The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (8 page)

Alan Bean is a medical malpractice attorney in Nashville. His specialty is defending health-care providers in negligence cases. But he got an intriguing call at his law office around the time that Kiffin left Tennessee for USC. One of Bean’s friends knew Lacey Earps. He asked Bean if he’d be willing to give her some legal advice. Bean said to have Earps call him directly. He’d be happy to help her.

Bean, twenty-seven, had no experience with sports law or NCAA regulations. He’d been practicing law for only three years at that point. The first thing he told Earps was that he was no F. Lee Bailey. But the Vanderbilt Law grad had been following the so-called Tennessee recruiting scandal in the news. On the surface he thought Earps was caught in a situation similar to what nurses experience when a hospital gets sued. In multimillion-dollar malpractice cases, the real targets are hospital executives and physicians. They are the ones who set policy and prescribe treatment. Nurses, on the other hand, are on the low end of the totem pole, so to speak. Nonetheless, they get named in lawsuits and are served court papers along with everyone else. Bean figured that hostesses were a lot like nurses—caught up in an NCAA probe where the true target was Lane Kiffin and his staff, not members of Orange Pride.

Earps was immediately comfortable with Bean. At his invitation, she gave him a synopsis of what she had done as a hostess. She went into great
detail with respect to the trip she took to Byrnes High. As he listened, Bean took notes. By the end of the session, he had a pretty good sense of what had transpired. “When it became clear there was an investigation going on, the coaches were quick to distance themselves from the students who had helped in that office,” Bean said. “It didn’t take them very long to say we didn’t have anything to do with this. As opposed to defending the hostesses, the coaches pushed them to the front and suggested that students working under their control were responsible for all of this.”

Bean was a huge Tennessee football fan. But he was hardly surprised that the coaches were letting the hostesses take the heat. “Coaches by nature are opportunistic, and I don’t think that’s a trait you can turn off,” he said.

Earps asked Bean what to do about the university’s request to see her phone records. Bean explained that neither the university nor the NCAA could compel her to surrender her phone records. But based on her story, he determined that Earps had done nothing wrong and had nothing to hide. All her phone records showed was that she made lots of calls to recruits. That didn’t violate any NCAA rules. He advised her to cooperate fully with the NCAA.

Earps told Bean that her friend Dahra Johnson needed a lawyer, too. Bean agreed to represent both girls pro bono. One of his first items of business was to contact the NCAA investigator handling the Tennessee case.

Joyce Thompson had been out of law school for only three years when she joined the NCAA enforcement staff in 2002. But by the time the NCAA commenced its review of the Tennessee football program under Lane Kiffin, Thompson had become famous. In the motion picture
The Blind Side—
released in November 2009, just as the NCAA opened its inquiry into Tennessee’s program—actress Sharon Morris plays the hard-nosed NCAA investigator who looks into whether Michael Oher—the main character—violated any recruiting rules when he signed his letter of intent to attend Mississippi. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Sandra Bullock (playing Oher’s adoptive mother) isn’t allowed to sit in on an interview that Thompson conducts with Oher.

But in real life, Thompson’s reputation was that of a personable, understanding professional. “Because of my background as a litigator, I expected her to be adversarial,” Bean said. “But she wasn’t. Joyce was open and pleasant.”

Bean opened up to Thompson about the one thing about the case that angered him the most. Earps was taking a beating online. “Lacey had her picture plastered on the Internet,” Bean said. “And she was the subject of
message board topics being discussed in ways that no one would ever want their mother, daughter or sister described. Some of the stuff being said about her was just blatant defamation of character.”

Bean even considered taking legal action against a few Web sites. He told Thompson that none of these rumors and sexual innuendos were true. Earps was willing to submit to questioning. But he didn’t want her humiliated by inappropriate questions that dignified the lies being spread on the Internet. “I told Joyce that that issue concerned me a great deal and that I didn’t want any questions about that,” Bean said.

Thompson promised to tread lightly.

On March 16, 2010, Bean accompanied Earps and Johnson to the Andy Holt Tower on the UT campus. Before they sat down to face questioning by Joyce Thompson and Michael Glazier, outside counsel for the University of Tennessee, Bean gave his clients some simple advice: “Just answer the questions and tell the truth.”

Nervous, Earps had no interest in lying. But due to her proximity to Kiffin and his staff, she had been privy to information about recruiting practices that other hostesses—not to mention the Tennessee administration—were not aware of. The last thing she wanted to do was implicate people.

“I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Earps said. “Going in, I felt like I was being blamed for all of this. But I had a close relationship with the coaches and the staff. I didn’t want to get them in trouble.”

At the outset, Thompson showed Earps the picture that Andy Staples had taken during the recruiting visit to Byrnes High. “Is that you in this picture?” Thompson asked.

“Yes, it is,” Earps said.

Then Thompson showed Earps another picture. This one appeared to depict Lane Kiffin at a party in Knoxville. He was standing next to a platinum blond woman who appeared to be in her early twenties.

“Can you tell me where this photo was taken?” Thompson said.

“Ah, that’s not me,” Earps said.

Thompson then asked Earps a series of questions pertaining to the trip she and Johnson took to Byrnes High. Earps told her the same thing she had told Bean: they went because they were encouraged to go by the coaches. The girls also admitted that they had received gas money from Coach Reaves.

Earps summed up what she told the NCAA. “The only inappropriate thing we did was lead on seventeen- and eighteen-year-old guys just to get
them to come to the school,” she said. “We are not the only ones who do that. That goes on with hostesses at lots of schools. And no one tells us to do that. We just did it.”

Earps and Johnson never said anything to implicate Kiffin or his staff. At the same time, the NCAA never asked them about the money Kiffin had given Earps when Bryce Brown came to campus on an unofficial visit. Nor were there questions about the money that Kiffin’s staff had given hostesses to put on parties for recruits. The NCAA simply didn’t know about those things. Bean had instructed his clients to answer truthfully whatever was asked while refraining from offering information that went beyond the scope of the questions.

“I think that one of the systemic problems is that the NCAA and the enforcement staff doesn’t have the resources or the people to do the enforcement side,” Bean said. “They couldn’t investigate this stuff.”

Months after interviewing Earps and Johnson, the NCAA determined that the Tennessee football program committed secondary violations consisting of impermissible phone calls to recruits by coaches and inappropriate contact with recruits by more than one member of Orange Pride. In its Public Infractions Report on the University of Tennessee issued on November 16, 2012, the NCAA said, “The pattern of recruiting violations committed by the former football staff during its short tenure at the institution was, as stated in Infractions Report No. 342, troubling to the committee.” The penalty was a reduction in phone calls to recruits and a ban on recruiting at one high school (Byrnes) for nine months.

Lacey Earps never got her job back at Tennessee. After graduating with a degree in business, she left the state and took a job in the insurance industry. She remained loyal to the university and Orange Pride. She just wished the university had contacted her at some point to say it didn’t blame her for what happened on Lane Kiffin’s watch. “I gave everything I had to the football program and the institution,” she said.

Dahra Johnson also left Knoxville after graduating and entered the insurance industry. She also remained loyal to her alma mater and never spoke publicly about her experience.

After her sophomore year, Charlotte Henry transferred to the University of Memphis, where she earned a degree in journalism and public relations. She married, and she and her husband had a baby girl. Henry worked as a development coordinator for the mid-South chapter of the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

“This may sound so silly,” she said, “but my experience with the Orange Pride really altered the way I thought of the university. And it altered it in a bad way. People there were crazy about sports. The reputation that Tennessee built was to bleed orange through and through. Integrity. Tradition. So when you get there and you’re in it, the people that work there every day could care less about the colors they represent. It comes down to what’s going to bring in the money.

“To be honest, people don’t step back and say, ‘At what cost?’ Nothing came to be more important than winning football games.”

T
he Michigan-Alabama clash that kicked off the 2012 college football season was like a gigantic circus roaring to life. By Friday afternoon, August 31, the streets surrounding Cowboys Stadium, the billion-dollar state-of-the-art creation of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones crawled with cars flying favored-nation flags.

At 4:15 p.m., the University of Alabama arrived for a brief walk-through in three gleaming black Executive Coach buses escorted by a small squadron of motorcycle cops. Nick Saban led the procession of players. Looking sharp in a lightweight sport coat and contrasting slacks, he moved with a practiced economy into the locker room. He then headed onto the field, where Kirk Herbstreit and Brent Musburger, hoping for a few last-minute nuggets before their prime-time broadcast the next night on ABC, offered a congenial greeting. By now several of Saban’s players, dressed in coats and ties, milled about, staring up at the mammoth video board, an alien auditory planet forty yards across, looming above the middle of the field. Pictures were taken. Offensive linemen bent down in three-point stances and tested the artificial turf.

Michigan’s associate athletic director, Mike Vollmar, checked his watch for what seemed to be about the hundredth time in the last half hour. His Wolverines were running fifteen minutes behind schedule, and the director of football operations wore the look of a husband whose wife was a week overdue.

“We’ll make it up, we’ll make it up, we’ll make it up,” Vollmar said. His walkie-talkie crackled with an arrival update. He left to meet the buses.

Michigan had been priming for this moment for months. Ten days earlier, in Ann Arbor, the team had practiced with game-day intensity, three pristine outdoor fields humming with a relentless, unforgiving pace. A series of stations had been set up all over the fields—cone drills, fumble
drills, long snapping. Coaches were all over players for the least bit of dogging or poor technique.