Who's Corrupt USC Football or NCAA: Reggie Bush Scandal

Imagine a time when Los Angeles greatest football team was the College of USC, dominating on the field, celebrity sidings everywhere, and Reggie Bush electrifying crowds, and winning the Heisman Trophy. They were the pinnacle of Southern California football. But behind that glory was a storm brewing where allegations of impermissible benefits were threatening to tear down not only star player Reggie Bush, but the entire football program and changed the college football landscape. Join us as we dive into one of the most dramatic scandals in college football. As on June tenth, twenty ten, the NCAA laid down sanctions to USC due to lack of institutional controls that would change USC and Reggie Bush's life today. On Daily Sports History, Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm Ethan Reyes, your guide as you daily learn more about sports history, increasing your sports knowledge as we dive into the NCAA sanctions against USC and Reggie Bush. So first we need to figure out how USC got so good. I mean, they were great back in the day, with a couple of great running backs in Oorthol James Simpson and Marcus Allen. But they had some struggles in the nineties and their rivals they were doing better in the nineties, but they hired a guy, Pete Carroll, who used to coach in the NFL, and he started to turn things around. In his first season in two thousand and one, they got off to a rocky start, going four to one, but they rallied towards the end, finishing six and six, good enough for a bowl game, and they defeated their arch rivals UCLA twenty seven to zero, and by the next year USC was showing signs of being a contender again. They went eleven and two in their conference, the Pack ten and be Iowa in the Orange Bowl, which at the time was one of the BCS Bowl. Now, if you don't remember what the BCS is, it was a terrible system, using computers and statistics to decide who we play for the national championship, and you only had to choose between two teams. There was no playoff, and they had other bowl games that were considered BCS Bowls that were popular but still wouldn't give you a championship. It was a bad system, but sadly it was better than what we had before before the BCS. It was just newspapers deciding who the national championship was. So we've gotten better. But that year they finished fourth in the nation and would lead the Pack ten in both offense and defense and had a Heisman Trophy winner in Carson Palmer, and this would lead to their greatest stretch in years. They won seven consecutive Pack ten titles and would appear in seven consecutive BCS Bowls, including two championship games, dominating the two thousand and five game versus Oklahoma fifty five to nineteen, anticipating in argument, one of the best college football games ever against Texas in the two thousand and six Rose Bowl. Pete Carroll led his teams to eleven wins every season from two thousand and two to two thousand and eight and also had a thirty three week span as the number one team in the nation and would finish in the top four for seven straight seasons and produced two more Heisman Trophy winners Matt Liner and Reggie Bush, as well as having twenty five All Americans, fifty three draft picks, and fourteen that would be first round picks in the NFL Draft. And during this time he had Pete Carroll had doubled the athletic department's revenue from just over thirty five million dollars when he first showed up to over seventy six million dollars by two thousand and eight, more than double. He was charismatic, fans loved him, and they were a powerhouse. They were the biggest game in town. As during this time, Los Angeles did not have professional football. This was the closest they could get. So celebrities would show up, and they had great media coverage because LA is one of the top media markets. But how did they become so good so fast? They struggled for years? What changed? Well, in two thousand and six, media outlets started to come out that Reggie Bush's mother, stepfather, and brother were living rep free in a house in San Diego and a sports marketer named Michaels Are you serious, he's a double namer. That's a big red flag, right. But it was at the time improper for student athletes in their families to accept extra benefits other than a scholarship while they were a student athlete, whether from agents, marketers, or boosters. So this family having a free home would be an improper benefit. So the PAC twelve and USC launched investigations into it, and it came out later that even his running back coach Todd McNair was aware of this situation. And in April two thousand and five, Bush reportedly settled with Michael Michaels for around two hundred to three hundred thousand dollars, but there was still an investigation going on. Even though Reggie Bush no longer played for USC, he was now in the NFL. Then in November, Lloyd Lakes, a former partner of Michaels, sued the Bush family to recover almost three hundred thousand dollars in alleged cash and gifts, and he agreed to cooperate with the NCAA investigation into the matter. Well. At the same time, USC basketball was being investigated as well for improper venefts given to Old J Mayo, who was one of the top recruits at the time. And so they combined these two investigations to the football team and the basketball team into just a USC athletics department investigation. And after all their investigating and what's going on, and this was a roughly four year investigation a long time, they imposed one of the harshest penalties besides to the death penalty that was imposed to SMU back in the eighties due to lack of institutional control, which is one of the worst sanctions they can give down. Now understand, NCUBA is not lawmakers. They're not real courts. They don't have a judge and lawyers. There are lawyers and judges involved, but they're not a government body. There's not a court system. They make up things. To be part of the NCAA, you have to be a member, and when you're a member, you have to adhere to certain rules, but they're allowed to be kind of willy nilly with the way they impose their rules, not always the same. Some programs such as Miami back in the day, had seemingly worse institutional control and didn't get the penalties that USC did. The penalties that USC got were a two year postseason ban, which is a lot of revenue that come postseason ban in football ten in twenty eleven, and this is one of the major revenues for college football teams at the time, were their bowl games that they got to play, and a four year probation area period where they were limited and had to communicate with the NCAA. Even more than normal, and then they had to vacate all the wins from two thousand and four to two thousand and five, including their two thousand and four national championship and the twelve wins in the Reggie Bush Heisman season that were vacated. They also took away thirty scholarships during the next three years, so ten per year, eliminating the roster down from eighty five scholarship players to seventy five. And it makes it very hard to recruit and continue to be on top of the college football world. And they had to disassociate themselves from Reggie Bush for ten years, basically being an ex girlfriend, like, don't talk about him, don't want to see him, don't mention him, I don't want anything involved with Reggie Bush to be on campus. That's exactly what it was for ten years. Then they put a show cause penalty on Todd McNair for one year, which really limited his ability to coach because when you have to show cause, you have to make a real reason why you're gonna hire Todd McNair over someone else to the NCAA, and that makes it very hard for Todd to get a job. So it's not good for him, and they also required USC to return money. So it's a harsh penalty. Lots of money involved, lots of players involved. And I think the worst part about it is Pete Carroll, the coach, the mastermind of all this, left months before the penalties were coming down. Likely knew their penalties coming and that USC would be damaged, but he could leave and none of that would come on him. It was his team. He was doing everything, He knew everything, because let's be honest, as a head coach, you're gonna know if these kind of things were happening, like you're gonna get this great player. How do we get this great player? How do we go from being a bad team to a good team so quickly? Well, there's probably something else going on. And even though he was charming, he knew about it. And he has had no repercussions, nothing taken away from him other than his win total in college. What does that mean to him? He still made millions while coaching USC, and continued to make millions coaching the Seattle Seahawks. So it's sad. What's even sadder is that some of the stuff in the investigation later came out that the NCLA was also paying people to testify for them and paying people to testify against USC, and having people that headed the investigation be removed because of improper benefits they were receiving. So was this on the up and up? Probably on both ends not, but it still said it shockwaves through college football at the time. Lane Kiffin, who was the offensive coordinator at USC during Pete Carroll's last run, would take over the team and he would have them a respectable team. They would win ten win seasons in twenty eleven and twenty thirteen, but they weren't pushing for a championship and the reportation had been damaged. As time went on, less players would want to come knowing that there was issues to go there. And also ENCAA allowed any player on the team when the band came to transfer, and at this time when he transferred, normally you had to wait a year before you could play, but this allowed them to transfer more like today where you could just transfer wherever you want and play right away. One other thing that happened that was not the ncublela's doing, kind of was the trust of the Heisman Trophy, the people that vote on it and maintain the Trophy ceremony and everything like that. They voted to remove Reggie Bush, and Reggie Bush decided to give them back the Heisman Trophy and still the only Heisman Trophy that's ever been returned and left vacant. They did offer it to the runner up, Vince Young of Texas, but he declined to take it, so there's no winner for the two thousand and five Heisman Trophy, which is kind of sad because he didn't cheat on the field, but it's distain on his career. He has since sued the NCAA and the Heisman Trust due to defamation, and since the things that have transpired since twenty ten, how we have opened up paying for players and the benefits that can receive and using their name, image and likeness, it's hard for the NCAA to have a late to stand on. This was really catalyst to that program, showing like these people need to be able to make money off who they are. Sadly, that's how it goes with these top end programs, and it wasn't just Reggie Bush. USC has not been the same since they've gone through a lot of different coaches and they've just not been able to reach that mountain top, similar to before Pete Carroll got there. And this happens a lot. When you get sanctions from the NCAA. It makes it difficult to run your program. You have a lot more checks and balances, but it makes it hard to come back. And another reason that becomes hard is the NFL moved two teams to Los Angeles pretty recently and USC is not the main player in town. Celebrities have other football games to go to. They don't just have to go to USC, and so they kind of lost their mantle as the quote football team of LA and that really hindered their profile and as high profile and in college football has changed so much in the fifteen years since they released these sanctions in the twenty years since Reggie Bush was on the team, But the NCAA wanted to make an example out of USC, and they did not like USC as they were like a pro team in college not that they were paying all their players, but that they had a huge market they were getting. They literally had coverage that no other team could have, They had celebrities that no other team had, and it made it very difficult for other teams to compete. And using that seemed like unfair advantage, but you couldn't police that, so they used these sanctions as much as they could to police it. The question is was it fair? I mean, the NCAA doesn't care about fairness. N CUBLEA really on its last leg now and because of issues like this, not really running a fair program, being willy nilly and how you give out your sanctions, and that makes it hard. The question is will USC ever get back to what they were back in the early two thousands. I want to thank you for listening to today's Daily Sports History. If you enjoyed this, please make sure you like and subscribe wherever you're listening. That way you don't miss a single episode, and come back again for more Daily Sports History.