Caught In The Net

Late on the first afternoon in May, Michigan State basketball coach Tom Izzo went from work to Crunchy's, a popular student hangout near the sprawling East Lansing campus. He had been invited there by the two full-time secretaries in the Spartans' basketball office, who told him that they were sending off three graduating student assistant-secretaries with "a burger and a beer." Izzo says he hasn't had a drink in public since former Michigan football coach Gary Moeller's job-costing drunken meltdown at a suburban Detroit restaurant in 1995, and on this day as he snagged assistant coach Doug Wojcik on the way to Crunchy's, he planned only to mingle briefly and pick up the secretaries' tab. Upon entering the bar, to make clear his harmless intentions, Izzo loudly ordered a Coke, in a clear, no-nonsense glass.

As he nursed his soda pop, embarrassing soap operas were unfolding in college towns much like his own, and the careers of Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy and Alabama football coach Mike Price hung in the balance. Both men had been caught in compromising situations—Eustachy holding a beer and kissing coeds at a student party in Columbia, Mo.; Price throwing around money at a strip club in Pensacola, Fla.—that would ultimately cost them their jobs. Both had been initially outed by the intrepid and seemingly all-seeing eyes of the Internet, and now Izzo found himself in a rollicking watering hole packed with students, each of them a potential cyberspace snoop.

"I'm standing by the bar," says Izzo, "and this girl comes up and says, 'Coach, can I get a picture with you?' She's got a beer in her hand, and I say, 'You know what? I can't do that.' Eustachy's picture is on the TV right behind me. Honest to God. So you know what the girl says to me? 'People told me you were a good guy. You think you're so big you can't take a picture with me?' So I say to my secretary, Beth [Marinez], 'We're going to take some pictures. Just keep the beer out.' So Beth holds the girl's beer and we take the picture. Then some girls from the nursing school come over. There's like eight of them, and they want to take a picture. I've done that 100 times, but now I'm sitting there, freaking paranoid.

"What about the person sitting there [in the bar] saying, 'Hmm, there's Tom Izzo.' He could paint the picture completely differently. ' Izzo was in there drinking'—without saying what I was drinking—'with girls all over him.' How many times has a girl leaned over and kissed me on the cheek while getting a picture? That's happened 50 times. Now if that happened? I'd be paranoid. Now I'll probably go out a quarter of what I usually do [ Izzo is known largely as a homebody], and I'll become more separated from the public than I already am. It's that bad."

Izzo's behavior was innocent and Eustachy's decidedly less so, but both men live under the same microscope. Indeed, the high and mighty of college sports have entered a new world. Big Brother is watching. Probably Little Brother too, and maybe the whole damn family, given that millions of Americans have digital cameras and almost everyone has Internet access. Coaches are subjected daily to trial by truth or by rumor or even by lie. There was a time when the coach and the star player had the run of towns like Ames and East Lansing and Tuscaloosa—and a hundred others like them from Tempe to Tallahassee—but a generation of journalists hatched in the post-Watergate era changed all that, and in the last half-dozen years websites have brought a startling new level of scrutiny. "You can't go anywhere or do anything and expect not to be seen, because everybody is a reporter now," says Steve Patterson, 36, who operates ugaports.com, a website devoted to the coverage of University of Georgia sports that features The Dawgvent, a message board that attracts several thousand posts a day.

"I am a Missouri fan," says Nick Witthaus, 32, who owns and runs tigerboard.com, a Missouri fan site. "If a person is doing something that's going to bring down or embarrass our programs, I'm going to write about it." Mainstream media, SI included, often monitor website message boards to take the public's pulse and, in some cases, look for news tips. Many college coaches also monitor the boards, or have underlings do so, trying to stay in front of the latest gossip about their teams or their lives.

Most schools operate athletic department websites, largely vanilla pages with schedules, statistics, game stories and links. The fun begins outside the boundaries of these sites, as hundreds of other sites feed the appetites of fans hungry for news and rumors. Pvivals.com, a company based in Brentwood, Tenn., operates 83 sites devoted to college sports programs; Thelnsiders.com, located in Seattle, runs 87 such sites. There are countless other independent websites, ranging from the ambitious to the nearly invisible. A big-time school generating fewer than three unofficial websites is rare. Most of these sites offer the same type of material that is available on an athletic department site, but their nerve center is the message board, where fans can anonymously vent. Filling an apparent need first brought to light by sports radio in the '80s and '90s, message boards are the Cheers of the new millennium, except that nobody knows your name, unless your name really is GatorHater358.

In the vast, murky Internet universe, it is impossible to accurately measure the populace of fan websites. Volquest.com, a Tennessee fan site owned by Rivals.com and operated by 28-year-old former talk radio reporter Brent Hubbs, has approximately 2,000 subscribers who pay a monthly fee (either $6.95 or $9.95) to access premium services. Yet other parts of the website can be accessed for free, and volquest.com averages, according to Hubbs, more than 250,000 page views every day and more than one million on national football signing day in early February. Alabama fan site tiderinsider.com has between 4,500 and 5,000 subscribers, according to its owner, Rodney Orr. During the unfolding of the Price scandal, and in the midst of former football coach Dennis Franchione's sudden departure to Texas A&M in December, the site was getting more than 10,000 message postings a day.

Whether the sites are driven by small groups of shut-in fanatics or a full spectrum of the public is also unclear. "I've got 15,000 registered names on The Dawgvent," says Patterson. "I know for a fact that they include Georgia boosters with money and influence, people in the athletic department, truck drivers and high school kids. And that 15,000 doesn't include lurkers, who are just reading but not posting." On a given day, however, many message boards are filled repeatedly by no more than a few dozen tireless posters.

Regardless, there is little doubt that fan websites are breaking—and making—news and dramatically reshaping the relationship between college coaches (and their players) and the public. Witthaus says that photos of Eustachy's partying at Missouri were posted on tigerboard.com some three months before similar pictures were published in The Des Moines Register. Rumors hinting at Price's adventures in Pensacola were posted first on a message board at an Auburn website, autigers.com, and, according to Patterson, word quickly spread to Dawgvent and other sites around the Southeastern Conference, several days before the story went mainstream. Late last winter news of the deteriorating relations between then North Carolina basketball coach Matt Doherty and his players seeped out on insidecarolina.com.