The Rest of College Football

[entropy]

BOCA RATON, Fla. -- The conversation was loud enough for FAU coach Carl Pelini to overhear on the bus ride to the airport during a football road trip last season.

Cheerleading coach Heather Henderson was on the phone, rattling off a list of things she had to do for her athletes at her cheerleading gym. As the owner, Henderson was in charge of day-to-day operations, planning trips, dealing with athletes and parents, and coordinating schedules all while making sure the gym ran smoothly and efficiently.

As Pelini listened, he realized he needed somebody with that exact skill set to help him with on-campus recruiting. So he turned to Henderson and asked whether she would be interested in working with the football program as the director of football operations.

Henderson was floored.

And quite interested.

She went home and talked it over with her husband, Andy. They agreed to have dinner with Pelini to find out more about the job. The more Henderson heard, the more she wanted in. She had been looking for a change. After nine years owning her cheerleading gym, Henderson was ready to do something else. She had plans to sell her gym, so the timing seemed perfect.

Henderson began helping with on-campus recruiting, setting up visits, meeting with parents and players, arranging everything the way it needed to be arranged. Pelini asked her to interview for the open director of football operations position because she impressed him with her performance.

[+] EnlargeHeather Henderson
Andrea Adelson Heather Henderson, who was a South Carolina cheerleader, uses her experience running a cheer gym in her football operations job.

She did. In April, she got the position, becoming one of a handful of women across all football levels to hold the job.

And it all happened because of an overheard phone call.

"You never know what can happen in life," Henderson said. "People are always watching and always listening. There could be an opportunity. That's what I try to tell my cheerleaders and my girls. There's always opportunities and always be ready for them. When a door opens, you jump at it. Whether you get it or not, at least you tried."

Henderson has always been passionate about football. Growing up in South Carolina, she would either watch Gamecocks games at home with her father or go to games most Saturdays. She began cheering at an early age and eventually fulfilled her lifelong dream -- spending three years on the South Carolina cheerleading team.

The hardest part? Holding her emotions in check. Because she was such a die-hard fan, she had to learn to control her reactions to plays on the field. Henderson ended up graduating from Mars Hill College in North Carolina and took a job with the Home Builders Association of Greater Columbia, S.C., as the sales and marketing director.

At the time, she and her husband were not married. They had been dating for almost eight years. He had moved to Boca Raton and wanted her to come with him. Henderson said she would if they got engaged. He began planning. Meanwhile, she made plans to attend the South Carolina season opener on Labor Day weekend. He told her he was going on a fishing trip.

At halftime, Henderson's phone rang. It was Andy.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

Annoyed, Henderson replied, "I'm at the football game! I gotta go!"

She hung up.

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He called again.

"Stand up and wave," he said.

"I can't hear you!" she said and hung up.

He called again.

"Stand up and wave!" he said.

Everybody was seated around her. Henderson slowly stood up and started waving. Andy spotted her, but he was on the wrong side of the stadium.

At the end of the third quarter, he called again.

"Stand up," Andy said.

"Now turn around."

Andy was standing at the top of the stairs. He walked down the steps, got down on one knee and proposed.

Henderson moved to Florida a month later. In rapid succession, she opened the cheer gym, became FAU cheer coach and got married.

"She started that business from scratch, with no investors and no outside money," Andy said. "She started with one cheerleading mat and grew it from there. That says a ton about how much of a hard worker she is, how creative she is. You have to have a vision to take something the way she took it and grow it the way she grew it."

She grew the FAU cheer program too, going from bare bones to 45-50 athletes and top 10 finishes at national competitions on a shoestring budget. That position was only part time, but Henderson poured herself into it because she loved it so much.

Now it is time to tackle a new challenge. Henderson sold her cheer gym and gave up her cheerleading coach position to focus on the director of football operations job. Considering she has never worked in a football office, a slew of challenges await.

Being a woman in a male-dominated job is simply not one of them. Henderson is essentially in charge of the organizational side of the program. Everything she is being asked to do she already did with her cheer gym and her cheerleaders.

Planning trips? Check.

Talking to prospective athletes? Check.

Dealing with parents? Check.

Organizing events? Check.

Henderson is so organized that she already has every football road trip planned for the season. She has two computer screens on her desk and a personal laptop right next to them. At the end of each day, she leaves herself a note on her iPad with everything she has to get done the following day.

"My intention was to get a good productive worker in there and get the best person I could for that side of the job," Pelini said. "I don't think I would ever look at male/female. Just look at skills and what they're able to do and do they fit the job?"

Yet when FAU announced Henderson's appointment, there were snickers on message boards, on Twitter and across the Internet. A woman? In the football department? It almost felt like the clock had been turned back 60 years to a time when women were not CEOs of major corporations, Supreme Court justices or secretaries of state.

"I know I'm going to do a good job," Henderson said. "I'm going to work hard. There are people that aren't happy that I'm in this position, but there are a lot of people that are very happy that I'm in this position. It's more the people who don't think I'll do a good job that fuels the fire for me to do it even better."

Henderson attended an operations conference in Fort Worth, Texas, at the end of May. There were women there. Not many, but some. And the men welcomed them and encouraged Henderson to speak at the conference next year, not about being a woman in the role but about the challenges and experiences she faced in her first year on the job.

"There's still a perception out there that position has to be someone who knows the X's and O's of football," Pelini said. "That's not the case, not even close to being the case. That's the miscommunication; that's the misperception. Why did you hire a female to be something that requires a football guy? That job has very little to do with football. It's all the other things that keep a program running outside the football aspect."

Henderson has her own challenges to worry about. First and foremost, dealing with the unexpected. Henderson likes to plan and be prepared, but she has never gone through a football season in this job. What happens when something inevitably goes wrong? How will she handle it? How will she deal with the mounting pressures and stress each season brings as the weeks go on?

She will be facing everything for the first time. But Henderson has dealt with pressure, stress and deadlines for her entire professional life. She knows what she is doing.

Pelini just needed to hear a 10-minute conversation on a bus ride to realize that.

[entropy]

There was a time, a time before Gary Danielson trolling fans with IQs over 80. When a team of farm boys from the Great Plains reigned supreme. When people believed in the Power I.

This was an age when the quarterback could only get the ball from the center in a properly intimate way. And in college football, one team was more man then the rest. That team was the Nebraska Cornhuskers.

They were like a Greek deity, an angry, muscular deity walking amongst mere mortals. They had a style that could make a half-bear, half-cat from Rocky Top purr and helmets so plain they made Paterno look stylish. In other words, Tom Osborne was the balls.

For better or worse, we are college football fans in an era in which SEC teams create unbeatable teams by using their advantages in proximity to high school players who can practice year-round and fans who make death threats when the rival coach is invited to town. However, there was a time when one team owned the SEC. Over a 24-year period book-ended by a 1978 loss to Alabama in Birmingham and a 2002 loss to Ole Miss in Shreveport, Nebraska went 9-0 against SEC opponents. Included in this run were three major bowl wins over LSU – two of which were in the Tigers’ backyard of New Orleans – and three more major bowl wins over Tennessee and Florida in the late '90s, all by huge margins and all at a time when Steve Spurrier and Phillip Fulmer were at their apexes.

Over a longer timeframe, the Huskers were 15-1-1 against the SEC, including two straight wins over the Bear. In fact, Nebraska can say it handed Bryant the worst loss of his career at Alabama and Spurrier the worst loss of his career at Florida, both in national title-deciding bowl games.

At a time in which the SEC is dominant on a national stage, it's worth considering what we can learn from Nebraska’s epic run against SEC opponents.

(Insert standard caveat here about the fact that we are talking about a small sample size. Nine games over two decades or 17 over three aren't exactly going to survive a statistician’s test for significance. In this sample, it doesn’t hurt that three of the four best teams of the Bob Devaney-Tom Osborne era – 1971, 1995, and 1997 – played SEC champions in their bowl games.)

No state was quite organized around the principle of fealty to the local program the way that Nebraska was for its Huskers.

As an initial matter, Nebraska’s ability to put top teams on the field is interesting because the Huskers faced talent disparities similar to what many other teams face against the SEC today.

Although population shifts and the end of Jim Crow have enhanced the SEC’s advantages in terms of proximity to blue-chip talent, it’s not as if the Great Plains were a more fertile recruiting area than the Southeast in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s. It would be one thing if USC or Texas were dominating the SEC; it’s another for a program not in the vicinity of a great recruiting area to put together teams that could whip the elite of the SEC on a regular basis.

So what allowed Nebraska to overcome its geographic destiny? A few factors come to mind:

Continuity: Devaney and Osborne. That’s the complete list of coaches who were in charge for all but the final game of the 17-1-1 run. And Osborne was Devaney’s offensive coordinator, so the transition between the two was as seamless as could be expected. Nebraska’s attack certainly was not static over three decades, but the basic framework was consistent.

Walk-ons: How does a program practice a highly physical offense? How does it ensure that its defense gets reps against conventional offenses when its team runs an unconventional attack? Well, it helps to have scout teams full of cannon fodder, players who dream of playing for Nebraska and are perfectly content with being beaten on by the starters all week just for the privilege of wearing the Nebraska uniform on Saturdays in Lincoln.

And if the high school programs in the state happen to run the college team’s offense so the cannon fodder arrives knowing the system? Even better. As much as fans in the South love (and have always loved) their local teams, no state was quite organized around the principle of fealty to the local program the way that Nebraska was for its Huskers.

Strength and conditioning: Think of Boyd Epley as a Billy Beane-type figure for college football. Nebraska was ahead of the market in terms of physical preparation of its players, just like the A’s were ahead of the market in emphasizing the importance of on-base percentage and de-emphasizing a focus on physical tools.

So take a program like Oregon, which seems to be the closest modern analog to Nebraska (right down to the former Nebraska quarterback as its current offensive coordinator). The Ducks have continuity in that they have not hired from the outside in decades, although that continuity was broken a little by Chip Kelly getting lured away by the NFL.

Oregon has a unique offensive style, one that does not require superior athletes, just like Nebraska did. (That said, any offense looks better when it has Johnny Rodgers or De’Anthony Thomas.) The Ducks don’t have the walk-on program or the state-wide obsession the way that Nebraska did, but they do have Phil Knight’s lucre, which is an advantage in its own special way.

* - The advent of read-option-heavy offenses in the NFL represents a double-edged sword for a program like Oregon. On the one hand, it removes a recruiting obstacle. On the other hand, it makes their coaches more attractive to lucrative offers from a wealthy professional league.

What Oregon does not have is an advantage in physical development. The Ducks had two cracks at elite SEC teams under Chip Kelly, both times at neutral sites. Against Auburn in 2010 and then LSU in 2011, Southern athletic superiority prevailed over Oregon’s clever scheme.

Oregon averaged 23 points per game in those two contests, and that number is inflated by a meaningless touchdown in the closing seconds against LSU. The Ducks had the right system, but they did not have the dominant offensive line. They didn’t have the third leg of the stool: the edge in developing mauling, moving linemen.

In other words, the Little Engine That Could team that we are imagining would combine Oregon’s offense with Stanford’s offensive line talent.

Some other thoughts on the Nebraska example:

A common criticism of Paul Johnson's offense at Georgia Tech is that opposing defenses can shut it down when they have time to prepare. That was not the case for Nebraska. Florida and Tennessee had weeks to prepare for the Huskers’ option, and it rolled over all of them. With the right coach and right personnel, that offense does just fine in a bowl game.

And the Kirk Herbstreit claim in 2001 that defenses were too athletic for the option to work anymore? Nebraska was all of two years removed from crushing a Tennessee defense that was loaded with NFL talent. Nebraska did not need to move away from what it was doing. It just needed to do it better.

While SEC teams struggled against Nebraska, Miami and Florida State did just fine. From 1983 to 2001, Nebraska went 1-4 against Miami and 1-5 against Florida State. It’s not that teams with great athletes could not figure out how to defend the Nebraska offense; it’s that SEC teams couldn’t do it. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that SEC teams weren’t as well-coached in the '80s and '90s as they are today?

That said, the option can still make good defensive coordinators look bad. Take three of the more highly-regarded defensive coordinators in college football. Bob Diaco had a great year at Notre Dame last year, but he is only two years removed from Navy fans being befuddled by Notre Dame’s naivet? in defending their offense.

Greg Mattison is an outstanding defensive mind, but he had major issues trying to defend Air Force's option in 2012. And Air Force gave John Chavis fits when the Falcons played at Neyland Stadium in 2006.

With that context, it’s no surprise that Nick Saban’s voice trailed off when he talked about a team bringing the Wishbone back. The question is whether a team could run an old-school option offense and still recruit at a championship level. T

To come back to the Johnson question, Georgia Tech isn’t setting the world on fire on the recruiting trail, but is that because of the offense or the head coach’s personality and priorities?

If Nebraska went back to its roots, would it be unable to bring in talent to compete with Michigan and Ohio State in the Big Ten? Right now, the Huskers are struggling to find a new recruiting base to replace what they had in the Big XII, namely Texas and Kansas. Those struggles can lead to two divergent conclusions.

One would be that a program that is already having recruiting issues does not need to make matters worse by implementing an offense that recruits could see as a relic.

The second would be that if Nebraska is already going to be operating at a talent deficit compared to the Buckeyes and Wolverines, then the Huskers need to pull a page from their old playbook (quite literally in a certain respect) and employ a system that makes up for the program's physical distance from blue-chip recruits. It worked before.

[geo weidl]

Good grief! TG DB got rid of this ass clown.


[ame="http://youtu.be/RQZRpTvp-E8"]youtu.be/RQZRpTvp-E8[/ame]

[Tony G]

http://deadspin.com/rich-rodriguez-and-his-arizona-coaching-staff-play-cowb-513921897?utm_campaign=socialflow_deadspin_facebook&utm_source=deadspin_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Rich Rodriguez And His Arizona Coaching Staff Play Cowboys In A Saloon

Here is a video featuring Rich Rodriguez and his coaching staff at Arizona dressing up like cowboys in a saloon. It's called "Hard Edge." Also worth noting: they gave it a title. Here's a quick rundown of the highlights.

• Various members of the staff are shown leaning against things.
• Various members of the staff are shown smoking cee-gars.
• Someone points at Rich Rodriguez.
• Rich Rodriguez is on a quest for The Rose.
• Someone is thrown out of the saloon, another is dragged across the bar.
• It is 2:39 long.
• Rich Rodriguez's wife, Rita, produced it.
• The production company is called "#ontothenextone productions."

Based on the inclusion of RichRod and his staff, and the quest for "The Rose," it's a good bet this has something to do with the football team at Arizona.

[Optimus Prime]

More fantasy crap from the dirty Mexican!

It sucked....just like he does!

[entropy]

Per CNNSI/SB Nation:

http://www.sbnation.com/college-football/2013/6/17/4431212/bowl-game-projections-predictions-2013

Nebraska as the Big Ten No. 4, in the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl vs. Baylor.

Ohio State as B10 No. 1
Wisconsin 2
Michigan 3

Bama v. Oregon in title game.

[lineygoblue]

For OlieO to be B1G #1 and Wisconsin to be B1G #2, Wisconsin would have to lose to OlieO in Indianapolis, and they can't both play in Indy. One will eliminate the other from going to Indy.

B1G numbers 1 and 2 will be the participants in Indianapolis. Winner may even go to the BCS Championship game if they are undefeated. I think the loser still qualifies for a BCS At Large ...

[WM Wolverine]

B10 #2 isn't automatically the CCG loser, in fact the CCG loser gets an extra loss that might've been #2 and gets moved all the way down to #4...

Ohio has the most talent, return most everything other than their DL. They are the easy pick for #1... Hard to distinguish the #2-#5 teams, I include only Sparty because they have such an incredibly soft B10 schedule. If Sparty knocks off 1 of Neb, M, they could easily end up winning the west...

Wisky lost more talent than usual, tough to say without looking at their schedule but I think they drop more than a couple B10 games; 5-3 probably still means #2 in the east. Penn State who people forget had a lot of seniors last season imo lost a lot more (especially on defense) and with their sanctions they won't have the talent incoming to replace them. Defensively, they won't be their typical selves; it'll be tough for them to win a 4th B10 game and could end up behind 1 of Purdue, Indiana or Illinois...

Speaking of the bottom of the conference, I don't see near as big gap as usual between the bottom of the conference; PSU, Purdue, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, NW & Minnesota and the top teams; Sparty, Nebraska, OSU, M & Wisky... The bottom of the conference was quite young last season, started largely sophomores and juniors and had a lot of returning talent. I don't think the bottom of the conference will embarrass the B10 OOC as much as usual but not sure they'll upset the top 4-5 much.

[entropy]

Dis everyone see that Miami got a slap on the wrist?

[entropy]

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/blog/bruce-feldman/22464158/top-10-softest-non-conference-schedules

[Dr. Strangelove]

Dis everyone see that Miami got a slap on the wrist?

What do you mean? Won't it be weeks before they announce a punishment?

[Optimus Prime]

At Least six weeks, definitely before the start of fall football.

http://m.miamiherald.com/mh/db_43002...tguid=YsUFkJXt

[entropy]

They will get off because of time served... If Miami doesn't get hammered, which they won't, there is zero hope for the NCAA..

Also..

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/college-football/news/miami-ncaa/index.html

[entropy]

TIME PASSES slowly in Oakdale, La., and more slowly still at the Federal Correctional Institution on the fringe of town. The guards there know their college football, and even if they see the sport through LSU lenses, most of them quickly recognized inmate #61311-050 when he arrived in September 2011. "Everyone says the Louisiana Purchase was a steal of a deal," says Nevin Shapiro, who's serving a 20-year sentence for his role in a Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors of $930 million. "After 20 months in the state, I'd say the French pulled the heist on the U.S. government."

Humor like that helps sustain the most notorious college booster in history. In February 2011, Shapiro first began serving up to the NCAA one of the most extensive and apparently straightforward infraction cases ever. He turned over a trove of phone records, bank statements, credit-card receipts and photos to support his claims that between 2002 and '10 he supplied cash, cars, meals, drinks, junkets or gifts to more than 100 football and men's basketball players at Miami, whose teams he had cheered for since he moved to South Florida from Brooklyn at age six. He said he doled out cash bounties and performance bonuses for everything from violent hits to celebration penalties; entertained players at his $6.1 million Miami Beach home and on his yacht, All Axcess; colluded with coaches to pay recruits; supplied prostitutes to players; and lured a half-dozen clients from the Hurricanes' roster for Axcess Sports & Entertainment, the agency in which he held a 30% stake. From Jet Ski joyrides with players in Biscayne Bay to the stripper pole he measured for his luxury box at Sun Life Stadium, Shapiro's heyday reads like a Carl Hiaasen fever dream, and it didn't end until his Chapter 7 bankruptcy and subsequent guilty plea to charges of money laundering and securities fraud in September 2010. His felonious finances had nothing to do with the Miami athletic program-except that they helped bankroll his life as a booster. "[The media are] making a big deal about an Auburn coach giving a player $400," says the 44-year-old Shapiro, referring to a recent report on the sports website Roopstigo.com with that allegation. "That wouldn't even cover the valet for the first 10 guys I'd bring into a club-without the tip."

Bitter at how quickly most Hurricanes abandoned him after his fall, Shapiro shared his story with Yahoo! Sports, which corroborated many of his most damning allegations in an August 2011 report, leading Miami to impose sanctions on itself. Shapiro recalls the day that the NCAA enforcement reps originally assigned to the Miami case, Rich Johanningmeier and Ameen Najjar, were about to cross the threshold of a conference room to meet with him for the first time. "If you guys aren't ready to make history," Shapiro says he told them, "don't enter."

Yet that breakaway slam dunk of a case caromed off the back rim. First Johanningmeier, who had conducted the first 50 hours of interviews with Shapiro, retired from enforcement last spring at 69. Then Najjar, working for a division recently pledged to using a faster timetable and what it called "innovative techniques" to process cases, ignored the advice of the legal department and engineered what he would later call "a way around" to get sworn testimony. Because the NCAA lacks subpoena power, Najjar contracted with Shapiro's lawyer in the bankruptcy case, Maria Elena Perez, to pose questions to two of the booster's former associates who had not been cooperating with the NCAA. Najjar was fired seven months later. NCAA president Mark Emmert condemned the "shocking affair" and ordered up an independent investigation that resulted in the firing of enforcement chief Julie Lach, who had failed to forestall the arrangement with Perez.
EYE ON THE U
Johanningmeier, who retired during the Miami investigation, was struck by the increased communication in active cases between Emmert and school presidents, including Shalala.
PAUL SAKUMA/AP
DAVID EULITT FOR SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

News of Perez's role broke in January, months after NCAA management first became aware of it, and just as staffers were stuffing envelopes with Miami's notice of allegations. The NCAA quickly unstuffed those envelopes and dropped any charges based on information gathered from the two depositions. Nonetheless, in February the NCAA sent to Coral Gables allegations that reportedly document some $170,000 in impermissible benefits. Miami then served the NCAA with a motion to dismiss the case entirely. The NCAA turned the petition down, but the lesser charges have Shapiro regretting his choice to turn Miami in. "I thought I was dealing with the FBI," he says. "Instead I was dealing with a bunch of clowns. I gave the NCAA the body, the weapon and the DNA evidence on a platter, and they found a way to screw this up."

The NCAA committee on infractions takes up the Miami matter this week and is expected to announce its findings this summer. But regardless of what happens, the Miami case offers a glimpse into the troubled tenure of Emmert, 60, who has struggled to pass ambitious reforms since taking over in October 2010. It reveals chronic dysfunction in the enforcement division. And it presents the committee with a lose-lose proposition. If the school gets off without further penalties, the current level of cheating in college sports-"a free-for-all," one former NCAA enforcement staffer calls it-is almost certain to continue. Yet if the panel hammers Miami, it will do so after the NCAA's bumbling did more to taint the case than even the flaws of its lead witness did.

IN MARCH, Shapiro reached out to SI to discuss the Miami case and his dealings with the NCAA. SI sent a writer to Oakdale (the prison that housed Shapiro before he was moved to another low-security facility, in Butner, N.C.) in part because Yahoo! had found evidence to support many of his most damning charges. Shapiro supplied SI with documents, from e-mails to bank records, to support several new claims; in the meantime Johanningmeier told SI that he had found Shapiro to be substantially truthful.

During two five-hour conversations in prison, and follow-up e-mails and phone calls, Shapiro regarded his humble circumstances as karmic payback for how large he had once lived. "I had enough money at age 34 to retire," said Shapiro, who's scheduled to be released in 2027. "I ran my life like a circus ... and that lifestyle and behavior led me directly to where I sit today." But his comments usually had a more defiant tone. As he put it, "Somebody will have to answer for all this, because I will not go away."

"I GAVE THE NCAA THE BODY, THE WEAPON AND THE DNA EVIDENCE ON A PLATTER," SAYS SHAPIRO, "AND THEY FOUND A WAY TO SCREW THIS UP."

In a letter he wrote to Emmert last year, Shapiro questioned whether his once beloved Miami will receive what he says it deserves: "the worst punishment ever handed down in the history of the NCAA." He points to an e-mail he received from Najjar shortly after his dismissal, filed in connection with Shapiro's fraud case, in which the former Indianapolis cop complains that his superiors "simply want to get the case done, even if it is half or only one quarter done. I don't know if it is simply to meet some arbitrary time line or the upper levels are trying to save Miami. I suspect it's the latter." Later, in another e-mail, Najjar writes, "Keep the pressure on those SOBs! Don't let them get away with anything"-with Shapiro taking "those SOBs" as a reference to the NCAA and Miami.

Najjar declined to speak to SI. But in several phone calls, Shapiro says, Najjar told him that he feared the case was being handled "president to president," between Emmert and Miami president Donna Shalala. A spokesman for Shalala said she wouldn't comment until the case is complete. Emmert declined to speak to SI, but his spokesman, Bob Williams, says any discussions Emmert might have had with university leaders, "from a process standpoint, not a detail or investigative standpoint, seem reasonable to most people and were requested by our membership."

Still, when Emmert, who came to the NCAA from the presidency of Washington, talks with former peers about cases, he's speaking with members at whose pleasure he serves. And it exemplifies one of two clear ways enforcement work has differed under Emmert from his predecessors-and both changes bear out what Shapiro cites as Najjar's concerns. Gone are the days of NCAA founder Walter Byers's hanging up the phone after simply telling an inquiring school that if it had done nothing wrong, it had nothing to fear from an investigation. There is no evidence that deals are being made, but several ex-enforcement staffers confirm that, as Johanningmeier puts it, "you were more aware that there was an interest from the [NCAA] president's office in the cases than in the past." Another former enforcement rep says that a recent case involving the recruitment of UCLA basketball player Shabazz Muhammad entailed president-to-president communication. "It was very new to us to have those conversations going on above your head," the ex-investigator says.

Second, there has been more pressure to hurry cases since Emmert's No. 2, Jim Isch, began judging all NCAA departments by what he calls "business performance metrics." Upon opening an investigation, a staffer must assign it one of four codes for difficulty, and even the most daunting case is expected to take no more than 12 months to resolve. If a case takes longer, a new quality control directive requires the employee to justify the overrun. As Johanningmeier puts it, the imperative to "Get these things done, [and in] a measurable period of time," routinely ran up against the messiness of the real world-and the Miami case was one he considered to be a two-year undertaking. "We don't make widgets in enforcement," another former investigator says. "We process cases. It takes as long to do a case as it takes."

Though interim enforcement chief Jon Duncan says that "any suggestion that the [enforcement] department is in crisis or on its heels is absolutely not true," numerous current and former NCAA staffers tell of a division full of people desperate to leave, using words like instability, distrust and tension to describe the atmosphere. They point out that, since April, the unit has lost three of its most productive and respected employees. Some of that discontent can be traced to controversial episodes beyond the Miami embarrassment. Enforcement rep Abigail Grantstein was an investigator on UCLA's recruitment of Muhammad, and in August 2012 her boyfriend was overheard boasting on a plane that the NCAA would be finding violations. As a result the NCAA abandoned the case, reinstated Muhammad and ultimately fired Grantstein. Then there's the USC case in which the NCAA sanctioned the school in 2010 after finding that Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush and basketball star O.J. Mayo had received impermissible benefits. After reviewing internal NCAA documents, a California judge recently found enough evidence that NCAA staffers had shown "ill will or hatred" toward Todd McNair, an assistant USC football coach implicated in the case, that he permitted McNair's defamation suit to go forward. And the NCAA's punishment of Penn State after the Jerry Sandusky scandal-it imposed go-directly-to-jail sanctions that included a $60 million fine, a five-year probation, a four-year postseason ban and 40 lost scholarships-was regarded as overreach by many NCAA staffers as well as much of the public, because the enforcement division never conducted an investigation.

[entropy]

Lach says the new approach to enforcement, assigning multiple staffers to one investigation, led to a speedier resolution in the case against Ohio State and coach Jim Tressel.
JOHN BIEVER/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
RICHARD DREW/AP

Until now it has been inconceivable that an athlete would share incriminating information with the NCAA, only to reverse field nearly two years later to claim that an investigator had "coerced" him into doing so. Last week Miami redshirt senior defensive lineman Dyron Dye filed an incident report with the Coral Gables police department alleging that Johanningmeier "threatened Mr. Dye's football eligibility if he did not cooperate with the investigation" when he sat for the NCAA. To be sure, Johanningmeier has his detractors: In 2002 two Alabama coaches named him in a defamation suit against the NCAA, only to have Johanningmeier dismissed from the complaint; another case, tied to a 2003 investigation of Mississippi State, is still pending. But he says he simply asked Dye to sign a standard NCAA form, presented by a university-hired lawyer, agreeing that he'd be subject to losing his eligibility if he failed to tell the truth.

That's what it has come to: When an enforcement staffer tries to use his most basic tools, the carrot of competition and the stick of ineligibility, he gets reported to the cops. Whether the NCAA's current straits are the result of conspiracy or favoritism, or simply mismanagement or incompetence, the organization has never been so disrespected in so many quarters.

BEFORE EMMERT appointed Julie Lach to head the enforcement division in October 2010, the NCAA circulated among enforcement staff an electronic "applicant packet" with profiles of the four finalists for the position. The documents inadvertently included salary information showing Tom Hosty, an enforcement director, was making tens of thousands of dollars less than another in-house candidate, Lach, who had four fewer years' experience and less time as an on-the-ground investigator.

The steep career trajectories of the 37-year-old Lach, as well as those of such other young, female staffers in the enforcement division as Grantstein, Angie Cretors and Rachel Newman-Baker, touched off jealousy among some colleagues. The e-mail with the salary disparities seemed to confirm suspicions of management's preferential treatment for members of "the Sorority," as some male staffers called a group that included former college athletes and NCAA interns. Lach stressed the importance of tracking social media and data mining, and she began to hire more staff with law degrees, if not always experience working in college sports. Duncan says that 39% of his staff has experience on campuses or in athletic departments. "I remember one time some of my then colleagues at the copier couldn't name all the teams in the Big Ten," says Johanningmeier, a former Missouri State and Illinois College football coach known around the office as Coach. "The thing that really threw them was that there were 11 teams at the time."

In May 2011, the NCAA introduced to great fanfare a corporate sloganeering campaign: One Team, One Future. The new enforcement model would track the OTOF philosophy. After Johanningmeier finished his first interviews with Shapiro, at least five more people were cycled onto the Miami case. "One of the strong points under the old system was that we had a person who knew a case inside out," he says. "With ownership comes responsibility. These were no longer your cases. They were team cases."
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Shapiro says that once he learned of an injury to 'Canes QB Wright he placed $1.18 million in bets on N.C. State, which toppled favored Miami.
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Lach argues that the team approach was effective, and points to the Ohio State case that led to the ouster of coach Jim Tressel. She says that the very things Johanningmeier mocks-desktop investigators and the team approach-accomplished in seven months what would have taken one person 18. "The entire case was done," she says, "including the infractions decision, in less than a year."

Soon after an August 2011 summit with selected college presidents, Emmert began to stump for five major reforms. The membership chose to fully implement only the one addressing enforcement, which will take effect in August: more robust penalties to deter cheaters and an expanded committee on infractions to hear cases more quickly. Although recent defections have brought its head count down slightly, the enforcement staff had expanded from 45 to 59 since Emmert took over and began making his presence felt throughout the unit. "Julie is a good person but lacked good direction once she got the job," says a person with knowledge of the infractions process. "I don't think Julie blew her nose without checking with Mark Emmert or Jim Isch."

Under Lach, the NCAA began launching more cases, but it didn't result in the cleaner disposition of a couple of the highest-profile investigations, UCLA and Miami. In the meantime Emmert had been unable to get members to approve his other proposals, including simplifying the NCAA rule book and an increased stipend for athletes. As the subject of the only reform measure to pass, the enforcement division-already the organization's most scrutinized department-felt pressure. "There was definitely a clear message," says Grantstein. "This is not going to fail."

"PEOPLE ARE QUESTIONING THE NEED AND EFFECTIVENESS OF ENFORCEMENT," SAYS GRANTSTEIN, WHO WONDERS "IF THE MEMBERSHIP WILL SAY WE DON'T WANT IT."

"There was a mandate for change by our membership," says Williams. "The degree to which some people don't like that change and are not happy is probably higher than it's been over the last several years."

FOR YEARS the NCAA had judged investigators on whether they presented enough evidence to support an allegation once a case was brought, often after news of violations broke in the press. Under the new enforcement protocol, management evaluates reps on their adherence to deadlines and their ability to proactively develop information that leads to cases. "I remember being told [by superiors], Find a way to prove it," Grantstein says. "If you hit a brick wall, now the attitude was, Find a way to get through that wall. You can't come back with, I can't prove it." Lach disagrees, saying, "Staff were charged with being thorough and fair. If we hit a dead end, and it was clear the lead was bad or the evidence wasn't there, we shut it down."

Johanningmeier says the team approach was intended in part to speed the process, but he believes it introduced inefficiencies, including instances when multiple enforcement reps would travel to sit in on a single interview. "We had more teamwork under the old system than the one that looks good on PowerPoint with all the boxes and arrows," he says. "I've seen the old system work. I've seen people exonerated and seen people held accountable who should be held accountable."

In the Miami case, Shapiro's parents, girlfriend and some former business associates cooperated because he asked them to. Current Hurricanes spoke too because the NCAA and the school had the power to rule them ineligible if they didn't. But beyond campus-in the clubs of Miami Beach, for instance-no one is likely to welcome a Nosey Parker from the NCAA: That's what can make enforcement maddening work. "We're going into a gunfight with a water gun," a former investigator says. "Sometimes you can't go through the front door, back door or side door. But you still have to figure out a way to get in."

When Grantstein went out on a case, she would tell schools that, as NCAA members, they could recommend changes if they didn't like what she was doing. She senses exactly that happening. "People are questioning the need and effectiveness of an enforcement staff in general," she says, "to the point that I wonder if the membership will say we don't want it."

Former Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe, an ex--NCAA investigator who now runs a risk-management consultancy to help schools minimize misconduct, would like to see enforcement broken off from the rest of the NCAA and turned into a quasi-independent agency like the Securities and Exchange Commission. That way, if an administrator were to call the NCAA president, the president could honestly say that enforcement isn't in his domain. "I don't think it has an actual effect," Beebe says of a call placed to Emmert's office. "But you sure could have the perception of undue influence. In this world, perception can amount to a lot."

"I'm not sure enforcement can survive another 10 years the way it's structured now," adds Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany, who got his start in NCAA enforcement. "Every five years or so there's a feeling we have to get tough. Then people can't take it, and the NCAA has to back off."

Or as one high-ranking college administrator puts it, "I'm really concerned. There's a need for a healthy NCAA. It's not healthy right now."

Few of these critics spare the man at the top. Emmert has already had so many calls in the media for his ouster that presidents on the NCAA's executive committee felt compelled to give him a vote of confidence in February. Staffers describe Emmert as heavily invested in his public profile, whether he's handing out the championship trophy at the Final Four, making a TV tour after wading into the Penn State mess or shoehorning himself and his family into an NCAA documentary about Title IX. Among staff he's known derisively as King of the Press Conference, and his knack for commenting on ongoing cases has left investigators exasperated. "There's less interference and noise for the committee on infractions if you don't have the NCAA president saying anything," says former Alabama faculty athletic representative Gene Marsh, a lawyer who spent nine years on the committee. "I'm drop-dead sure the enforcement staff feels the same way."