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The recruitment of the nation’s top high school football player, tailback Bryce Brown, has been so intense that he left town to escape the hoopla surrounding Wednesday’s national signing day. He may wait a month before deciding whether to join his brother, Arthur, a linebacker at the University of Miami, or go elsewhere.
Sharing the spotlight and the drama of the decision is Brian Butler, who identifies himself as the Brown brothers’ trainer and manager. To get to Bryce Brown, coaches must go through Butler. He handles Brown’s workouts, recruiting and news media requests.
On a Web site, Butler sells updates of Brown’s recruitment for $9.99 a month or $59 a year. He also seeks contributions that he says are used to take players on a tour of colleges each summer.
Butler, a former rapper and cellphone call-center manager, is among a new breed of entrepreneurs inserting themselves into college football recruiting. Some say he is navigating gray areas of N.C.A.A. rules and brokering his clients’ futures for personal gain. Others say he is providing his clients with exposure they would not normally receive by leveraging connections he has made during the recruitment of the Brown brothers to create a market for lesser players.
Butler encouraged Huldon Tharp, a linebacker he trains, to spread word that he got a scholarship offer from Miami to raise his recruiting profile. A Miami spokesman, who checked with Hurricanes Coach Randy Shannon, said that the Hurricanes did not offer Tharp a scholarship or seriously recruit him.
Butler’s efforts are not even limited to the realm of college athletics. He said that he was considering having Bryce Brown skip college and play in the Canadian Football League.
"I’m doing a dang good job," Butler said. "I know that I’m the most connected guy in Wichita and probably in Kansas. Probably in the Midwest, and let some people tell, probably in the dang nation when it comes to high school recruiting."
In his representation of about 30 players from around Kansas, Butler has upset many local high school coaches. They say he persuades players to skip school-organized summer workouts in favor of his own
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an assertion Butler denies. Coach Brian Byers of Wichita East High School said he suspected Butler of telling the Brown brothers to "shut it down" in games once they piled up big statistics.
Byers, who has coached football for 30 years, described Butler’s philosophy this way: "It’s all about me, me, me. That’s not what football is about. We’re a proven fact. We had supposedly the best football player in the country in high school, and we went 6-3. We didn’t have a team because of that."
Intermediaries have long operated in college basketball. The N.C.A.A. is essentially powerless to patrol the actions of third parties, and officials would not comment specifically on Butler. But he is viewed as part of an emerging trend.
"It wouldn’t surprise me that we’re seeing a little bit more of that in football," said Kevin Lennon, the N.C.A.A.’s vice president.
Asked how Butler handles his recruiting, Bryce Brown said: "I don’t really tell him to do anything. It’s just kind of what he does. He asks me my input on things. It’s all about us and how we feel."
Rise to Prominence
The Brown brothers’ talent helped Butler, a 33-year-old father of five, rise from local trainer to national recruiting figure.
In the spring of 2007, Butler organized a showcase workout for Wichita area players, headlined by the brothers and sponsored at the last minute by Nike. Southern California Coach Pete Carroll, Florida Coach Urban Meyer and Oklahoma Coach Bob Stoops found their way here.
"It was like the Mount Rushmore of college coaches," said Tom Audley, the head coach at Andover Central High School, which is east of Wichita.
Within months, Butler filed paperwork in Kansas to establish a recruiting business, L.I.F.E. Training L.L.C., and a nonprofit organization, Potential Players Foundation. The Brown brothers’ father, Arthur Brown Sr., is one of the foundation’s board members.
"I’ve been supporting Brian in what he’s doing," said Brown Sr., 46, who works for an aircraft manufacturer. "He’s trying to help as many young people as he possibly can."
Butler left his $65,000-a-year job as the manager of a cellphone call center to work with high school players full time in January 2008. He charges from $70 to $200 a month for training sessions and $450 a player for recruiting consulting services. Butler said he has made less than $200 selling the online recruiting subscriptions.
Many people in college football question whether it is ethical for recruiting advisers to sell information on their players.
"We’ve got to the point where a handler or a street agent starts a Web site to charge money for an update," said Tom Luginbill, the national recruiting director for ESPN and Scouts Inc. "I’m not in line with that. I think that is a precedent that could become very scary and very ugly."
Bryce Brown, who graduated from Wichita East a semester early, said he did not mind that Butler was trying to profit from their relationship.
"If there’s anybody that needs to be making money off of me, it needs to be the person that’s put the time in," he said.
Before Butler ended up in the BlackBerrys of college coaches around the country, he struggled for years searching for the spotlight. He attended three colleges
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Fort Hays State University, Butler Community College and Kansas State. He played football at Fort Hays and Butler Community College.
At 5 feet 8 inches and 350 pounds, he was known as Big B during his rap career. He said he once opened for Ludacris during a tour stop at Kansas Coliseum, although that could not be verified. He has worked numerous jobs, including as a telemarketer and as an employee at a liquor store.
Money has long been an issue, he said, and he has spent years fending off bill collectors. In 1997, he was arrested in a forgery case and pleaded guilty to a felony charge, which he said had since been expunged from his record. A state tax warrant was filed last year for his failure to pay $983.75, which Butler said he had since settled.
He said he has never asked a coach or a university for money, but he also said he did not vet every donor to his nonprofit organization.
At one point, Butler said, Ron Prince, then the coach at Kansas State, discouraged his program’s boosters from donating to Butler’s foundation. A booster’s donation with the hopes of luring a recruit would be an N.C.A.A. violation.
"Recruiting for college football is obviously changing," Prince said in a telephone interview. "It’s become much more like the basketball model. When that happens, you then have people who are intermediaries like this gentleman is."
Prince had little success recruiting Butler’s players. He lost his job last season, and Bryce Brown has since begun to consider attending Kansas State.
"He was basically telling those people don’t support my program," Butler said of Prince. "Making sure the boosters don’t come in and support my program."
At a high school game in October 2007, Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator, Kevin Wilson, and defensive coordinator, Brent Venables, sat in the stands watching Bryce Brown play.
Byers, who coached the brothers at Wichita East, said Wilson later told him about a conversation he had that night with Venables.
"Hey, we’ve really got a shot
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we’ve really got a shot at these guys," Venables told Wilson, speaking about the Brown brothers.
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