Athletic Director's Financial Contributions

Despite the fact that the Graham Plan forbade monetary assistance to players, coaches and/or the athletic director occasionally found ways to help certain players pay for their schooling.  To make a winning team, coaches would often recruit good players who they were well aware would not be able to pay for school.  If a coach found a promising young man who lacked the financial capacity, the coach could locate loans, find contributions from alumni, or even help the player look for a job.  To avoid confrontations about this evasion of the Graham Plan’s policies, this form of monetary aid was rarely discussed publically.  In this excerpt from the hearings, Frank Graham repeatedly questioned Ray Sermon to determine if he ever assisted a player in this format. Sermon defended himself by asserting, in reference to the days before the Graham Plan, that there “was no ruling at that time that we could not help a boy.”  Sermon also emphasized that all of the boys he helped promptly paid him back, thereby arguing that his personal system before the Graham Plan worked out well.