The Hard Knock on Rick Neuheisel

On a winter night in Houston six years ago, college football coach Rick Neuheisel steered his rental car to the curb and placed a cell phone call to a house across the street. When a young man answered, he asked the kid to open the front door and look outside. This was the cutthroat business of recruiting, an annual rite by which coaches scramble to restock their teams with talent from high schools nationwide. The kid in the doorway was good enough to have received offers from other universities. Neuheisel wanted to impress, to set himself apart from the other suitors.

To that point, Neuheisel's life had seemed charmed. An unheralded quarterback at UCLA, he had come off the bench in his senior year to guide the Bruins to victory in the 1984 Rose Bowl. His rise through the coaching ranks had been equally improbable, blurry-fast, landing him as head coach at the University of Colorado by age 33. Blond and baby-faced, a guy who liked to play guitar, he had basked in the spotlight. From the start, his teams had been winners.

That night in Houston, in January 1997, Neuheisel knew that one of the myriad rules set down by the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. to govern recruiting forbade him from visiting the athlete personally. To violate such a rule would be no small matter, not when the game had become big business and millions of dollars could ride on each victory.

So Neuheisel sat 15 yards away and chatted by phone.

"It's difficult to say we were within eyeshot," he told NCAA investigators reviewing his conduct a few years later. "It was after daylight savings time. So it was dark. I looked at the rule and I thought it would be permissible because it was a telephone call." Investigators suggested otherwise, counting the incident among others in which Neuheisel had crossed the line. The NCAA placed Colorado on two years' probation.

But by that time, Neuheisel was long gone. He had left Colorado in 1999 for a million-dollar contract at the University of Washington, where the golden boy kept winning games and--despite warnings from people around him--kept testing and stretching the rules.

Until it all caught up with him this summer. In a move as swift as it was stunning, University of Washington administrators fired Neuheisel "for just cause," citing a series of transgressions that occurred during his four years on the Seattle campus. The university also moved quickly to replace him as the Huskies prepared for this Saturday's opening game against the defending national champions, Ohio State University.