Jeff Benedict - The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football

Copyright 2013 by Jeff Benedict & Associates, LLC, and Lights Out Productions, LLC

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

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eISBN: 978-0-385-53662-2

v3.1

To our wives, Lydia and Dede,
who endured the two-year journey with us

F rom the blimps-eye view high above sold-out Sun Life Stadium the helmets looked like metallic gold dots, bank after bank of thousand-watt halide lights adding an almost ethereal glow. As the view compressed, more colors came into focusfirst the crimson, then the white, and finally the navy blue. It was January 7, 2013, a perfect night for football in South Floridaa balmy seventy-three degrees with winds out of the northeast at five miles per hour. A record crowd of 80,120 erupted as four Wings of Blue paratroopers stuck landings on the field. Another 26.4 million fans were tuned in at home, making it the second-largest audience of any program in cable television history.

On paper, the Discover BCS National Championship game was a match made in football heaven: No. 1 and undefeated Notre Dame (12-0) against No. 2 and defending national champion Alabama (12-1). After six weeks of analysis and hype the big boys were finally getting down to business. It had all the earmarks of a storybook ending to a wild, crazy roller coaster of a season that had driven the popularity of college football to dizzying new heights.

For fourteen consecutive Saturdays in the fall of 2012 college football owned the sporting publics attention from noon till deep into the night. Click and there was Johnny Football, on his way to Johnny Heisman, performing magic tricks for Texas A&M; click and there was Bill OBriens gritty Penn State squad rising from the ashes of the soul-crushing child abuse sex scandal to go 8-4; click and there was Ohio State bruising its way to an undefeated season while barred by NCAA penalties from competing in a bowl game; click, click, click, click, and there was Oregon, Stanford, West Virginia and K-State taking their turns on the national stage.

Off the field the news wasnt so good. A dozen programs were on probation for major NCAA violations, including USC, Ohio State, Tennessee, Boise State, LSU and Texas Tech. Graduation rates for African-American players continued to lag behind, highlighted by 2011 national champion Auburn, where only 49 percent of black athletes graduated, compared with a majority of white players. A 2012 study found that student-athletes in top football programs are more accurately athlete-students, averaging 41.6 hours per week preparing for football, compared with 38.2 hours in the classroom.

The economics of college football were upside down, too. The latest figures showed only 22 of the 120 top-tier programs broke even or made a profit in 201011. If anybody looked at the business model of big-time college athletics, they would say this is the dumbest business in the history of the world, said Michigans athletic director, Dave Brandon, the former CEO of Dominos Pizza. You just dont have the revenue to support the costs. And the costs continue to go up.

Another study, released in 2012, found that Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools spent more than $91,000 per athlete compared with just over $13,000 per student. Yet students across the country faced steep tuition hikes and increased fees. As colleges and universities absorbed painful cuts in funding and went deeper into debt to stay afloat, a nationwide building booman arms racewas under way when it came to stadiums, premium seating, weight rooms and football facilities.

At the same time, a seismic shift in conference realignment had schools bolting conferences and abandoning long-standing rivalries in order to capture a greater share of the multibillion-dollar television contracts. I dont know where this all ends, NCAA president Mark Emmert said at the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in early December 2012. But it does make clear that those moves are, if not entirely about money, predominantly about money.

The result, said Emmert, was the erosion of friendship and trust that existed for decades among college presidents, athletic directors and conference commissioners.

I really dont know what to do, but Im really concerned about it, really, really concerned about it, said Emmert. Its not healthy at all.

As for the players, they have paid a heavy price for what has become a year-round job. A staggering 282 players from eight of the ten Bowl Championship Series (BCS) conferences and major independents suffered season-ending injuries. And those were just the officially reported ones. Plenty of other players were carted off practice fields, never to return to action.

Meanwhile, in March 2013, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic released a study showing that college football players are likely to experience significant and long-term brain damage from hits to the head even when they do not suffer concussions. The findings were based on blood samples, brain scans and cognitive tests performed on sixty-seven college football players before and after games during the 2011 season. As the debate over the long-term effects of head injuries in football continues to escalate, it is now an established fact that college football players who never make it to the NFL are at risk of being diagnosed with degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma.

But none of that mattered as Notre Dame and Alabama squared off for the national championship on ESPN. The last time the two storied programs had met with so much on the line was the 1973 Sugar Bowl, remembered for the gutsiest call of Irish head coach Ara Parseghians career, a third-and-eight pass from the shadow of his own end zone, enabling the Irish to run out the clock and outlast Paul Bear Bryants Tide 2423. Epic.

Four decades later, Brian Kelly and Nick Saban had come to power. Kelly, in his third year, was a former womens softball coach at Assumption College before making a name for himself at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. Six hugely successful seasons at Central Michigan and Cincinnati helped propel the son of a Boston politician to South Bend. Kelly had more than a bit of the Irish in him and, like his father, was wise to the media game. He offered smooth, thoughtful answers to almost every question, even ones he had heard for the third time in an hour. He also spoke of the importance of painting a vision of success at Notre Dame.