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 d!(k 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 d!(k 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.
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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 d!(k 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 d!(k 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.