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In Review: The System– The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football
By: Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict
Reviewed By: Macy Walsh
The System will shock even the most casual college football fan as the reporting peels back the veneer on everything from coaching politics to sexual tension in tutoring labs, the role of recruiting hostesses, backstabbing conference realignments, super boosters and more. Even the hardcore fans will be surprised. Everyone knows this is a wild business, just not in such detail. The book also serves as a mini-recap of recent college football history, tying together the hot stories from the past five years, ranging from Ohio State to Tennessee to Texas Tech to BYU.
A thorough retelling of the Ohio State “tattoogate” scandal includes the previously unreported transcripts of NCAA interviews with Jim Tressel and athletic director Gene Smith. You can see Tressel incriminate himself as he tries to explain his cover-up of the scandal that doomed his career and led to major sanctions against the program. Meanwhile, Smith is vague on some details but claims he was forceful in multiple conversations with booster Bobby DiGeronimo, who was cited for overpaying players for work at his companies and later banned from associating with the Buckeyes for the next 10 years.
Also speaking publicly for the first time is Lacey Pearl Earps, the infamous Tennessee recruiting hostess dubbed “The Closer” by volunteer coaches for her ability to connect with top high school players. Earps details the bizarre system of the hostess business where pretty, personable, well-trained college women are used as bait to lure top talent. Even if they don’t have physical relationships with high school players (and some certainly do), they are encouraged to engage in at least pseudo-romantic relationships through social media, text and Skype for months on end. All of this happens with the approval and encouragement of athletic department officials and highly paid coaches. “Our job is to flirt with them,” Earps said. Earps insisted she never had a physical relationship with a recruit, but acknowledges purposefully leading the players on. “From the athletic department’s perspective, it didn’t matter how the recruit got there,” she said. “Whatever it took. A lot of people turned a blind eye.”
Even worse is the story of the University of Missouri student-athlete tutoring culture, which is paramount in keeping players eligible for competition. The System lays out the profoundly ill-conceived concept of college girls being paired with male football and basketball players, who are often academically disinterested and physically exhausted, for apparently “lightly” supervised one-on-one work. The result is an environment of sexually provocative conversations, rampant hook-ups, tutors doing the athlete’s schoolwork and worst of all, in the case of star running back Derrick Washington, a 2010 sexual assault of his tutor that sent him to prison.
Much time is spent on Alabama and coach Nick Saban, whose process and ensuing success has come to define this mini-era of college football. Saban grants the authors perhaps unprecedented access and there is an extensive retelling of how the Crimson Tide lured Saint Nick to Tuscaloosa.
The bottom line? It’s all about the money. And we’re not talking chump change. Big-time college football is a multi-billion dollar industry with wealthy alums ready and willing to provide whatever their star players need and/or want. Athletic departments live on the revenue generated by the football program.
This book encompasses the good, the bad and the ugly of college football, and it reads like a novel. Even if you’re not a fan, you’ll love it.
