It's not often that these stories make it to the full light of day and shine a light on the dirty business that recruiting can often be..especially in the SEC. However, for those that remember almost 20 years ago the recruitment of Albert Means was well known to folks following these boards back in the day. We all knew his recruitment was dirty as hell and that the figures being thrown around to buy him were substantial. Hell, his high school coach/street agent was even charging big bucks just for a visit.
This is particularly relevant today as other than OU we are primarily competing with SEC schools for a bunch of the top recruits in Texas. Remember, this happened almost 20 years ago....it doesn't take much imagination to realize how much more sophisticated and expensive these games have gotten in the almost 2 decades since Albert Means recruitment.
The Story of Albert Means...
Once upon a time, Alabama dodged the NCAA's biggest bullet: Ron Higgins
Updated Jun 25, 2015; Posted Jun 25, 2015
Would the career path of former LSU and current Alabama football coach Nick Saban have changed if Alabama had been given the death penalty in 2002 by the NCAA?
By Ron Higgins ron_higgins@nola.com,
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
The college football world moves at such a fast pace it's hard to remember what happened a month ago much less last season.
But with last week's announcement that Tom Yeager was retiring as the Colonial Athletic Association commissioner, CBSSports.com columnist Dennis Dodd was able to connect the dots and rewind more than a decade in time.
And it took me back to my incredible front row seat to one of the most blatant cases of cheating in college football recruiting I've ever witnessed.
Thirteen years ago, Yeager was serving as the NCAA infractions committee chairman. The case in front of him was an Alabama booster unabashedly buying the services of Memphis football prospect Albert Means of Trezevant High.
It was a story broken and absolutely owned by an enthusiastic young reporter at The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis named Gary Parrish, now the primary CBSsports.com college basketball columnist.
I also wrote sports for that newspaper for 30 years. Since my desk was practically next to Gary's, I'll never forget the day in January 2001 he revealed to us the jaw-dropping tale told to him by former Trezevant assistant coach Milton Kirk, who wanted to clear his conscience.
Kirk said that he and Trezevant head coach Lynn Lang conspired in 1999 to sell Means, a blue-chip defensive tackle, to the highest bidder. Kirk said that highest bidder was Memphis businessman and Alabama booster Logan Young, and that he paid Lang $200,000 to ensure Means would sign a National Letter of Intent with Alabama in February 2000, which he did.
It was shocking how easy it was to confirm what Kirk alleged. As soon as Gary told us his story, I called then-Arkansas head coach Houston Nutt who tried to recruit Means.
I expected the usual "no comment." Nutt never hesitated confirming it was true.
"Yep, Lynn Lang asked us for $200,000 for Albert Means," Nutt said.
Means never got in shape to play at Alabama. He was released by the school and eventually transferred to the University of Memphis where he got married, developed into an all-conference player in Conference USA as a senior and graduated, eventually earning a Master's degree.
Though others eventually testified that Means was paid $30,000 from Lang's $200,000 asking price, Means always denied that. The only thing Means ever confirmed was Lang had someone else take the ACT for him.
"I didn't have a clue, I was just a guy playing football, running and ripping and trying to make something happen," Means told Memphis TV station WREG in a 2011 interview. "I'm in Alabama then boom! The NCAA wants to talk with you. About what? Then all of this stuff came out and do you know who? I never met this person (Logan Young). That's how I am. I can't believe this. So what am I supposed to do now?"
Adding to all this intrigue is what happened to Young, the Crimson Tide booster who never attended the university yet was passionate about the program after using his wealth to cozy up to late 'Bama coaching legend Bear Bryant.
The school permanently disassociated from Young, stripped him of his $40,000 Bryant-Denny Stadium luxury box and canceled an insurance policy that would have paid $500,000 toward the Bear Bryant Museum on campus upon Young's death.
Young was convicted in federal court on conspiracy to commit racketeering, crossing state lines to commit racketeering, and arranging bank withdrawals to cover up a crime. He was eventually sentenced to six months in jail and was appealing the ruling when in April 2006 he was found dead next to his bed, nude in a pool of blood.
Because of blood throughout the home, it was originally thought to be a homicide. Many people are still convinced Young was murdered because his friends said he never walked around his house nude.
But Memphis police ruled it an accident, explaining that its investigators determined Young tripped while carrying a salad and soft drink up a set of stairs and hit his head on an iron railing.
Investigators said the fall onto the railing opened a large gash across the top of Young's head, causing him to drop to the floor bleeding profusely. After lying on the floor for some time, Young got up and walked bleeding through several rooms of his spacious, two-story house including the kitchen to wash off the blood before ending up in his second-floor bedroom. Young walked past several telephones but didn't place an emergency call before bleeding out.
Parrish's thorough reporting of the Means' situation and other corrupt recruiting in Memphis led to a federal investigation that resulted in indictments of Lang and Kirk. It also resulted in NCAA investigations and sanctions at Alabama and at the University of Kentucky.
Because it was Alabama's fourth case before the NCAA in 14 years, it was a repeat violator that made it eligible for the death penalty that would have shut down the program.
The NCAA has done that only once, at SMU in 1987.
Yeager told Dodd told that Alabama would have gotten the death penalty if it hadn't been for Gene Marsh and Marie Robbins.
Marsh, a prominent attorney, was a University of Alabama law professor and the school's faculty athletics representative. Robbins was the school's compliance director trying to get her arms around the mess.
"Gene and Marie did everything they could, short of patrolling the campus with semi-automatic weapons," Yeager told Dodd. "That, at the end of the day, is what saved them.
"They were (in line for the death penalty). . .to put it real bluntly and try to say that as forcefully as we could."
According to NCAA rules, that's absolutely true. But in the real world where the elite programs rarely get nailed to the cross, no big-name school ever gets fully killed by sanctions to where it never regains its traditional giddy-up.
There's too much TV and bowl money at stake for offenders to receive such bans. Usually, the NCAA will take away some scholarships and official visits.
If a school or some of its boosters want to cheat, it's going to happen and it's untraceable.
A former college head coach once outlined for me the various ways to buy a player. The best and most simple method was 10 to 20 boosters from a certain school mailing a prospect anonymous birthday cards containing a designated amount of cash.
"They'd write in the card 'Happy Birthday' and write something that would let the kid know they wanted him to sign with their school," the coach told me. "Because the cards are anonymous, the kid doesn't know who sent them so he can't give the money back. Hell, it didn't have to be a kid's birthday to send the cards. It was just an untraceable way to buy him."
The point of Dodd's column is what would have happened to Alabama had it received the death penalty in 2002? Would that have affected the career path of Nick Saban, LSU's 2003 national championship winning coach who left after the 2004 season for the NFL's Miami Dolphins? Saban experienced two frustrating seasons with the Dolphins before going to Alabama in 2007 where he has his own statue with perfect hair after winning three national titles in nine years.
Dennis Dodd, I guess we'll never know.
But the one thing I do know is don't count on seeing the death penalty being used to punish any major school, even if a player scoring a touchdown is greeted in the end zone by a mob of boosters showering him with $1,000 bills
This is particularly relevant today as other than OU we are primarily competing with SEC schools for a bunch of the top recruits in Texas. Remember, this happened almost 20 years ago....it doesn't take much imagination to realize how much more sophisticated and expensive these games have gotten in the almost 2 decades since Albert Means recruitment.
The Story of Albert Means...
Once upon a time, Alabama dodged the NCAA's biggest bullet: Ron Higgins
Updated Jun 25, 2015; Posted Jun 25, 2015
Would the career path of former LSU and current Alabama football coach Nick Saban have changed if Alabama had been given the death penalty in 2002 by the NCAA?
By Ron Higgins ron_higgins@nola.com,
NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
The college football world moves at such a fast pace it's hard to remember what happened a month ago much less last season.
But with last week's announcement that Tom Yeager was retiring as the Colonial Athletic Association commissioner, CBSSports.com columnist Dennis Dodd was able to connect the dots and rewind more than a decade in time.
And it took me back to my incredible front row seat to one of the most blatant cases of cheating in college football recruiting I've ever witnessed.
Thirteen years ago, Yeager was serving as the NCAA infractions committee chairman. The case in front of him was an Alabama booster unabashedly buying the services of Memphis football prospect Albert Means of Trezevant High.
It was a story broken and absolutely owned by an enthusiastic young reporter at The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis named Gary Parrish, now the primary CBSsports.com college basketball columnist.
I also wrote sports for that newspaper for 30 years. Since my desk was practically next to Gary's, I'll never forget the day in January 2001 he revealed to us the jaw-dropping tale told to him by former Trezevant assistant coach Milton Kirk, who wanted to clear his conscience.
Kirk said that he and Trezevant head coach Lynn Lang conspired in 1999 to sell Means, a blue-chip defensive tackle, to the highest bidder. Kirk said that highest bidder was Memphis businessman and Alabama booster Logan Young, and that he paid Lang $200,000 to ensure Means would sign a National Letter of Intent with Alabama in February 2000, which he did.
It was shocking how easy it was to confirm what Kirk alleged. As soon as Gary told us his story, I called then-Arkansas head coach Houston Nutt who tried to recruit Means.
I expected the usual "no comment." Nutt never hesitated confirming it was true.
"Yep, Lynn Lang asked us for $200,000 for Albert Means," Nutt said.
Means never got in shape to play at Alabama. He was released by the school and eventually transferred to the University of Memphis where he got married, developed into an all-conference player in Conference USA as a senior and graduated, eventually earning a Master's degree.
Though others eventually testified that Means was paid $30,000 from Lang's $200,000 asking price, Means always denied that. The only thing Means ever confirmed was Lang had someone else take the ACT for him.
"I didn't have a clue, I was just a guy playing football, running and ripping and trying to make something happen," Means told Memphis TV station WREG in a 2011 interview. "I'm in Alabama then boom! The NCAA wants to talk with you. About what? Then all of this stuff came out and do you know who? I never met this person (Logan Young). That's how I am. I can't believe this. So what am I supposed to do now?"
Adding to all this intrigue is what happened to Young, the Crimson Tide booster who never attended the university yet was passionate about the program after using his wealth to cozy up to late 'Bama coaching legend Bear Bryant.
The school permanently disassociated from Young, stripped him of his $40,000 Bryant-Denny Stadium luxury box and canceled an insurance policy that would have paid $500,000 toward the Bear Bryant Museum on campus upon Young's death.
Young was convicted in federal court on conspiracy to commit racketeering, crossing state lines to commit racketeering, and arranging bank withdrawals to cover up a crime. He was eventually sentenced to six months in jail and was appealing the ruling when in April 2006 he was found dead next to his bed, nude in a pool of blood.
Because of blood throughout the home, it was originally thought to be a homicide. Many people are still convinced Young was murdered because his friends said he never walked around his house nude.
But Memphis police ruled it an accident, explaining that its investigators determined Young tripped while carrying a salad and soft drink up a set of stairs and hit his head on an iron railing.
Investigators said the fall onto the railing opened a large gash across the top of Young's head, causing him to drop to the floor bleeding profusely. After lying on the floor for some time, Young got up and walked bleeding through several rooms of his spacious, two-story house including the kitchen to wash off the blood before ending up in his second-floor bedroom. Young walked past several telephones but didn't place an emergency call before bleeding out.
Parrish's thorough reporting of the Means' situation and other corrupt recruiting in Memphis led to a federal investigation that resulted in indictments of Lang and Kirk. It also resulted in NCAA investigations and sanctions at Alabama and at the University of Kentucky.
Because it was Alabama's fourth case before the NCAA in 14 years, it was a repeat violator that made it eligible for the death penalty that would have shut down the program.
The NCAA has done that only once, at SMU in 1987.
Yeager told Dodd told that Alabama would have gotten the death penalty if it hadn't been for Gene Marsh and Marie Robbins.
Marsh, a prominent attorney, was a University of Alabama law professor and the school's faculty athletics representative. Robbins was the school's compliance director trying to get her arms around the mess.
"Gene and Marie did everything they could, short of patrolling the campus with semi-automatic weapons," Yeager told Dodd. "That, at the end of the day, is what saved them.
"They were (in line for the death penalty). . .to put it real bluntly and try to say that as forcefully as we could."
According to NCAA rules, that's absolutely true. But in the real world where the elite programs rarely get nailed to the cross, no big-name school ever gets fully killed by sanctions to where it never regains its traditional giddy-up.
There's too much TV and bowl money at stake for offenders to receive such bans. Usually, the NCAA will take away some scholarships and official visits.
If a school or some of its boosters want to cheat, it's going to happen and it's untraceable.
A former college head coach once outlined for me the various ways to buy a player. The best and most simple method was 10 to 20 boosters from a certain school mailing a prospect anonymous birthday cards containing a designated amount of cash.
"They'd write in the card 'Happy Birthday' and write something that would let the kid know they wanted him to sign with their school," the coach told me. "Because the cards are anonymous, the kid doesn't know who sent them so he can't give the money back. Hell, it didn't have to be a kid's birthday to send the cards. It was just an untraceable way to buy him."
The point of Dodd's column is what would have happened to Alabama had it received the death penalty in 2002? Would that have affected the career path of Nick Saban, LSU's 2003 national championship winning coach who left after the 2004 season for the NFL's Miami Dolphins? Saban experienced two frustrating seasons with the Dolphins before going to Alabama in 2007 where he has his own statue with perfect hair after winning three national titles in nine years.
Dennis Dodd, I guess we'll never know.
But the one thing I do know is don't count on seeing the death penalty being used to punish any major school, even if a player scoring a touchdown is greeted in the end zone by a mob of boosters showering him with $1,000 bills
