IRVING, Texas — When Butch Davis, Mark Richt and Urban Meyer finish banging their heads against the wall, they can find a sympathetic shoulder to cry on in Stillwater, Okla.
Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy still has headaches from his wall mashing over Dez Bryant’s ill-advised pseudo scrape with sports agents a year ago. It merely cost Bryant most of his junior season and the Cowboys arguably the best wide receiver in the country.
“We talked to Dez about 18 months before it ever happened,” Gundy said last week at the Big 12 Conference football preview. “We talked to (offensive tackle) Russell (Okung) too and Russell did fine. He handled it different than Dez did. I think Dez learned a lesson.”
Gundy just hopes the rest of his players did, if not the rest of the country. The scary part? Bryant’s crime wasn’t that bad. He didn’t sign an agreement. He didn’t accept money. He merely lied. He talked to former NFL star Deion Sanders about a potential agent but denied doing so to NCAA investigators.
The truth is the ramifications were massive. Bryant was suspended Oct. 7 for the rest of the season and lasted until the 24th pick in the NFL draft in April. Draft analysts kept mentioning “character issues.”
Meanwhile, Okung waited until after the season to sign with an agent. He went sixth in the draft, to the Seattle Seahawks.
Some agents and players get itchy wallets. Take the recent mess that has entangled North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida. On May 15, San Francisco 49ers running back Frank Gore hosted a party at Club Liv in the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach, Fla.
Among those reportedly attending were North Carolina defensive tackle Marvin Austin, a projected high draft pick last spring who returned for his senior season, and senior Greg Little, the Tar Heels’ leading receiver. Both could be suspended. Also reportedly at the party was A.J. Green, Georgia’s all-SEC receiver.
The NCAA is investigating whether agents, financial advisers or “runners” paid for the trip. The Tar Heels say they did nothing wrong; Green says he has never even been to Miami.
Meanwhile, the NCAA is investigating whether Maurkice Pouncey received $100,000 from an agent while playing for Florida last year, a charge he denies.
The whole spider web moved Alabama coach Nick Saban to say of agents, “How are they any better than a pimp?”
Beebe’s bold idea
During the Big 12 football preview, commissioner Dan Beebe held court and offered a solution. It’s not new. He came up with it 15 years ago as a young Ohio Valley Conference commissioner. But he’s also a former director of NCAA enforcement, so people listened.
Beebe believes players should be able to sign with agents — as long as the agent is also required to sign with the school. If a rule is violated, the agent would face massive financial penalties.
“Say Dennis is a great player and you’re a professor of business and I’m a professor of law,” Beebe said. “Bring your (agents) in and show what they have. I bet the legitimate guys will want it. It takes it out of the dark.”
What more can be done? The NCAA didn’t make it any easier a couple of years ago when it allowed players to talk with agents without signing.
“It’s hard to have a relationship with somebody if you don’t talk to them,” Texas coach Mack Brown said.
The coaches agree the target should be the agents. The NCAA and NFL, coaches say, must join forces again to make an agent’s job more difficult.
“We educate and educate and educate. But if an individual on his own goes behind everyone’s back decides to do something . . . right now, the individual’s punished and the school’s punished but nothing happens to the agent,” Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops said. “Until that (changes), it won’t stop.”
Education ongoing
A problem that didn’t exist 10 years ago is new technology. It’s hard to keep secrets on a practice field, let alone in a high-end nightclub where everyone is brandishing a cellphone camera.
The Tar Heels’ Austin and Little were nabbed in a Twitter photo.
Big 12 schools, other than Oklahoma State, have avoided scandal recently. They have put in the work. Nearly every school has an agents day, when agents are invited to talk to upperclassmen and their parents about the legal issues and dangers.
Texas has 52 players in the NFL. When the ACC and SEC scandals broke, Brown spent nearly two weeks educating his players, families and area high school coaches about agents.
It seems to have worked. All the players interviewed at the Big 12 football preview said they have been contacted. Kansas State’s Daniel Thomas, the Big 12’s leading rusher last year, said he is contacted by five or six agents a day. To no avail.
“For the most part,” Texas A&M quarterback Jerrod Johnson said, “when guys contact you, I say, ‘Look, I’m not interested in talking about it. I’ll get back with you at the end of the season.’ “
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
