Three and Out (27 page)

Van Horn graduated from Central Michigan University and started her career as a receptionist in the CMU athletic department in 1989. CMU, like every other school, needed someone to run compliance, but couldn't afford a full-time employee for the position. So, to her credit, Van Horn took the phonebook-fat NCAA rule book home every night to learn the arcane codes therein, and that's how she became Central's compliance director, the first woman to hold that post in the Mid-American Conference.

After a full-time compliance stint at Michigan State from 1997 to 2001, Bill Martin hired her, partly to help with the basketball booster scandal he had inherited.

In 2002, Van Horn created Michigan's CARA form for all its teams to use. Unlike most schools, which require only a sample of student athletes to record their hours each week—much the way the NCAA regularly conducts random drug tests—Van Horn's system required every athlete to fill out a form every day. It was the equivalent, one athletic board member told me, of asking lawyers to keep track of their billable hours every ten seconds.

Scott Draper and Brad Labadie were assigned the onerous task of handling this for the football team each week and were not to submit the forms to Van Horn's office until every player had filled his out—an almost impossible standard for football, which has eight times more players than basketball.

“If 119 of 120 players sign it and you submit it, it gets sent back,” Labadie told me. “The irony of the whole situation is this: The only way to get 120 students to do
anything
is to make their coach or their strength coach make them. And once you've done that, you've compromised the whole process.” The forms, after all, are intended to protect the athletes from being exploited by their coaches.

But this does not explain why the job had been done much better by Scott Draper, and better still by MSU's Mike Vollmar, who submitted the forms “like clockwork,” Van Horn said. Further, every other Michigan team, even those with large rosters like track and women's rowing, were submitting their CARA forms regularly.

Draper and especially Labadie did not put the task at the top of their list of things to do, and stopped submitting them altogether soon after Rodriguez had been hired. “The fact that every form was not signed with 100 percent completion, that's on me,” Labadie said.

At the time, Van Horn was spread thin. It was no secret that Van Horn, a very warm and likable person, had ambitions to become an athletic director.

To those ends, she jumped at the chance to add the title of senior women's administrator (SWA). Because Michigan does not have separate athletic directors for men's and women's sports, like most schools, at U-M the SWA is largely a ceremonial title, but it allowed Van Horn to travel to conferences and increase her profile nationwide. In 2005, the National Association for Athletic Compliance (NAAC) named Van Horn the recipient of the Outstanding Achievement Award, and three years later, in 2008, she was elected to a two-year term as president of the NAAC.

But she was still well aware of the problems with the CARA forms, and sought to fix them. After Labadie failed to turn in the forms for the spring of 2008, Van Horn convened two formal meetings that summer with Scott Draper, Brad Labadie, Mike Parrish, and Ann Vollano from Compliance to determine why the forms were not submitted and to remedy the problem for the upcoming academic year. Labadie said he had an improved system and assured Van Horn that football CARA forms would be submitted each month. Van Horn reported to Bill Martin that Labadie's delay that spring appeared to be an aberration, and the forms should be submitted on time in the future.

But they were not. Van Horn's office engaged Draper and Labadie in a slow game of e-mail tag, repeatedly requesting that the forms be submitted. Van Horn informed Martin of the situation and solicited the help of athletic development director Joe Parker, who kept on Draper and Labadie to get them done.

In the beginning, Labadie's explanations seemed plausible to Van Horn, who had enjoyed a good working relationship with Draper and Labadie since she arrived in 2002.

However, as time went on and attempts to get any CARA forms turned in went unheeded, the Compliance staff grew increasingly frustrated. As one former colleague said, “Labadie told Compliance a number of times that the CARA forms were ready and he would hand-deliver them, and then later claimed they'd been lost. Help was offered as well and he and Draper never threw any red flags.”

“Looking back, I feel like I was snowed,” Van Horn told me. “Thinking on all the written and verbal communication that occurred, particularly with Brad, the explanation or excuses were nothing more than misdirection, or even out-and-out lying to the Compliance staff.”

A year later, in the spring of 2009, Van Horn—fed up with the lack of results—brought in the university auditors to examine the situation and bring more pressure to bear on Labadie. Their review resulted in a finding against the football program in the summer of 2009, a few weeks before the
Detroit Free Press
began its investigation.

Rodriguez had been told the department used CARA forms a few weeks after he had taken over, but had largely forgotten about them—which was not an oversight, but how the system was supposed to work—until early August 2009, when Van Horn, Labadie, and others came to him after the internal auditors presented their report.

Rodriguez asked why the CARA forms had not been submitted and, just as important, why he had not been informed of the problem when it was discovered months earlier.

No one had good answers. Van Horn had believed Draper, who reported to Rodriguez, when he told her repeatedly that Rodriguez was in the loop. He was not.

They all apologized and promised neither mistake would happen again. The good news, at the time, was that the problem was easily fixed: submit the forms you've held on to for a year, and stay current from that point on. And that was the last Rodriguez had thought about it, until that Friday night after the scrimmage.

It was still just a boring administrative glitch, however, until the
Free Press
submitted a very specific Freedom of Information Act request asking for interoffice correspondence related to the CARA forms. “Now,” Labadie asked, “how could you possibly know about something like that without a leak?”

It's a fair question. Whoever it was, they knew what to look for, and where to send the information.

In the recruiting lounge, Mike Parrish, Dusty Rutledge, and Chris Singletary sat, mulling over the events, feeling like they were on death row.

“Sometimes,” Rutledge said, “you're just not wanted. And it just gives [Rich] that much more to think about—like he needs that.”

Down the hall in Rodriguez's office, it was obvious Rutledge was right. Rodriguez paced around his desk, angrily muttering to himself or anyone who walked in. “Every day, it's something else. We've given the media complete access, and this is what you get. They
know
when practice begins and when it ends—because they're
there
! Look at your goddamn watch! We're
clean
!”

It is a spacious office, but Rodriguez, a strong man with an overabundance of kinetic energy, seemed to fill it completely, especially when he was worked up. As he paced back and forth—to pick up something from his desk or meet someone at his open door—he would stop and make another point.

“Never seen nothing like the drama of this place,” he said, and he was including West Virginia in the comparison. “Ridiculous. Someone at this university has to stand up and say, ‘Enough!' But no one ever does. Everyone just listens and surrenders when we're
right
! Why do we always give in to it?”

His office phone rang. He looked to see who was calling and let it go to voice mail.

“It's always ‘Trust me, trust me,'” he continued, searching for something on his desk. “They told me in the interview, ‘You get to Michigan, and you're gonna be surrounded by great people who're gonna support you.' Oh, yeah? Really? Where are they?

“I want to talk to the regents, directly, and tell them what's going on.”

He walked out to his secretary's desk to sift through a small stack of papers.

“People who want to support our program only hear about all the bullshit these guys are making up. What about Mark Huyge? Jared Van Slyke? Tim North?” They were, respectively, an engineering student and starting lineman; the son of a baseball star who chose to be a football walk-on; and a great student with a bright future in business. “What about the guys from Pahokee, who never got three meals a day or a practice jersey until they got here? So many good stories aren't getting told. It grinds you.”

Madej walked into the office. For him, it all boiled down to a simple idea: “We need Bo,” something all the veterans echoed at some point that weekend. “Bo would say ‘Bam!' and all this bullshit would be over. I was worried as soon as he died about what would happen. It started with Harbaugh taking a shot at the program when Lloyd was the coach—and now this.”

Rodriguez sat down at his desk, while Madej looked over his shoulder to work through several drafts of a short press release. But they were at a loss, since they weren't sure exactly what they were responding to. Ablauf joined them and suggested they also send out a copy of a week of their practice schedule to all the reporters who cover the team, as proof that they were in compliance.

This is what they finally came up with: “Rich Rodriguez: We know the practice and off-season rules and we stay within the guidelines. We follow the rules and have always been completely committed to being compliant with all NCAA rules.”

They had no idea if it would do any good. The progress they had made over the previous nine months, culminating in the unrestrained joy and hope of the past twenty-four hours, was in danger of being wiped out by Sunday's paper.

 

16   BAD NEWS ON THE DOORSTEP

When Rodriguez woke up Sunday morning, this is what he found on his doorstep:

MICHIGAN FOOTBALL PROGRAM BROKE RULES, PLAYERS SAY

Rodriguez denies exceeding NCAA time guidelines

By Michael Rosenberg and Mark Snyder

Free Press Sports Writers

The University of Michigan football team consistently has violated NCAA rules governing off-season workouts, in-season demands on players and mandatory summer activities under coach Rich Rodriguez, numerous players told the Free Press.

Players on the 2008 and 2009 teams described training and practice sessions that far exceeded limits set by the NCAA, which governs college athletics. The restrictions are designed to protect players' well-being, ensure adequate study time and prevent schools from gaining an unfair competitive advantage.

The players, who did not want to be identified because they feared repercussions from coaches, said the violations occurred routinely at the direction of Rodriguez's staff.

“It's one of those things where you can't say something,” one current Wolverine said. “If you say something, they're going to say you're a lazy person and don't want to work hard.”

That player was one of six current or former players who gave lengthy, detailed and nearly identical descriptions of the program to the Free Press.

Rosenberg and Snyder stated that Rodriguez and his staff were making their players put in some fifteen to twenty-one hours a week on football during the off season—more than twice the NCAA limit of eight—in an article depicting a head coach exploiting his players for personal gain. The long piece raised more questions than answers, not only about Rodriguez's program, but also about the
Free Press
's motives and sources. But in the short run, none of that mattered.

Ablauf and company pointed out that the headline and opening paragraph themselves were misleading, because the players interviewed (two of whom—Brandin Hawthorne and Je'Ron Stokes—were freshmen proud of the work they had done) apparently didn't know the difference between “countable” and “uncountable” hours and were not accusing the coaches of breaking those rules, since they didn't know what they were. The writers, not the players, were making that charge.

But as the saying goes, you can't unring a bell, and the
Free Press
had banged this one loudly enough to be heard from coast to coast, drowning out any questions or counterpoints for a news cycle or two.

*   *   *

The coaches met for their regular meeting at 11:00 a.m. and got the day's business behind them before allowing themselves to ruminate on the story making national news as they spoke. Though somewhat shell-shocked, and not yet able to get their heads around the entire piece, they had read enough to poke at the particulars pretty efficiently.

“These guys are claiming our players go forty-five hours a week,” the normally easygoing Cal Magee said. “Do
they
even know the fuckin' rules?”

In the reporters' defense, just to cover a small section of this rule, the NCAA needs two pages and thirty-five bullet points. Boiled down, student athletes can spend only eight hours a week on their sports during the off-season, and twenty hours a week during the season. But when you get into which hours count and which don't, things get blurry fast.

Under “countable hours,” the NCAA lists eleven core activities, like practice, games, and team meetings. “Uncountable hours” include just about everything else, sixteen items total, including getting taped, receiving physical therapy, eating team meals, and traveling—and, most ill-defined of all, anything deemed “voluntary.”

How can you tell the difference? Good question. If you write for
The Michigan Daily
or play in the Michigan Marching Band, you probably should expect to put in extra work if you want to become the editor in chief or the drum major. Does that make it mandatory? Who knows? The NCAA isn't watching them, of course. But it doesn't get much easier to determine what's truly voluntary when you're talking about a football player who's dying to start or get to the NFL.