Another CU story from SI insiders

[HuskerBob]

hey fellaz heres a long but intersting article from SI..

 

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By Kelli Anderson and George Dohrmann

 

The release of some 20 depositions in lawsuits filed by three women

who allege they were raped on a night they partied with Colorado

football players and recruits has raised questions about coach Gary

Barnett's program and shed light on tawdry recruiting practices

 

Says Colorado athletic director Dick Tharp: "I know that no matter

what the the resolution of this is ... the stain on the institution

and the athletic department will stay out there."

Tim DeFrisco

They all had heard stories. Perhaps not surprisingly those stories

translated into wild expectations for some of the high school

football players on an official recruiting visit to the University of

Colorado campus in early December 2001. And according to later

depositions and police reports, four recruits who arrived in Boulder

on the evening of Thursday, Dec. 6, soon had some of those

expectations fulfilled. That night at least five women, among them

Colorado students, wound up in recruits' hotel rooms, with one of the

women spending the night. At one point in the evening, one of the

Colorado players who were serving as hosts for the high schoolers

showed a recruit a video of a Buffaloes player having sex and told

him, "This is what you get when you come to Colorado."

 

The next day two more recruits arrived -- and the partying continued.

That night, after the high schoolers had toured campus, met with an

academic adviser and dined with coaches, some of them gathered at the

apartment of two player-hosts. While stories of Thursday night's

exploits were passed around the room, along with rum and marijuana,

one of the player-hosts worked the phone, trying to connect with one

of the women from the night before. As the other host told

investigators later, he thought the high school players "expected"

that sex would be arranged for them because these were "top college

recruits from around the nation."

 

When the connection was made, the players got directions to an off-

campus apartment where four Colorado coeds were playing a drinking

game called the Hour of Power, during which they each took a shot of

beer every minute for 60 minutes. The recruits, their player-hosts

and other members of the football team piled into three SUVs and

headed to the women's apartment. As they drove up, they saw two of

the women standing on the median waving them in.

 

By midnight, at least 15 players and recruits, some of them drunk,

were partying in the small two-bedroom apartment. By then the women --

who had been expecting only two recruits and two hosts -- were drunk

as well. Several other women also turned up at the apartment. Some

players and recruits soon left, but several of those who remained

engaged in a dizzying array of sexual activity with at least three

women; one of the recruits later would describe the scene to police

as "a big porno." A woman and a player had sex in a closet, and when

they were done, the woman was approached by a recruit who asked her

to "show a recruit a good time." As she turned away she was stopped

by two players who police say had their pants open, inviting her to

perform another sexual act.

 

Another woman was engaged in sex with a player on the edge of a bed

near where a third woman, Lisa Simpson, had lain down and, by her own

account, "passed out." When she awoke, according to her deposition,

Simpson found one of the men on top of her and another standing over

her. Both were engaged in sex acts with her. "The players ... and the

recruits just came in and just -- they didn't even ask to have sex

with me. They just thought it was okay," said Simpson. "And they were

bigger and there [were] more of them and they just -- they could do

whatever they wanted to me." At 2 a.m., one of the women at the

apartment ordered the remaining players and recruits to leave.

 

Though Simpson told police she had been raped, Boulder district

attorney Mary Keenan decided that because of the nature of the party

and the condition of the participants, she would have a hard time

proving criminal wrongdoing, and no criminal sexual assault charges

were ever filed. (Three players pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges

of serving alcohol to minors.)

 

What went on that night might have faded into the annals of he-said,

she-said if Simpson hadn't filed a federal lawsuit against the

university a year later. In the suit Simpson (who through her

spokesperson declined to talk to SI) reiterates her rape allegation

and claims that the university violates the Title IX gender-bias law

by fostering an environment in which sex and alcohol are used to

entice prized high school football players to sign with the

Buffaloes. Since December of last year, two other attendees from the

2001 party, Monique Gillaspie and a woman who does not wish her name

to be made public, have also filed suits against the university and

have alleged that they too were raped by players during or after the

party.

 

A National Issue

Colorado isn't the only school at which sex and recruiting have been

linked in recent years

2000 FLORIDA While on a recruiting trip to Gainesville, offensive

line prospect Jason Respert of Warner Robins, Ga., is arrested and

charged with burglary and attempted sexual battery for an incident

that occurred after he'd been drinking in a bar with a fellow recruit

and a Gators player. Respert pleads to lesser charges of criminal

trespassing and simple battery. He's now a junior at Tennessee.

2002 ALABAMA The NCAA bans the Crimson Tide from postseason play for

two years for violations that include players inviting strippers on

campus to entertain visiting high school recruits from 1997 to '99.

2002 OREGON During his recruiting visit to Eugene, blue-chip running

back Lynell Hamilton of Stockton, Calif., is taken to parties where,

he says, he's offered alcohol, marijuana and sex. Hamilton is turned

off by the experience, telling the Stockton Record, "Oregon was my

number one choice, but they blew it for both of us." He signs with

San Diego State and rushes for 1,087 yards as a freshman in 2003.

2003 MINNESOTA Several Gophers players take top offensive line

recruit Lydon Murtha of Hutchinson, Minn., to a strip club during a

December campus visit. Murtha later rescinds his verbal commitment to

Minnesota and signs with Nebraska, though he tells the Minneapolis

Star-Tribune that the club visit had nothing to do with his decision.

Other 2004 recruits later say that they too were taken to the

establishment on their visits and supplied with alcohol. The

university is investigating the charges.

2004 BYU Provo, Utah, police probe allegations that a sex crime

occurred at a late-night party for Cougars recruits in January at a

house shared by three football players. Investigators find no basis

for criminal charges but turn up evidence of other recent football

parties that included sexual advances and alcohol. Consuming alcohol

and engaging in nonmarital or extramarital sex violate the school's

honor code, and university officials are investigating.

2004 COLORADO STATE AND OTHERS Steve Lower, owner of Denver-based

Hardbodies Entertainment, tells the Rocky Mountain News that his

company, which has branches in Houston and Las Vegas, has sent

strippers to entertain recruits at parties at Colorado State,

Houston, Northern Colorado, Rice and UNLV, in addition to Colorado.

Officials at all the schools involved deny knowledge of such

activity. Says Rice president Malcolm Gillis in a university

statement, "I can't believe any of our athletes are that stupid."

 

 

 

The result has been a firestorm. In a deposition released in January,

Keenan echoed Simpson's assertion that the football program uses

alcohol and sex as recruiting tools to attract players. At the same

time, police reports and other depositions -- including testimony

from players, female students, coaches, university administrators and

legal authorities -- became public, casting Colorado football as a

program out of control and shedding new light on the often tawdry

practices of college football recruiting. Buffaloes coach Gary

Barnett has likened the barrage of criticism he and his program have

endured to getting "between the pipes and taking slap shots for 16

hours." The latest allegations against the program came last week

from the only woman ever to play football for Colorado, former

placekicker Katie Hnida, who told SI's Rick Reilly that she was

sexually harassed and molested by teammates during her freshman

season in 1999 and was raped by one teammate the following summer.

 

Simpson's and Keenan's claims have shone the spotlight on a

relatively unmonitored and unpublicized aspect of recruiting: the

official visit, a 48-hour span that is intended to give high school

players a feel for a university and provide coaches an opportunity to

sell their program. Every recruit is matched to a host, a current

player selected by the football staff, often based on his having

something in common with the recruit -- being from the same hometown

or playing the same position, for example. A host's chief duties

begin after the recruits have had their campus tours, meetings and

coaches' dinners, when he is handed an NCAA-approved $30 to spend on

what the NCAA manual calls "entertainment" for himself and the high

schooler. "The only guidelines you're really given are, Show them a

good time, but don't do anything to embarrass yourself or the

university," says former Buffaloes tailback Cortlen Johnson, who

graduated in 2001.

 

How hosts and recruits spend their time together depends on a variety

of factors: what the recruit wants and expects, how accommodating the

host is and what the environment at the school is. "You'd be

surprised how often you just sit around with the guy playing video

games," says Rashidi Barnes, a safety at Colorado from 1996 to '99.

 

There are the usual college diversions: frat parties, dorm parties,

off-campus parties, bar-hopping -- all of which can put recruits in

the company of young women eager to meet athletes. At Colorado, which

was recently named the No. 1 party school in the country by The

Princeton Review, alcohol is both widely available and consumed in

large quantities. Sometimes other entertainment is available to

recruits. On Feb. 7, Colorado junior linebacker Chris Hollis was

suspended for one game after admitting to Barnett that he had taken a

recruit to a Boulder strip club. A few days later, the Rocky Mountain

News reported that Steve Lower, the owner of Hardbodies Entertainment

in Denver, had been sending strippers to recruiting parties at

Colorado and a number of other schools for the past 20 years. "Never

once has a coach called us [to arrange for a stripper]," Lower told

SI. "It's always players or friends of players. Sometimes they'll

flat-out tell you, 'It's a recruiting party; please send your best

girls.' Sometimes they try and tell you it's a birthday, but the

girls will come back and tell you what it is."

 

Hiring strippers has evidently been a common recruiting practice at a

number of schools, including the football nonpower Northwestern,

where Barnett coached from 1992 through '98. Chris Leeder, a lineman

who played for the Wildcats from 1994 through '97, says recruits were

taken to strip clubs or to parties where strippers

performed. "Selling sex to recruits is not something they invented at

Colorado," he says. "Every school does it." Asked if he would be

surprised to hear that Northwestern recruits were taken to strip

clubs, Barnett said, "No. Everywhere is pretty much the same. We work

in this environment and in this culture. It is a college. We are in a

college culture, and that doesn't change, [no matter] what state you

are in or what school you are in."

 

Harder to place in the spectrum of Colorado's embarrassments was the

disclosure by the university that a phone-record audit had traced

calls made between June 2002 and July '03 from an athletic department

cellphone to a Boulder escort service called Best Variety. At the

time of the calls, the phone was assigned to football recruiting

coordinator Nathan Maxcey, who left Colorado last summer and now

lives in Utah. Maxcey acknowledged making the calls but said that the

$250-an-hour escort service was for his personal use and not for

anyone else at the university. However, a lawyer for Pasha Cowan, a

former manager of Best Variety, told the Boulder Daily Camera that

Maxcey had set up the service for others -- specifically, "some young

and very athletic men."

 

 

"I can't write down all the things players are going to encounter

when they go outside the university," says Barnett. "I have to rely

on a basic set of values."

Tim DeFrisco

Before Mary Keenan was elected Boulder County district attorney in

November 2000, she built a reputation as a deputy DA by successfully

prosecuting sexual assault cases. "She established the principle that

no means no and date rape is not O.K., even if you are drunk and half-

naked," says Boulder attorney George Johnson. As she said in her

deposition in the Simpson case, Keenan (who declined to talk to SI)

didn't foresee charges being upheld in the 2001 incident partly

because she felt the recruits "had been built up to believe that the

situation they were going into was specifically to provide them with

sex."

 

That, she believed, was further evidence of the toxic culture she

felt had contributed to a similar incident involving Colorado

football recruits in December 1997. In that case a Niwot, Colo., high

school student claimed she was raped by two recruits at a party

organized by Terrell Cade, then a Buffaloes defensive end. Keenan

didn't press charges because of insufficient evidence, but as she

said in the deposition, she believed the '97 encounter "had been set

up to provide sex to the recruits as a recruiting mechanism."

 

Keenan made a similar statement in a February 1998 meeting with

university chancellor Richard Byyny, athletic director Dick Tharp and

university counsel Bob Chichester, among others. She suggested the

university establish a "zero tolerance" policy regarding alcohol and

sex for recruits. Further, she recalled telling Tharp directly that

he needed "to take measures to prevent [an incident like the one

in '97] because if it happens again, we are going to deal with it

very seriously. You are on notice."

 

How much of Keenan's message was conveyed to Barnett after his hiring

in 1999 is unclear. Chichester, now the athletic director at UC

Irvine, recalled talking to the new coach about the '97 incident and

about Keenan's concerns. Barnett, in his deposition, said he heard

nothing about either subject until after the December 2001 party, and

that even if he had, "I don't think it would have had any effect on

my policies, procedures, and the way I would have done business....

My expectations and my standards were different than the ones that

were in existence before."

 

That was what Colorado fans were counting on when Barnett arrived in

Boulder in January 1999 for what he considered his dream job. During

his seven-year career at Northwestern, he had lifted the historically

hapless Wildcats to respectability and taken them to the 1995 Rose

Bowl. Barnett also had established a reputation as a detail-oriented

disciplinarian, a hard-nosed coach who would not tolerate the kinds

of problems that had marked the tenures of his two immediate

predecessors at Colorado. Although Barnett was an assistant under

Buffaloes coach Bill McCartney from 1984 through '91, he was never

linked to the myriad troubles during that reign, which included at

least two dozen players being arrested from 1986 through '89.

McCartney was followed by Rick Neuheisel, whose program was found to

have committed more than 50 NCAA violations during his four seasons

in Boulder and who was seen as a coach whose ability to relate to his

players masked his inability to rein them in. While entertaining high

school recruits in January '99, Neuheisel stunned the Buffaloes

faithful by accepting a seven-year, $7 million contract at

Washington. (He was fired last year by Washington for participating

in a high-stakes NCAA basketball tournament pool and failing to be

forthcoming about it.)

 

So when Barnett returned to Boulder and spoke of structure and

accountability, even hardened CU skeptics like Keenan were

optimistic. "I felt like I needed to crack down and change the

culture," Barnett told SI last week. "There is no question I ran into

some resistance, but you have to do it your own way."

 

Barnett brought a player handbook to Colorado, parts of it borrowed

from Tom Osborne's guide at Nebraska. It's a constantly expanding

volume that outlines everything from how a player should act on the

practice field to the team's alcohol policy, and includes a section

titled "Date Rape/Social Policy," which advises, among other

things, "Never initiate sexual intercourse if the woman is

intoxicated or passed out."

 

There's no question that in some cases of wrongdoing by team members

Barnett has acted decisively. Two of the four Colorado players

charged for their roles in the 2001 party were suspended, and three

of them lost their scholarships. Earlier this month Barnett dismissed

walk-on quarterback Colt Brennan for violating team rules. (According

to the Daily Camera, Brennan is the subject of a police investigation

involving an alleged sexual assault in late January at a campus

residence hall. SI was unable to reach him for comment.) On Feb. 7

the coach suspended not only Hollis but also three other players for

unspecified violations related to recruiting.

 

After arriving at Colorado, Barnett stopped the large recruiting

parties -- attended by coaches and players as well as recruits --

that had been common under Neuheisel. And following the 2001 party,

he instituted a 1 a.m. curfew and a hotel check-in for visiting high

school players. "I find it very ironic that the school with probably

the strictest rules and someone whose reputation has been one who

enforces those rules is the one who is the focus of all this,"

Barnett says.

 

Imposing new rules, however, is different from changing an ingrained

culture. According to a police report, when one of the women who

attended the 2001 party confronted players involved the next day, a

player told her, "We're Big 12 champs.... Why would we need to rape

somebody?"

 

In the face of such a palpable sense of entitlement, Barnett worried

that placing tighter restrictions on recruiting would hurt Colorado's

football program. He says in his deposition, "We were concerned that

some of those changes would create a recruiting disadvantage ... most

notably a curfew." Later, Barnett says, the school decided "to be

proactive," which is when he put in place the curfew and check-in

rules for visiting recruits.

 

There's no evidence to suggest that having a curfew has harmed

Colorado's recruiting. It's not even clear whether Keenan's "zero-

tolerance policy" on sex would put a school at a disadvantage. "To

use whether you had sex on campus to choose your school is shallow

and shortsighted," says former Colorado linebacker Chad Brown, now

with the Seattle Seahawks. "I had a four-page checklist to assess the

merits of each school I visited. To base that decision on three

minutes of sex as a 17-year-old is pretty pathetic."

 

Others suggest that official visits are just icing on the recruiting

cake anyway. "I don't care how much fun you have on a visit, guys

have their minds made up where they want to go, and the fun you have

on your recruiting trip isn't going to change that," says

Indianapolis Colts running back Edgerrin James, who played his

college ball at Miami. "I could've had the greatest time ever on my

Ohio State trip, and I still wasn't going there."

 

Barnett's counter to the slap shots he and his program have absorbed

the last few weeks is to point to the handbook and raise the question

of how much responsibility a coach has for the actions of players

when they aren't under his watch. "I can't write down specifically

all the things that players are going to encounter when they go

outside the university," Barnett says. "I have to rely on a basic set

of values, and players either internalize them and learn how to use

them or make mistakes and learn to deal with the consequences of

those mistakes.

 

"None of us could ever say that type of behavior [at the 2001 party]

is condoned or accepted. But one question everyone needs to answer

is, Let's say there is no football here and we don't have athletes on

scholarship. Is it likely the same kind of party would have occurred

on a college campus somewhere in this country on Dec. 7?"

 

Some would say no. "The deadly combination at Colorado is the

spoiled, pampered, revered athletes and the coaches and

administration that have a blind desire to win at all costs, with no

self-examination," says Regina Cowles, Boulder chapter president of

the National Organization for Women. "That's a volatile situation.

And it keeps coming back to haunt them. This is an opportunity for

the university. Opportunity doesn't always come in pretty packages."

 

After fighting hard to keep the Simpson depositions sealed, the

university has been both grudging and ham-handed in embracing its so-

called opportunity. Soon after school president Betsy Hoffman

announced the formation of a panel on Feb. 5 to examine the football

team's recruiting practices and the university's policies on sexual

misconduct and alcohol abuse, cochair Joyce Lawrence, a former state

legislator, compromised the appearance of impartiality by saying to a

local television reporter, "The question I have for the ladies in

this is, Why are they going to parties like this and drinking or

taking drugs and putting themselves in a very threatening position

like this?" Critics see a blame-the-victim mentality in that comment,

but despite calls for Lawrence's removal, she has refused to give up

her seat, and Hoffman has not asked for it.

 

University regent Jim Martin has been outspoken in calling for the

school to deal with the scandal openly and objectively. "It's an

emotionally charged issue," Martin says. "I told Gary Barnett

recently that I thought he was a man of integrity. He's facing a

serious problem for the program and for the whole university. But you

can't deny it, and you can't ignore it."

 

Though it's too early to know how the lawsuits and investigations

will turn out -- Keenan has said she'll reopen the criminal probe

into the 2001 case in light of the recently released depositions --

clearly the university's reputation is bruised. In a Feb. 8 opinion

piece in the Daily Camera, physics professor Carl Wieman, a Nobel

laureate on the faculty, described the university as "an academic

appendage to the football program." Says Tharp, "I know that no

matter what the resolution of this, it won't matter. The stain on the

institution and the athletic department will stay out there. I know

that 10 years from now somebody is going to say to me, 'Oh, the

University of Colorado, isn't that where they had that sex recruiting

thing going on?'"

 

A bigger question may be, Is Colorado alone? "Even if this case is

thrown out of court, it should serve as a wake-up call," says

Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione. "We tend to focus on a

symptom instead of stepping back and addressing the entire disease,

although I hate to use that word. Instead of focusing on one issue

here or there, we need to step back and look at the culture that

exists on our campuses."

 

NCAA president Myles Brand is convening a task force to reexamine

rules regarding recruiting visits, a move that will almost certainly

result in several more pages in that already hefty NCAA manual. As

for Colorado, Barnett has now added strippers to his handbook's list

of forbidden entertainment. "We have a 124-page handbook," he

says, "and next year it will be 134 pages."

 

No doubt other coaches will follow suit, typing up admonitions and

reshaping policy. But as Colorado has shown, policy and practice can

be two very different things.