Regardless of the verdict of NCAA investigations, this is a dark time for college football.
Yesterday Sports Illustrated released the second in a series of five stories revealing widespread corruption and impropriety at Oklahoma State. Athletes received large cash payments from boosters. There was a bounty paid for sacks, interceptions and fumbles. A new pair of socks in your locker usually meant a wad of cash was rolled up inside. In addition, there were no-show jobs and signing bonuses. Under first Les Miles and then Mike Gundy, the cheating was widespread, flaunted and systematic. The Hat denied it all.
The cheating extended to academics, the report said. Some players never went to class at all. Tutors were paid to do athletes’ work for them. Players received passing grades for classes they never attended, or given test answers before the exams. Grades were doctored and fabricated. None of the revelations were particularly surprising: Oklahoma State was the school where Dexter Manley starred while reading at a second-grade level back in the seventies.
Part three of the report is being released today and it covers wide-spread drug use. Players routinely smoked marijuana before games, SI charges, and drugs were everywhere and easily attained, including painkillers and steroids. Part four discusses sex: members of the Orange Pride Hostess Program were encougaged and recruited to have sexual relationships with visiting prospects to convince them to attend the school.
On Saturday the series will discuss the fallout and consequences for athletes after football, how poorly a corrupt system prepared them for the world. With no real education and no job skills, many have fallen into drug addiction, despair and crime. Unqualified for the pros (only 1% make it) most are discarded after their college eligibility is used up. They discover quickly that they have few resources for dealing with the outside world. There are no more $500 handshakes. Which is probably why many were willing to cooperate with the SI investigation, bitter and desperate.
The SI investigation of Oklahoma State had barely hit the Web when Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports reported that 5 prominent players in the SEC had received impermissible cash payments from an agent/runner, former Alabama defensive end Luther Davis.
The players included University of Alabama offensive tackle D.J. Fluker, University of Tennessee quarterback Tyler Bray, Tennessee defensive end Maurice Couch, Mississippi State University defensive tackle Fletcher Cox and Mississippi State wideout Chad Bumphis.
Bray and Couch suited up against the Ducks in 2010. Couch is scheduled to start for the Volunteers on Saturday in Autzen Stadium. Fluker was a starter on the Alabama offensive line that drove the Tide to national championships in 2011 and 2012. Agents paid Davis over $45,000 to steer players, line their pockets, and entertain them.
Reports like these taint the sport all over the country. Miami is 2-0 after a big win over Florida last Saturday, but the Hurricanes’ season carries a living asterisk as the school is under the cloud of a two-year NCAA investigation. Booster Nevin Shapiro, currently doing 20-years for running a 930 million dollar Ponzi scheme, lavishly entertained players on his yacht and at strip clubs. He paid players and coaches under the table, enjoying wide-spread access to the program for a period of 10 years.
Before Shapiro, rapper Luther Campbell had performed the same role. The players called him “Uncle Luke.”
On the field on Saturday Alabama travels to Texas A&M for a game with the Aggies, a showdown of #1 versus #6, a rematch of the 29-24 upset Johnny Manziel engineered last season in Bryant-Denny Stadium, a titanic clash of the recently cleared versus the newly suspected. The taint and stench hanging over that game is palpable. On one sideline stands Manziel, who reportedly received an alliterative “five-figure flat fee” after signing autographs last January for memorabilia collector and dealer Drew Tieman. That scandal broke in August, but the NCAA quickly reached a finding of “inadvertent violation” and “insufficient evidence” in time for the season, suspending Johnny Football for one half of the Rice game, the standard punishment for felonies in the SEC. On the other sideline is Nick Saban, paid a seven-figure flat fee to stonewall everything.
Saban had a terse exchange with reporters in yesterday’s post-practice news conference. The reporters wouldn’t let up. They asked him three questions about the Luther Davis investigation, whether it would be a distraction for his team on Saturday in the big game. He warned reporters, “I’ve made a statement. Don’t ask me any more questions about it.” Athletic director Bill Battle and his staff were investigating the reports, he said. He hadn’t read it. He had a battle of his own to worry about, on the field with Manziel. Reporters asked him another question, reframing the first two. Any distraction for the team? Saban angrily dropped the mike, sarcastically thanked reporters for their interest in the game, and stormed out of the room, demonstrating emphatically, “I’ve won three national championships. I don’t have to take this ____.”
The entire world of college football is poisoned with allegedlies. Just this June Oregon was granted a relatively clean bill of health after a two and a half year investigation into the use of street agent Will Lyles to recruit in the state of Texas. Their association with Lyles got them two years of unwanted attention and endless innuendo, but it also netted a bountiful catch of top players. Because of Will Lyles or in spite of him, the Ducks are now a power in Lone Star State recruiting. Oregon played the NCAA investigation process exactly right. They cooperated. They released documents. They hired the smartest lawyer in the field. It still took two years.
The seamy underside of college football has always existed. Teddy Roosevelt nearly banned the sport at the turn of the 20th Century because it seemed too violent and dangerous. Entire conferences were rocked by pay scandals in the ’50s. Brian Bosworth was banned from the 1987 Orange Bowl for using steroids, famously wearing a jacket on the sidelines that read, National Communists Against Athletes.
NCAA investigations, like the border patrols and the DEA, are always one step behind the cheaters and the violators. There is always a carefully constructed tunnel for the dirty money being built somewhere, and in a cynical, hopelessly corrupt system, the governing body wants to do everything it can to preserve the appearance of amateurism while preserving its own flow of the money. The USA today reports that in 2012, the University of Texas Athletic Depart had a total revenue in excess of 163 million dollars.
Fans know that the game is, always has been and always will be a little bit dirty. Everywhere. Here’s where Oregon comes in. By playing a fast, entertaining style of football, with a squad of players who are well-spoken, likable, motivated and attend class, the Ducks are a cover story to counter balance all the awful negative reports. To go with his 4.3 speed in the 40, De’Anthony Thomas got a 4.0 in the classroom spring of 2012. Taylor Hart and Michael Clay made the All-PAC-12 Academic 2nd team last season, and Marcus Mariota, Derrick Malone, Alejandro Maldonado, Rodney Hardrick, Daryle Hawkins and Mana Greig were honorable mention.
In the 1920’s baseball was The National Pastime, and reeling. Eight Chicago White Sox players had conspired with gambler Arnold Rothstein to fix the 1919 World Series. He’s the fictionalized gambler Leonardo DiCaprio meets in “The Great Gatsby.” Trust and confidence in the game was at an all-time low.
What happened? Babe Ruth gripped the end of the bat, and started swinging for the fences. He hit 29 homeruns, about twice as many as anyone ever had before. Interest in the game skyrocketed and baseball would rule the sports landscape for another 40 years, until the first Johnny Football, Johnny Unitas of the Colts, engineered a come-from-behind, overtime victory over the New York Giants in “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” the 1958 NFL Championship. The nation discovered NFL Football, violent and colorful, a game that now has problems of its own.
Flash forward to 2013, and the Ducks and their NFL counterparts, the Philadelphia Eagles, are prepared to save the reputations of two broken games. They innovate. They’re entertaining. They not only win, they swing for the fences in style and in pace, with point-a-minute offenses that attack all over the field at once. There are no huddles or slowdowns, just a dazzling display of speed and variety. De’Anthony Thomas zooms around right end for 40 yards, tight-roping the sidelines as he outruns three guys twice his size, toe-dancing inside the pylon as a defender tries to smash him in two. Marcus Mariota keeps, faking out the entire defense as he scoots through a hole five yards wide, dashing 71 yards up the middle of the field with the grace of an antelope on the Serengetti. This time it’s the predators who are helpless. Not even the NCAA could catch the Ducks, and watching them on the field, who cares about sanctions and investigations and what’s inside the socks in the 68 million dollar locker room? They wear the shiniest helmets in the game, the super heroes of the sport. It’s Marvel Comics football, and the wall panels and carpets in the Hatfield-Dowlin Center tell the same story.
Oregon football is an antidote to all the sleaze and misery in the game. It would be naive to think that Oregon athletes are any different. Like everywhere else some smoke marijuana and drive cars they didn’t pay for. But on the field and in the press conferences, they are the best advertisement the country has for what remains a beautiful game, at least between the lines. There is nothing like a college football game day, for the passion, the pride and the color, the history and tradition, the way it can make 60,000 people rise to their feet with joy and wonder. How can you not love to watch De’Anthony Thomas run, watch this offense turn an opponent inside out in a minute, twenty seconds, and repeat the whole mad, beautiful, entertaining magic show ten times a game? How can you not love the 1000-watt smile from a kid who coaches second grade basketball in the winter?
The game of college football is the best sport in the country. The business, and the putrid stench of recruiting and competing for players and what the game does to their bodies and futures, is horrible to look at. No one has the first idea of how to make it better, because it has always been like this. The NCAA wants to just get better at covering the ugly part up, at succeeding in demonstrating just enough enforcement that everyone can pretend the ugliness doesn’t exist.
The Ducks are the 60-minute highlight video for everything that is right in the game. They bring the entertainment and the energy. They are the Sultans of Swat in the best sports product in the country, 2013.
Meanwhile, our country is mired in another kind of misery. America is broken. The city of Detroit declared bankruptcy this summer. 11.3 million people are unemployed. The U.S. Commerce Department reported the U.S. federal trade deficit for the month of June was $43 billion dollars. We used to be a country that built things. Now we can’t manufacture anything but debt.
What does this have to do with the Ducks? It’s simple, and revolutionary. Politics won’t solve our problems. It never has. Neither will all-caps screeds on Obama Care or the intransigence of Congress. (Please, for the love of the Duck and all that is right and holy, don’t leave any in the comments section.) The only hope the country has is the same hope the Ducks bring to football: innovation. Doing things faster, better, and more efficiently. Being lean and athletic and committed, having guiding principles, a process, and a commitment to character and productivity. That’s why the Ducks win. It’s the only way America ever will.
In Louisiana there is a small start-up company with a story like Oregon’s. They’ve designed a smaller, sleeker, amazingly innovative car. It has three wheels, a narrow, sleek body, and it gets 84 miles to the gallon of gasoline and sells for $6800. It comes in eight colors, and one of those is fluorescent green.
With a big yellow O on the side, it would look perfect. An innovative, exciting product always wins the day.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=w-SawjhfwQk
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