35carry their financial weight, which meant coaches needed
to fundraise like never before. Texas athletics might rake in
revenue—$200 million, even in COVID-19-riddled 2019–20,
the most recent year with figures available—but Patterson
emphasized that income from media deals and ticket sales
needed to be augmented by donations. Patterson told SI this
was less about philosophy than economic necessity: His
department was “$15 million in the red” when he started.
Under Dodds, Texas had earmarked $15 million for a
new tennis facility; the old one was to be demolished to
make way for a medical complex. Under Patterson, that
line item was gone. Center recalls the AD saying that if
he wanted a new home for his program, “people needed
to pull out their checkbooks.” He also says Patterson told
him that if he reached $10 million in private donations,
“a shovel would be put in the ground.”
Center says that, grudgingly, he began to court donors.
And he scored an early success when the father of a former
player indicated a willingness to contribute $5 million
toward a new tennis center in exchange for naming rights.
Before the 2014–15 school year, all of UT’s coaches gathered
at Patterson’s home for a kickoff dinner. The university’s
then president, Bill Powers, stood and cited Center by name
for the $5 million donation he was on the verge of clos-
ing. “I was pleased for the recognition,” says Center, “but
thought, Funny, we won the conference and finished in the
top five in the country last season, and I never heard anything
from the administration.” That summer Center received a
new five-year contract. (Patterson says he persuaded the
UT board to give Center a 30% raise in recognition that
the facilities situation had made his job difficult.)
The $5 million gift, however, fell through. Center says
that he felt intense pressure, fearing that if he didn’t raise
the funds he wouldn’t get a new facility, which meant he
wouldn’t get top recruits and then wouldn’t get his next
contract. “There was a naked interest in bringing in dollars,”
Center says. “I was a fundraiser first and a coach second.”
Around that time, in late 2014, Center received a call
from Martin Fox, a longtime tennis coach from Houston
who had entered into the murky world of AAU basketball.
A classic connector, Fox ran a team and steered recruits
to colleges and universities.
Fox asked Center for a favor on behalf of a friend,
Rick Singer. Based in Newport Beach, Calif., Singer ran
a college consultancy business and one client, a wealthy
Silicon Valley private equity titan, Chris Schaepe, had a son
who wanted not only to attend Texas but also to become a
manager on the men’s basketball team. Could Center help get
him admitted under the guise that he was a tennis recruit?
Center recalls being confused. The basketball program
had, as he puts it, “infinitely more juice” than tennis. What’s
more, Schaepe supposedly had Bay Area connections to
Kevin Durant. Why wouldn’t the family lean on Durant,
the most prominent player in Longhorns history, for help?
But Center agreed to entertain the offer. “Special favors,”
he says, “happen all the time in college sports.”nationwide, as determined to maximize revenue as ever,
chug on unbothered. School administrators and athletic
department officials may have written self-flagellating mea
culpas about the “need for better controls.” They may have
vowed to examine the various loopholes for athlete admits.
They may have, rightly, fired coaches—all in nonrevenue
sports—who accepted bribes. But no athletic directors or
school presidents faced job loss, much less criminal charges.
So it is that the ultimate scandal might be this: Nothing
has meaningfully changed. As it stands, Varsity Blues is
like an organized crime dragnet that had the goods on the
low-level crew members. But instead of rolling them up and
going after the capos—and taking down the syndicate—the
feds accepted guilty pleas, held self-congratulatory press
conferences and then headed off to the next case.M
ICHAEL CENTER’S SAGA begins in 2013 when
DeLoss Dodds, UT’s longtime athletic director,
retired. Dodds’s replacement, Steve Patterson, was younger,
slicker and boasted a f lashy résumé that included time
with the Texans, Rockets and Trail Blazers. He’d spent
the last year as AD at Arizona State before hopping to UT.
Patterson concedes that he and his top lieutenant,
Chris Plonsky, made clear: Nonrevenue sports needed toFEBRUARY 2022CENTER COURT
Swarmed by media after being charged,
Center says that when FBI agents arrested
him that day he thought it was a mistake.V
A
R
SI
T
Y(^) B
L
U
E
S