34 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
For
Michael
Center,
2019
was
shaping
up as a
hell of a
year.
has paid a steeper price. Texas had fired him and, within
a year of his players’ triumph, he was serving a six-month
term in a federal prison in Three Rivers, Texas, three hours
south of Austin. On intake, he was put on suicide watch:
His cell contained a concrete bed and a plastic mattress
with a pillow sewn on top. The air conditioning didn’t
work. The lights remained on at all times. “I begged the
guard to place a fan at the bottom of my cell so I could get
some air,” Center says. “The guard told me he didn’t want
another Jeffrey Epstein. I started to cry and thought about
bashing my head against the wall. Then I got COVID.”
For all that, Center says that rock bottom had come months
earlier, in September 2019, when he received an email of a
Texas news release signed by the university’s president. It
stated that an internal Varsity Blues investigation had found
that the coach was solely responsible for any stain on the
school: “Because Center’s conduct was unthinkable in
athletics, the controls in place did not catch his subterfuge.”
Center says he was never contacted for the investigation,
which was performed by the university’s vice president
of legal affairs, not an outside firm. Since the beginning,
the coach has admitted wrongdoing: He had sponsored a
recruit for admission who had no intention of ever playing
on the team. He later took a $100,000 payout. But the idea
that he acted alone? That no one else in the entire athletic
department—a workforce of more than 300, with seven
employees dedicated specifically to “risk management
and compliance services department”—was also at fault?
That others weren’t fully aware that the university was
admitting a nontennis player to play tennis?
“I almost fell out of my chair,” says Center. “I literally
couldn’t breathe. There’s no college coach in America—
much less at a state school, much less a coach of a nonrev-
enue sport—who can admit an athlete without consulting
other people in the athletic department. What they were
asking people to believe, it’s just impossible.” Multiple
coaches at UT—and administrators at other schools—
confirmed this characterization to Sports Illustr ated.
Almost three years on, Varsity Blues triggers more
smirks than outrage. The quintessential American scan-
dal, it combined kids, sports, celebrity, privilege, college
admissions, bribery and schadenfreude. So far, 29 of the
implicated parents—including actors Felicity Huffman and
Lori Loughlin—have been sentenced to a median of two
months in prison and $150,000 f ine (which was less than
half the amount of the median bribe). Their children, often
unaware of the fraud perpetrated on their behalf, were put
through the social media wringer. (Who didn’t giggle at the
fraudulent USC water polo recruit whose backyard pool
image was Photoshopped into a water polo action shot?)
Despite cooperating with the feds, Rick Singer, the chief
architect of the scheme, is awaiting a sentence that could be
as heavy as 65 years in prison. And the world got a glimpse
of the transactional underbelly of college athletics and
admissions, where money and power could buy so much.
Yet the system got off astonishingly easy. Athletic programsAfter almost two decades as the coach of the Texas men’s
tennis program, Center had assembled a team capable of
winning the NCAA title. His two top singles players were
blazingly talented, perhaps the strongest recruits he’d
ever had. All season, the Longhorns thrashed opponents.
On the third Sunday in May the Longhorns would fulfill
their promise, defeating Wake Forest in Orlando to win
their first national championship in the program’s 73-year
history. Center watched the matches with pride, wearing his
trademark burnt-orange T-shirt and a considerable smile.
But as a dogpile ensued on the court, Center was home on
the couch, suddenly in tears and unsure how to feel. “It was
a dream day,” he recalls, “and it was also one of the most
difficult moments of my life.” It didn’t help that ESPN’s
broadcasters had referred to Center as “a distraction.”
When the team FaceTimed him an hour later, he fumbled
through a few words of praise and then cried again.
Center was one of the nine college coaches sentenced
in Operation Varsity Blues, the 2019 college admissions
bribery scandal. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone whoBOB (^) D
AE
MM
RIC
H/
ZU
MA
(^) PR
ES
S (^) W
IRE