for driving without his lights. That case was disposed through a plea agreement.