MIAMI -- As this stained season continues, there's only one leader who looks good amid this University of Miami mess. One. And he was fired.
It isn't the weary president, soaked in scandal, photographed looking at a big check like a fat person looks at frosting. It isn't the athletic director who fled toward Texas Tech's tumbleweed like a man being chased. It isn't the basketball coach who had the allegations trail him to a better job at Missouri, or the compliance man that a drunk and now jailed Ponzi gnome reportedly tried to fight in the press box, or all the smeared assistant coaches who now have new jobs elsewhere.
No, only Randy Shannon looks like a real leader with vision and morals today. A fired Randy Shannon everyone wanted gone, many a Miami fan rooting against Miami in Shannon's final game just so he wouldn't survive it. A Randy Shannon who always cared about the rules and cared even more about the only program and city he has ever loved. A Randy Shannon who still hasn't landed a new job anywhere else in an amateur business that claims to care about the kids and discipline and doing the right thing.
Having morals and having success is often an either-or transaction in college sports, and Shannon was on the right side of one of those but on the wrong of the scoreboard, so he remains unemployed as college football starts even as all the aforementioned smeared people keep cashing amateurism's checks. That should tell you about all you need to know about what the real priorities are of big-business college sports, when the only Miami employee who actually went out of his way to keep greasy Nevin Shapiro away from the kids is the only one who is also jobless now, fired by a man who avoided what was coming a few weeks later by leaping to a bigger paycheck at Texas Tech.
Understandably lost in the volume of all those details from prison about prostitutes was the report that Shannon knew Shapiro's money was not to be trusted around his program and reportedly warned his players again and again to stay the hell away from him.
This, as the athletic department gave Shapiro his season-ticket skybox three consecutive games for free despite his non-payment, fronting him the box and figuring he was good for the money, not knowing that he wasn't paying because his accounts had been frozen and he was en route to jail.
So Shannon isn't being blamed at all today for this unholy mess, which is pretty interesting. The coach always gets blamed in this spot, even if so much of what happens outside the huddle is outside of his control. Maybe Shannon isn't being blamed because he is already gone, and most seem to be happy that is so, even if we can't know yet if he took all the losing with him. Maybe if he were still here, fans would be blaming him, just to be rid of him, using this mess as a rationalization for a scoreboard that displeases.
But, as it stands, those most outraged around Miami seem to be calling for the resignation of school president Donna Shalala, which is ridiculous but makes warped sense because you have to keep going higher and higher to find any authority figures involved in this who remain near the stigmatized school. Blame usually follows anger, and there has to be a place to put both, and, implausibly, Shalala is the only one still around. It says plenty about the instability around this athletic program that you have to go that high up the food chain to find anyone whose face you still recognize enough to blame.
"It's a coach's nightmare," legend Bobby Bowden says of a booster like Shapiro. "Controlling it? It is the hardest thing in the world to do, especially in an area the size of Miami. If something like that happened in Tallahassee, everyone would know about it. They'd call you, 'Hey, coach, your boys are doing this or that.' An area (as) big as Miami, it is 10 times as hard to find out what's going on."
Bowden and Barry Switzer are very different champion legends who have known how it feels to be buried beneath scandal. Bowden, a man of profound faith, is a grandfather god who could charm a coiled cobra with his Southern-fried touch.
Switzer is a bootlegger's son with a jarring way of cutting through the nonsense mythology we still insist on alleging is amateurism. Switzer -- with the confidence that comes with success, the clarity that comes with age and the I-don't-give-a-bleep that comes with freedom -- punches you in the face when he describes his final months atop the college football cesspool.
"The doping, the raping and the shooting," is how he refers to his last few months at Oklahoma, where he was 157-24-1 and won three national championships. He points out with his rebel streak that "the academia, the presidents and the board of regents" always get upset when he describes that time that way, but the descriptions are accurate and efficient, if cold. The people around the library always get a little uncomfortable when the athletic department is unmasked like that and brought out into the light, but Switzer has spent his life around the good and bad of sports. He knows this ugly, beautiful beast. And he cuts to the heart of some issues when he points out that the coach who doesn't loosen his morals is going to lose to the one who does -- or, like Shannon, lose his job.
"Why did you recruit the guy who shot his roommate with a .22?" he begins. "Well, if I hadn't, he would have been playing at Notre Dame, Texas or Texas A&M. He was the No. 1 defensive back in the state. Started as a freshman. He was a great player. Did a dumb-ass act, probably because he was on drugs ..."
On to the raping ...
"The first one, two or three she had sex with, that was OK," Switzer says. "But the fourth or fifth or sixth, she says, 'No,' that becomes rape. She should have never been in the dorms. The guys who brought her in there, they went to prison and served their sentence."
Switzer loses his place.
"Oh, what was the other one?" he asks.
The doping ...
"Oh, Charles Thompson was set up -- great player, great QB -- in an FBI sting. Talked into doing it with a bunch of buddies, thugs that came from high school. Set him up because they were three-time losers and they had a bug on him. Basically, they were trying to get me and my program. He relented after turning them down a dozen times."
A gun. A rape. An FBI sting involving the QB. Makes the $140 Jacory Harris allegedly took in things like cover charges seem monk-like, huh? I marveled at how coldly Switzer described all that chaos.
"You know what?" he said. "I don't answer to a college president and a board of regents. And I don't give a damn what the media thinks. It's great to not have bosses anymore."
Bowden is asked if he ever turned his back on something he shouldn't have.
"I ain't telling," he says through a laugh.
He says it hurts him that Jim Tressel lost his job at Ohio State, but that's what happens when you run on a platform of integrity while surrounded by temptation that is so hard to control.
"I really felt for him," Bowden says. "When something like that comes across, the first thing you think about as coach is, 'Protect the boys.' Just slide it under the table. Just don't tell anybody. But you can't do that. You have to tell your athletic director and president, so they don't get blindsided. Boy, it can sneak up on you if you aren't careful."
How often would Bowden have to go to the compliance office to report rule-breaking on his own school?
"Every week," he said.
But the dollars remain everywhere, and it can get tough to separate the clean from the dirty ones. Bowden bounced all over the country, raising money with speeches, trying to give rich men a lot of access without giving them too much.
He remembers, back at West Virginia, before he was established, a coal miner giving the school hundreds of thousands but then telling Bowden whom to fire and whom to play.
"We raise millions of dollars to pay for athletics," Bowden says. "You always got one guy. He gives $50,000 or $100,000. Now he wants to run the ball club. He wants to put his two cents in. That's who gets you fired."
A knowing laugh from the wild, old legend. Booster gives a lot of money, and he gets very strong.
"If he gets strong enough," Bowden says, "the president might listen to him and not me."
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