As a one-time member of the University of Oregon varsity athletics staff, it hit close to home for me when Ducks football recently came under fire for possibly breaking National Collegiate Athletics Association rules. Months earlier, followers of Oregon football cheered their team to the national title game. The focus today remains on football, but for not-so-happy reasons — suspicions that coaches cheated to get star players to campus. It no longer is a matter of waving an index finger in the air to proclaim “We’re No. 1,” not with the reputation of the University at stake because the NCAA is investigating charges that Oregon heads the pack in rules breaking.
If true, it might be because Coach Chip Kelly fantasizes he’s living back in the hey-day of college football in the 1920s. His $300,000 monthly paycheck would fit right in with extravagances of those years just before the Great Depression. Recent allegations suggest he may be making the same miscalculations to acquire players the way many did it in the 1920s, before the NCAA was created to monitor and discourage hijacking.
I saw such problems up close when I was Oregon Sports Information Director (SID) the last time the NCAA had to clamp down on Oregon football, in the 1980s. The issue then was about enrolling players for summer classes in a Kansas junior college notorious for letting football players slide through to gain academic eligibility. Oregon fired a chief assistant coach, John Becker, @@http://www.benzduck.com/display/ShowJournal?moduleId=9829420&registeredAuthorId=1406574&currentPage=4@@to try to get off the hook. That makes the rumor that Josh Gibson on the current staff might be removed sound ominous — as if the Ducks figure such a sacrifice is needed to save the head coach’s position if the NCAA decides to crack down.
The pre-NCAA era is familiar to me thanks to what I learned from an old-time letterman when I was SID at Northwestern of the Big Ten. Twist Thorsen was a grizzled veteran of the school’s track teams of the 1920s.
“I wasn’t a bad runner,” Twist told me. “But I got more important after I finished school, because nobody brought in better recruits than I did. Consider the best back Northwestern ever has had other than Otto Graham. It was Pug Rentner, an all-American in the 1930s. Everybody wanted him. He wound up on the Illinois campus. I drove to Champaign, met with Pug, and brought him back to Evanston with me. He was not the only one I stole from another school. But he was the best.”
Fast forward to today, and we have rumors that Oregon has a connection with a Texas recruiter — Kelly’s Twist Thorsen at a time when Thorsens are illegal. He reportedly went beyond NCAA rules to encourage two great Texas prospects to enter Oregon. That goes beyond rumor when the NCAA begins looking into reports that junior running back, LaMichael James, and freshman running back, Lache Seastrunk, came to Oregon through illegal arrangements made with the Texan, Willie Lyles.
James is an especially interesting case because he last season finished third in Heisman Trophy voting to an Auburn quarterback who also had a college career marked by questions of illegality. Lyles said that because James’ math scores for admission to Oregon were too low, he helped him transfer to an Arkansas high school where the math test was not used. Last season, James was suspended for the first game after being arrested for beating up a female companion.
The one-game suspension seems to be part of Coach Kelly’s mild punishment pattern for star players. It was the announced discipline for all-American defensive back, Cliff Harris, after his arrest for driving a car 118 mph in June. That was the last in a series of traffic arrests for Harris. He is among six varsity players to have been arrested for various reasons since last season.
Lyles said he was deeply involved with Seastrunk. When his mother refused to sign his letter of intent with Oregon, Lyles said he arranged for the player to have his guardianship shifted to his grandmother, who agreed to sign.
Kelly’s excessive pay is not the only money controversy facing Oregon. Lyles was paid $25,000 — well beyond the normal — for supposed scouting services. That now has ballooned in another area — an estimated $150,000 from the University as a retainer for an eastern law firm, Bond, Schoeneck & King, noted for helping football programs navigate their way through NCAA investigations.
Big money? Maybe not when one considers the $3 million severance package Kelly’s predecessor got when he quit the University a year ago to become an ESPN commentator. Still unexplained is how Mike Bellotti got any payment — usually reserved for persons who are fired — on a simple handshake from former Oregon president, David Frohnmayer.
Yet we continue to get frothy statements from the University, like the recent quote from Athletics Director Rob Mullens:
“Oregon athletics remain committed to operating a program of integrity.”
George Beres
(The writer is retired from the University where he was sports information director, and later manager of the Speakers Bureau. As SID at Northwestern University, his alma mater, he headed the Intercollegiate Committee on Gambling Awareness.)