'We are what we drive': How car dealers became college football's power brokers

CHRISTOPHER LATE COMES from a long line of Texas car dealers. His grandfather owned Broncho Chevy in Odessa. His grandfather's brother, Frank Late, who owned Late Chevrolet in Dallas, became one of the southwest's largest auto magnates. Christopher's dad, Steve Late, was a BMW dealer in Austin.

Christopher, whose Vanguard Auto Group consists of five dealerships, also comes from a long line of Longhorns and has built on another family tradition. His dad was an instrumental figure in starting the Big Wheels program at UT, where car dealers provided vehicles for coaches to drive so they could hit the recruiting trail in style.

But Christopher, part of the new generation of Texas car dealers, doesn't need coaches to recruit for the Longhorns anymore. Because of NIL, he's now the biggest of the Big Wheels.

In 2021, Late got a call from Scott Freeman, an old college buddy involved with the Texas One Fund, the Longhorns' NIL collective, on the heels of a 5-7 season. Quinn Ewers, a former No. 1 overall recruit who was once committed to Texas before signing with Ohio State, was entering the transfer portal and Texas needed Late's help in getting him to Austin.

Ewers, who skipped his senior year of high school to go to Columbus and sign NIL deals worth a reported $1.3 million before he ever played a snap of college football, played sparingly his freshman year and decided to transfer. He even made a video turning in his keys to his lifted, supercharged Ford F250 Tremor to the dealer that signed him out of high school.

Hard not to think of what could have been... now they are just memories... ��. Thanks Quinn for everything, it was a fun few months, best of luck in Texas! Now Go Bucks! @QuinnEwers @ricart #NoLongerPoweredByRicart pic.twitter.com/JbWKUMScpY

- Rick Ricart ������ (@RickRicart) December 10, 2021

Knowing that Ohio State NIL deal was now part of the expectation for Ewers, Freeman asked if Late could step in and get him the car of his dreams and get Ewers to Texas.

"Sure, that's easy," Late replied. He reached out, asked what Ewers wanted and made it happen. "He was dead-set on a Corvette: black exterior, red interior," Late said. "I met him up at Austin Country Club and presented him his car."

There has always been a mystique around cars in college football. Before NIL, there were whispers, message-board postings and social media photos soft-pedaling accusations of underhanded dealings by boosters.

Paparazzi-style photos appeared in the newspaper, like in 1979, when future SMU Pony Express (and Excess) star Eric Dickerson's gold Trans Am made national news and became the most famous car in college football history, right up there with the Ramblin' Wreck of Georgia Tech.

But now, there are thousands of Eric Dickersons. Players legally pose with their new sports car on a dealer's Facebook page. While it takes some of the cool factor out of the old days, it's a natural evolution for the combination of sports and commerce. And a Pontiac seems downright quaint in retrospect. Across the country, major college football parking lots might as well be outside the Chateau Marmont.

"Historically, we are what we drive," said Dr. John Heitmann, a Dayton professor who lectures on the history of automobiles and pop culture. "These are athletes at the highest level. These cars are often lean and fast -- a Mercedes, Porsche, a Lamborghini, that's what they are. If they're a lineman, give 'em an SUV or a truck or something. Athletes have always been very good advertising for top-end cars."

And car dealers have always been some of college football's biggest and proudest boosters. In Texas, there are 13 Division I football schools and about 1,400 franchised new car dealerships, many of them run by real-life versions of Buddy Garrity, the president of the booster club in "Friday Night Lights." And their supplies far outstretch the demand.

Late said that since he handed Ewers the keys to that black Corvette, he has signed 27 Texas players to NIL deals including some of the Longhorns' biggest stars like Roschon Johnson, Jaylan Ford, T'Vondre Sweat, Kelvin Banks Jr., Colin Simmons, Anthony Hill Jr., Matthew Golden, Ryan Wingo, Malik Muhammad and DeAndre Moore Jr.

He gives the player a price range and asks them what they want, then looks to used car auctions if it's not a model he sells. That includes Ewers, who eventually decided the Corvette was giving him back issues.

He couldn't abide that with his QB1, so he asked Ewers what else he'd like. "How about a Porsche Cayenne GTS?" said Ewers. Done.

For Late, it's a win-win. His sons, 5 and 7, get to hang out with players when they come to his house on Sundays for dinner and tell stories about the games. They get sideline passes and build relationships with players and coaches that he hopes will become longtime customers.

"I really wasn't doing it as a moneymaking scheme," Late said. "It was really to help the university and get Texas kickstarted and help get some good players here. But after about three or four years, we're finally starting to get some turn where friends and families of these players, they'll call the dealership and we'll help sell 'em cars. And then the players after they leave Texas, they call me to sell them cars because they trust that I'll take care of 'em."

Along the way, the Longhorns, behind those stars, improved from 5-7 to 8-5, followed by a Big 12 title and two straight College Football Playoff semifinal appearances.

"It's pretty neat," Late said, "to think that I had a little bit of something to do with getting the program recharged."

SOME OF TEXAS' most legendary characters made their names, reputations and fortunes in the car business, and they were often willing to lay all of that on the line to help their alma maters.

W.O. Bankston, who died in 1993, was the most colorful. After arriving in Dallas in 1932 on a train with no job and 18 cents to his name, he eventually opened his own dealership in 1938. He believed in doing things by his own rules, like when he hired a former contemporary of Bonnie and Clyde's who escaped from Alcatraz to be his dealership's night watchman, then helped get him pardoned with the assistance of then-senator Lyndon B. Johnson.

Bankston, who provided cars for the Dallas Cowboys, was a Nissan dealer in the 1980s when they were some of the most popular cars for football players, akin to the Dodge Charger today.

"W.O. was a guy who made and lost many fortunes in the car business, in real estate and banking, but he was always extremely generous and he didn't necessarily always abide by the laws that he didn't think were fair," said Bill Wolters, the executive director of the Texas Automobile Dealers Association for 40 years. "He thought it was very fair for him to help SMU football by providing the players with new cars. In the days of the Pony Express, the SMU football parking lot looked like W.O.'s front line."

"They help me with my tickets, and I help them with their cars," he once told The Washington Post. "That's the way it is in Texas."

In the pre-NIL days, car dealers were often among the fixers, the go-to guys who could make or break deals to get a player in their uniforms. They closed deals all day long, and their buyers were never more eager than when a star recruit wanted a specific model.

"A car is is rolling status, Heitmann said. "For that age where a normal kid is just struggling to get a halfway decent car, these guys are on the top of the hill. They don't need a Rolex. This is what they need."

And it doesn't hurt business if thousands of alums know they're the ones supporting their team. In a line of work where the product is the same, it's name and reputation that gives dealers an advantage over their competitors. That's why dealers will pay to have their names adorn video boards at high school stadiums, provide convertibles for parades, vans for youth sports trips and are almost always sponsors of the local college program, no matter if it's junior college, small college, or at Texas or A&M, whether they're an alum or not. The end zone clubs at the state's two largest stadiums -- Kyle Field in College Station and Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin -- are both named for car dealers.

"That's just who they are and what they do," said Wolters, who compiled an extensive research on the family legacies of the car business in the state. "Dealers in virtually every town are either involved with high school or college football, our principal sport for 100 years. To me, the most important institutions in any community are churches, schools and car dealers."

In Kilgore, Texas, Bill Wilson owned the Pontiac-Buick-GMC dealership on the main highway in the town of 11,000. He was the mayor, president of the chamber of commerce, and on seemingly every board in town. He was a TADA president. He was also my dad.

He grew up poor and didn't graduate from college, but fell in love with Texas A&M and became a member of the Aggie Wheels Team, providing a car for an assistant coach to drive, which then-coach R.C. Slocum said was essentially a way to give a coach a raise without costing the university money.

Dad generally provided modest cars -- an assistant coach once refused to drive the sensible $18,000 Buick Century he sent to College Station. After a certain number of miles, A&M would return the car, and he'd sell it as a "demo," short for "demonstrator" in car business terms, where the manufacturer would provide an allowance to the dealer to cover the discount for the car having mileage on it, all in the name of getting more of their models on the road. In return, he got premium game tickets and a road trip to an away game with the team in return. He felt like a big shot even though the whole endeavor didn't really cost him anything.

So then, he wasn't exactly Red McCombs, but no one was. In the 1960s, McCombs became one of the largest car dealers in the country from his home base in San Antonio, a colorful character whose net worth was estimated at $1.7 billion in 2022 by Forbes, and who at one point owned the sixth-largest dealer group in the country, along with the San Antonio Spurs (twice), the Denver Nuggets and the Minnesota Vikings at various points.

"I'm big and I live big," said McCombs, who wrote a book titled "The Red Zone: Cars, Cows, and Coaches  -- The Life and Good Times of Texas Dealmaker." "I enjoy people, and I don't mind crowds. When I'm in a good mood, the normal force of my voice can frighten the birds off of tall trees."

He was a giant for a generation of donors who demanded their voice be heard in their school's programs. When Texas hired Charlie Strong in 2014, McCombs famously recoiled and came under fire for his comments on his lack of involvement in the process after lobbying for Jon Gruden's hire.

"I think it is a kick in the face," McCombs said in a radio interview. "We have boosters that have a lot of knowledge about the game. When we decided to go get Mack [Brown] -- from the time we decided to go get Mack to about 30 hours later to have a press conference here and it was done -- we had a lot of input."

McCombs also criticized the hiring of Strong, who had been the head coach at Louisville and would be Texas' first Black football coach. "I don't have any doubt that Charlie is a fine coach," McCombs said. "I think he would make a great position coach, maybe a coordinator."

He later apologized to Strong and told the San Antonio Express-News that he was troubled by the perception that his comments were race-based.

"I'm not sure I knew anything about the race issue until it was broadcast like that," he said. "I didn't even think about that."

McCombs, who died in 2023, donated $50 million toward what's now known as the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas in 2000 and $3 million in 1997, the largest collegiate women's sports donation in American history at the time, to fund UT's softball stadium, Red & Charline McCombs Field. In 2008, the Red McCombs Red Zone, with club level seating, was completed in the north end zone at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. He also played a pivotal role in the creation of the Alamodome in San Antonio, home to UTSA football.

Each school has their own version of McCombs. They're used to success in their own lives, and they will do whatever it takes to make their alma maters a success, too. And their money often gives them access to the input that they crave.

At A&M, the Bernard C. Richardson Zone was named after the school received a $6 million donation from Richardson, an Aggie who built Richardson Chevrolet in Houston into the largest Chevy dealership in the United States. J.L. Huffines, an Aggie who owned six auto dealerships in the Dallas area and was once a part-owner of the Dallas Cowboys, provided an endowment for the Sydney and J.L. Huffines Institute for Sports Medicine and Human Performance at A&M, which also works with the athletic programs.

Carl Sewell, whose family has been in the car business in Dallas since 1911, has been one of SMU's most stalwart supporters, including being the chair of the board of trustees for years.

He took over Sewell Village Cadillac at 26 after the death of his father when it was in third place of three Cadillac dealers in Dallas and built it into an empire with 21 locations and 13 different car lines. In 1988, when Village was the second-largest Cadillac dealer in America, he wrote a book called "Customers for Life," which sold more than a million copies, was translated into 17 languages and is still a guidebook for teaching customer service.

At a National Automobile Dealers Association convention I attended with my dad years ago, I saw Sewell stand and pound the podium like Nikita Khrushchev to get his point across. In front of the head of every major car company in the front row, Sewell stared at them and forcefully told them that there was absolutely no reason he shouldn't be able to order a car for a customer and have them deliver it in seven days.

Decades ago, General Motors pressured dealers to take their names off their signs and opt for more generic names like "Hometown Chevrolet," and Sewell didn't take kindly to the request.

"He said, 'My name means more than General Motors,'" Wolters said. "And he was right."

Sewell, now 82, couldn't be reached for this story. But he's still a Dallas icon and SMU trustee who is part of the influential group of boosters that helped SMU forge its way back to major-college football. As the Mustangs celebrated their official arrival to the ACC on July 1, 2024, then-athletic director Rick Hart acknowledged Sewell as he arrived during the ceremony.

"Welcome Mr. Sewell, thank you for being here today, sir," Hart said from the dais. "One of the many shoulders we stand upon."

Across the Metroplex in Fort Worth, TCU has the ultimate crossover of Texana, car dealers and football. Fin Ewing III, a Dallas dealer, is a Horned Frog whose life has revolved around running his family's Ewing Auto Group and working in college football, including being inducted into the Cotton Bowl Hall of Fame this year -- along with Jerome Bettis and Bo Jackson -- for his work with the bowl game for nearly his entire life. His company is the second-longest tenured sponsor of the Cotton Bowl behind Dr Pepper, and has provided courtesy cars for team officials and guests at the bowl game for 84 years -- they provide 80 each year -- and Fin knows nearly every major coach in the country.

His father, Finley Jr., was one of Darrell Royal's best friends who, of course, provided him with a car -- though the coach preferred to drive a car from an Austin dealer -- and was the inspiration for the Ewing name on the massively popular drama "Dallas" in the 1980s, when the show's producer saw a billboard for the Ewing Auto Group. Mercedes from the Ewings' store were featured in the show. For years, Ewing III has provided cars for TCU coaches to drive.

Ewing has a unique relationship with the current Frogs coach. Texas Tech coach Spike Dykes was one of Ewing's best friends, and in 1992, asked Ewing for a favor. He wanted to know if he could send his son, a Red Raiders baseball player named Sonny Dykes, over to Dallas to build some character in the boy.

"Spike told me to wear his ass out," Ewing said.

"I was a janitor at Ewing Buick," Sonny Dykes said. "My dad told him to give me the s---iest job in the whole place. And he did."

Thirty years later, Ewing couldn't believe it when he heard his former janitor was getting the head coaching job at his alma mater. Now, Dykes drives a Mercedes from Ewing's Dallas dealership.

"A football coach is flashy," Ewing said. "And car dealers like that flash. And you give somebody like that a car, a football coach or any celebrity, all of a sudden you're friends with them. That matters to a lot of people. I wouldn't give Nick Saban a car just so I could have been friends with him, but I gave all those sumbitches that were ever at TCU one."

A HALLMARK OF Steve Sarkisian's Texas teams has been their ability to put speed all over the field. But an eye-popping partnership provides it off the field, too.

The Lamborghini Austin Promotional Partner program, the dealership notes, is not a booster program and is not affiliated with the university. But through an NIL deal, a committee selects two players each year to drive the supercars around Austin. Bijan Robinson, Jaylan Ford, Jordan Whittington, Jake Majors, Isaiah Bond and Michael Taaffe have been the recipients so far.

Such arrangements are certainly not limited to Texas. Rick Ricart, the Ohio dealer who signed Ewers and star wide receiver Jeremiah Smith to deals as freshmen, oversees the largest auto location in the country with a 67-acre auto mall outside of Columbus and sits on the board of Ohio State's collective, THE Foundation. Feldman Chevrolet of Highland, Michigan, provided freshman quarterback Bryce Underwood with a Tahoe RST, along with cars for his mom and dad. Across the country, college football parking lots are stocked with Dodge Chargers.

Still, some people are concerned about such powerful machines being in the hands of teenagers, particularly after Georgia football player Devin Willock and recruiting staff member Chandler LeCroy were killed in a car wreck in a racing incident in Athens in January 2023. Police said LeCroy had a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit and was racing Jalen Carter at about 104 mph when his Ford Expedition slammed into two utility poles and two trees.

"Obviously, now in the day and age with NIL, guys have more money at a young age than they've ever had, and with more money comes more access," then-Georgia quarterback Carson Beck, who drove a Lamborghini, told ESPN last July at SEC media days. "When you have more access to these types of cars, does it lead to some of this? Yeah, but that's not an excuse for the things that have been happening."

Still, David Lucsko, whose Ph.D. dissertation at MIT was titled "The Business of Speed: The Hot Rod Industry in America," said the combination of speed and youth has always been dangerous, especially when there's no sense of ownership.

"The fastest car in the world is a rental car, not yours," said Lucsko, who is now a history professor at Auburn. "You can drive it like a madman and not worry about it. I kind of feel like the same thing must apply to a gift car. I worry you're putting these shiny, beautiful, fabulous, technologically sophisticated gems in young folks' hands, and of course they're going to play with them, sometimes to the detriment of public safety."

Late certainly understands that concern, he said. Like Lamborghini of Austin, Late works with Texas to identify players he feels are trustworthy enough for the responsibility of such machines.

"They all want the Jeep Trackhawks, Dodge Durango Hellcats and Dodge Charger Hellcats," he said, all of which share a 707-horsepower engine. "I've had a couple players that have totaled cars. One of them, we didn't renew our deal after that. I just heard too many stories about how he was driving around town show-dogging, and so that just didn't make sense."

The same can go for the adults. Ewing said for years, it was a total mystery where Cotton Bowl courtesy cars would go. "We just gave people a car, and when they left town, we found cars all over the place," Ewing said. "There were a lot of 'em that weren't even in Dallas that we'd have to go round up everything. And they all had some kind of damage on them. Maybe every other year there was a car that we couldn't find and somebody would say, call us and go, 'This is so-and-so at this bar over here. Your car's been sitting out in our parking lot for nine months.'"

Now, they hire drivers along with providing the loaner cars. But even the coaches sometimes provide their own legends. Joe Chastang, a Ford dealer in Houston, has provided cars for University of Houston coaches for more than 20 years, including Art Briles, Kevin Sumlin, Tom Herman and Dana Holgorsen.

When Herman left for Texas, he reportedly left his Ford Explorer provided by Chastang's dealership at the airport and left town. Chastang didn't wish to discuss it. But he didn't deny it either.

"We've never sold a coach's car faster than that one," Chastang said. "A friend who's a big U of H supporter called me immediately and said he had to have it for that exact reason. He's still got it, too."

Sometimes the story is the best kind of advertising.

Chastang recalls an iconic Houston image from his days working at a GMC dealership on the Gulf Freeway in Houston, where they would use a crane to mount a brand-new pickup truck atop a pole on the lot as somewhat of a landmark, like a beacon guiding Texans to pickups.

"Every year, people shot at that motherf---er from the freeway," Chastang said. "It's been sitting in the air for a year, and I thought we'd have a hard time selling it. But we'd take it down, and people would be lined up to buy the damn thing. And the coaches' cars are the same way."

THERE WILL NEVER be a more compelling or enduring car story, however, than the one about the gold Pontiac with a giant bird on the hood, a gleaming symbol of Southwest Conference arrogance. It's everything we love about college football's most mythical era: The Aggies bought a car for a star recruit; then he drove it to Dallas and became an All-American at SMU.

It wasn't until 2022, when Dickerson wrote a book, "Watch My Smoke," when he finally came clean about the whole process. Dickerson writes that Clarence Shear, an Aggie booster from his hometown of Sealy, Texas, told him to pick out his choice of a Corvette or three Trans Ams: black, silver, and gold. The car was purchased by Dickerson's grandmother in her name, and the Aggies reimbursed her.

"Is that such a scandal? That the best player for one of the best teams in the country got a nice car?" Dickerson wrote. "I don't think so. I think I deserved that car -- and a lot more than that."

This is exactly how today's NIL deals work, according to Late. The Texas One Fund supplies the money for the car, the player comes into the dealership and he sells to them at cost, titles it in their name, and they become an ambassador for Vanguard, making appearances or doing social media posts.

It's a stark contrast from the 1980s. In February, Crest Auto Group of Frisco, a Dallas suburb, posted a picture on Facebook with the star of the current SMU team.

"We're proud to team up with SMU's quarterback Kevin Jennings and the iconic 2025 Cadillac Escalade," they wrote. "The perfect combination of power, precision, and style on and off the road."

Dickerson's "Trans A&M" will always have a mystique that isn't attached to today's cars. It was the gold standard for brazen recruiting pitches of yore. It's not the same when everyone knows the game.

Still, for such a legendary tale, there's one thing missing: the ending. Dickerson's "grandma" -- this time it was an SMU booster named George Owen -- upgraded him to a Corvette for his final season at SMU, and Dickerson said he sold the Trans Am to Charles Drayton, his fullback and best friend.

But then what became of it?

"I have no clue," Dickerson told ESPN. "Charles got his leg broke, couldn't drive and had the car sitting at the house. He told Bobby Leach to take his car back to campus and leave it at SMU."

Leach, who would become known as the "Miracle Man" when he caught a kickoff return lateral on a bounce and ran it back 91 yards with 4 seconds left for the winning score in a 34-27 win over Texas Tech in 1982, had other plans. He was dating a girl in Oak Cliff, a neighborhood in Dallas with some rough-around-the-edges parts.

"Charles told him, 'Bobby do not take my car over to Oak Cliff, and he says 'No, no no, I ain't gonna do it,'" Dickerson said, laughing. "So what does he do? He takes the car to Oak Cliff. The next morning we get a call from Bobby Leach. I never forget, Charles Drayton is on the phone. He's like, 'Come on, Leach. Stop joking, man. Stop playing, Leach.' He threw the phone to me and said, 'Man, talk to him."

Dickerson grabbed the phone, with Leach on the other end.

"Eric, I got Charles's car stolen," Leach said. "I know I wasn't supposed to take it over there."

That was the last of the Trans A&M, lost to history. It was made before VIN numbers were common, and Dickerson said he nor Drayton have ever found any way to track it down.

"That car's a ghost," Dickerson said.

Still, its spirit lives on across college football.