The Numbing Sameness of It All, Again---Bears Edition

The temptation, of course, is to slap a new headline on last week’s story and call it a day.  That’s basically what the Cleveland Browns did on Sunday, losing in inglorious fashion once again, this time to the Chicago Bears, 38-31.

There wasn't anything particularly new to report, the details of this particular loss irrelevant.  Suffice it to say that the Browns blew a lead as the defense collapsed. Gee, when have I written that before?  Oh year, nearly every freakin' week.

So if the manner in which the team lose is irrelevant was there anything of relevance to ponder?  Yes.  If you’re looking for meaning in a cold city with a cold stadium and an even colder season then it is that this team continues to lose, that it continues to lose with such regularity in fact that it is threatening to undermine whatever fan base remains.

Watching the Browns lose again on Sunday in much the same manner as their other 10 losses this season, I wondered whether even the players get bored losing in the same way each week.  Either they have the deepest reservoir for absorbing boredom imaginable or they aren't bored at all.  No matter.  They are, sadly, still losers.

A defensive collapse by this team isn't news this season or any season.  It’s just what they do irrespective of the players, irrespective of the coaches, irrespective, really, of who they are playing. Maybe losing like this is habit forming as D’Qwell Jackson suggested after the game.  Maybe it just doesn't matter.  When you’re playing out another string in another meaningless season does the manner in which your next loss happens really matter?  It does but only if you’re earnestly trying to improve.

Feel free to make the case that this Browns team isn't the worst team the front office has put on the field in recent years. I’ll readily concede that this team seems more talented than in previous seasons as long as you readily concede that your point notwithstanding the results still aren't any different.  That is the numbing sameness of it all in a nutshell.

The problem with this team since its reintroduction into the league until this past Sunday starts with the quarterback and flows from there.  It’s almost hard to fathom that the Browns are no closer to having a good serviceable quarterback than at this same point during its first in 1999.  That is institutional incompetence as practiced at the highest level of professional sports.

Without a quarterback that the team or the fans can believe it, there's little to rally around.  A strong defense can win you a few games.  Perhaps your hack quarterback can do likewise occasionally.  But there is no end game except the unfulfilled belief in the results of next year's draft.

In Sunday’s New York Times sports section there was an article pondering whether the Jets, whom the Browns play this coming Sunday, will follow the same path of the Carolina Panthers and once again try to draft a franchise quarterback.  The Panthers, as most recall, drafted Jimmy Clausen late in the first round in 2011 only to watch him perform like a baby-faced Brandon Weeden.  In 2012 they conceded their mistake just one season into the experiment and drafted Cam Newton and now find themselves, in Newton’s second season, as one of the better teams in the NFL.  In doing that they did what most teams won't even contemplate—cutting losses instead of grasping to the thin reed of the potential you saw in the player when you first drafted him.  NFL quarterback may be the toughest position in professional sports but that doesn't mean that conclusions can't be drawn after a season.

This past season the Jets drafted Geno Smith in the second round.  He’s been awful in the way that only an unprepared rookie quarterback could be awful.  Think Akili Smith and you’you've essentially captured the awfulness of Geno Smith.  The Jets face the issue of whether to cut bait with Smith, just like the Panthers did with Clausen.

The Browns of course faced this issue last off season and punted, which is why Weeden started the season.  Now deep into Weeden's second season, there can’t be anyone in Berea that believes he’s a viable, reliable NFL starter.  The game just hasn’t slowed down enough for Weeden and who knows if it ever will.  Meanwhile the Browns continue to have a quarterback problem and they need to continue to turn over every rock, spend every high draft choice they have, until one is found.   Quit using hope as a strategy.

The Browns don’t need a “franchise” quarterback, for whatever that even means at this point.  They just need a guy who can consistently and efficiently manage a game, minimize mistakes and get the ball where it needs to be.  Maybe that is asking a lot. No matter.  Until that quarterback is found, the Browns will remain stuck on 4 to 5 wins a season.

Look at it this way.  In their 15th season since re-entering the league, the Browns are averaging just over 5 wins a season.  The franchise has had just two winning seasons overall.  The common denominator is the lack of a quarterback.  The correlation is near perfect.

Which brings us back to Sunday’s game.   Those brave few that continue to watch know what happened.  The defense had another, yes another, monumental 4th quarter collapse that gave the Bears 21 points, the last of which was on a 40 yard touchdown run.  This continues to be a major problem with the team but let’s also be fair: it’s not as if this collapse spoiled fine play on the offensive side of the ball.

Jason Campbell didn't lose the game.  But where he failed is where every other similarly situated Browns quarterback has failed.  He can’t win a game on his own.  He doesn't have the presence and doesn't have the skill to lift a team’s spirit and push it forward in the tough moments of a game.  He’s in very fitting company with all the other ones who have tried and failed in a Browns uniform.

Sunday Campbell helped put together a decent first drive but he couldn't finish, a consistent theme on both sides of the ball.  Campbell did throw a 43-yard touchdown pass with under a minute remaining.  The Bears were up 14 points.  In other words, it was garbage time.  What Campbell was able to do, once, was put together a drive that mattered that resulted in the Edwin Baker 2-yard touchdown run.

Is this all Campbell’s fault?  Of course not.  The holding penalty on Shaun Lauvao early in the fourth quarter negated a nice run by Chris Ogbonnaya that had taken the ball deep into Chicago territory.  The penalty ultimately pushed the Browns back far enough where they had to punt.  If that penalty doesn't happen, maybe the Browns go in for the touchdown and maybe they go up 14, just like a week ago.  But given Campbell’s play, there’s at least as much reason to think that the Browns end up getting another field goal, at best.  At worst, he throws an interception.

Either way, it was still on the defense to help make a paltry lead stand.  It was at that point where my future son-in-law leaned over to me and asked me if I thought the Browns could seal the deal for once.  How do you think I answered?

As if on a timer, the defense then collapsed.  The capper was not the Michael Bush 40-yard touchdown run.  That was icing on a cake that was fully baked.  Once the Bears had overcome the deficit and gone up by 7, the defense was waiving the flag of defeat.  It might be they lacked confidence in Campbell and the offense.  It might be that they lacked confidence in themselves.  It was probably both.

The capper was the 45-yard improbable touchdown pass to Alshon Jeffery.  What was remarkable was the fact that Cutler threw the ball in the first place.  He saw Jeffery seemingly well covered by Tashaun Gipson and Julian Posey and still figured “why the hell not?”  Why the hell not indeed.

Gipson seemed perfectly positioned in front of Jeffery.  It didn't matter.  Gipson jumped and missed and the ball landed perfectly in Jeffery’s arms.  Give Jeffery credit for good concentration certainly but that play, more than any other this season, succinctly documented this team’s massive defensive shortcomings.

Safety T.J. Ward, who had a fumble recovery for a touchdown, said that the team won't be folding in it's last two games.  Who is he kidding.  This team is neatly folded with crisp hospital corners.  It couldn't possibly fold any further.

What we’re left with then is what we’re always left with: a team without a quarterback it can believe in and a defense that’s all shit no hit.  In other words, wash, rinse, repeat.  There’s two more weeks to go.

Lingering Items--Adjustment Edition

It's going to be another long season for a city that only knows long seasons. But anyone taking a realistic assessment of the Cleveland Browns knew that already. What they don't know, what noone can answer is when the light at the end of the tunnel will not just be another oncoming train.

Certainly Mike Holmgren can’t answer it nor did he much try at his press conference on Monday (itself an event but perhaps consistent with a vow to be more accessible to the local media). What he did offer up, though, spoke volumes about the season to come. It wasn’t pretty.

In one breath Holmgren said he expected the team to be better but in another he expressed some astonishment at the composition of the roster and the fact that fully half is comprised of rookies and second year players and is being led by someone in only the second year of his head coaching career.

With no discernible sense of irony Holmgren also said that the team is pretty much where he thought it would be. Huh? Either Holmgren has adjusted his expectations without bothering to tell the fans or he really is as disconnected from the day to day operations as most fans have suspected.

I actually don't much care as much about the youth on this team as I do about whether the guy in charge was aware this was happening. The latter is related to the former anyway. Clearly Holmgren didn’t know what was happening and that is what they call in the business a red flag. It makes every thing else he says suspect.

Holmgren has given general manager Tom Heckert final say over the roster but perhaps sometime before the 53-man roster was announced Holmgren and Heckert should have met and discussed how this team, with all its youth and beauty, was going to meet the almost conflicting goals of significant improvement and roster overhaul in the same season. You get the feeling that Holmgren didn't realize what this team looked like until he read about it in the newspaper. Actually, that may be exactly how he found out.

And that, really, was what Monday's press conference was all about--lowering fan expectations. Holmgren reminded everyone more than once that quarterback Brandon Weeden is a fine passer but is still a rookie. He also went some length to distance himself for last year's pledge of big improvement in almost every way imaginable, probably because he knows that you can’t have a rookie quarterback, a rookie running back, rookie receivers, rookie defensive linemen, no linebackers and a likely to be suspended cornerback and think you’re going anywhere but down.

But more frustrating was his view on how an opening day loss (highly anticipated given how the Eagles defense toyed with the Browns' starters two weeks ago in a meaningless game) doesn't mean much because the season is a marathon and not a sprint.

In the words of Jim Steinman, "stop right there." I don't know if I'd label the NFL season a sprint but it's surely not a marathon. With only 16 games on the schedule one loss is far more impactful to a team's season then in any other sport. But that's not even the biggest problem with Holmgen's statement.

No, that would be reserved for the lack of situational awareness that it displays. The Browns 2.0 have played 13 seasons. In that time they've won their season opener once. That's right, once. In those 13 years they've had just two winning records at season's end. But let’s put an even finer point on it. In those 13 seasons, there have only been 24 weeks total when Browns fans could claim that their team had a winning record. In other words, 90% of the time over the last 13 years the Browns have had a losing record. If you take away the two winning seasons of 2002 and 2007, there have only been 6 weeks in the remaining 11 years when the Browns have had a winning record. To bring it all home, there have been 7 seasons in the last 13 where the Browns didn’t have a winning record at any point and 3 seasons where they enjoyed a winning record for exactly 1 week.

So when Holgrem blithely dismisses the importance of this team in this town getting off to a good start it shows me that he has no idea just how desperate these fans are to have something positive happen with this team, if just for a little while. That’s why, if nothing else, winning the home opener is so important. In context it would contrary to the strong trend in the other direction.

**

As I thought more about Holmgren's press conference it occurred to me that while he was clearly level setting rather modest expectations for the team he barely knows, the fans weren't his intended audience anyway.

Where Holmgren seemed most emphatic was with respect to his job status. Declaring he's never quit anything in his life, Holmgren clearly put the onus on owner-to-be Jimmy Haslam to push him aside and, in the grand tradition of every front office executive who's come before him in the last 13 years, pay off the remaining years of his contract.

That's the only way any of Holmgen's statements can be squared. Holmgren sounded as much like a man auditioning for his new boss as he did a man explaining to future employers that the team is on track and would get to the promised land if only he had been given the time to see if through.

In that sense Holmgren actually sounded much like Eric Mangini during the final days of The Lost Season. Mangini hadn't yet been officially told his fate from Holmgren though it seemed clear to everyone else. He sounded at times like he was lobbying for a third season while also reminding the rest of the league that his plan was working should he need a new job.

It didn't work out for Mangini (it still hasn’t) and I don't see a different outcome for Holmgren. If/when Holmgren is pushed aside, the likely outcome is that he’ll retire back to Seattle with Haslam’s money to live on for a few more years. And that, more than anything, will be Haslam’s real welcome to the NFL. He’ll join Lerner as another billionaire giving away money to guys that didn’t deserve it.

Meanwhile what I hope doesn't happen but probably will is that once again the fans will be asked to be patient while the new blood cleans up the old mess. What we won’t know but will be left merely to debate is whether the team was on the right track in the first place because it will once again be time to visit the one place that the fans know better than any other--square one.

**

Getting now to the meat of the matter, you can’t say that Holmgren doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He perused this roster and knows that significant improvement is unlikely.

I don't know what to make of the Browns' rather unusual roster, except for one thing. There is simply too much youth on this team to expect improvement, substantial or otherwise, as measured by wins and losses.

Let's use the Carolina Panthers as our barometer. Last season they went 6-10 with Cam Newton as their quarterback. That was an improvement of just four games from the prior season. (True, it tripled their victory total from the year before, but they were still nowhere close to the playoffs.) That seems about right considering the caliber of player Newton is versus the kind his predecessor, Jimmy Clausen, was.

By all accounts Weeden is a better passer than Colt McCoy but the difference between Weeden and McCoy isn't even close to the difference between Newton and Clausen. So expecting a huge jump for the Browns, assuming you think the Panthers took a huge jump, just by changing quarterbacks seems a bit of wishful thinking.

If you're thinking then that the addition of Trent Richardson will make all the difference, that's doubtful, too. The 2010 Panthers were terrible but it was more anomaly than trend. The season before they were 8-8. The season before that they were 12-4. In fact at no point in their existence have they been as miserable as any of the Browns' recent seasons.

But staying with that 2010 Panthers team it's true that they didn't run the ball well that season but their same two primary running backs were far more effective in 2011 with the addition of Newton, who had a substantial rushing total of his own. Even with a very effective running game the Panthers still only improved by 4 games.

It won't take much for Richardson to markedly improve the Browns' rushing game but unless he has a record-setting season, he won't approach the combined rushing totals of the Panthers' backs last season. Add to that the fact that Weeden is almost no threat to run and you come to the rather easy conclusion that while the Browns should be more balanced like the Panthersin 2011, it still won't amount to much this year.

And, as I just mentioned, the Panthers were already a better team in 2010 than the Browns were in 2011, the records notwithstanding.

But all of this just gets us back to the even more salient point. While upgrading at quarterback and running back, the Browns also got markedly younger almost everywhere else as well. This doesn't bode well in a league where youth is served only occasionally.

I would expect the Panthers to take another decent step forward this season because it is now more experienced. But even this season may not be of the leaps and bounds variety, the kind that Holmgren envisioned for his own team this season.

The Browns may be on the right trajectory, but as trite as it sounds only time will tell. Unfortunately there simply won't be enough time in this season to really make that judgment and that's all Haslem may give this regime before he decides to repaint the walls of Berea.

**

Staying with this same theme, given what Randy Lerner extracted from Haslam for control of this franchise, have we been underestimating Randy Lerner’s business acumen all along?

The Bucks and the Ducks

We’ll probably never really know how it was the Jim Tressel actually came to lose his job as head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes. Sure we understand the email from an unethical lawyer that Tressel stupidly didn’t pass along to anyone else in authority and the false statement he made about it months later as the lynchpin. But why Tressel was ultimately forced into early retirement is murkier.

It’s been several months now since the revelation of Tressel’s misconduct and the “we’ve got his back” press conference that university president Gordon Gee and athletic director Gene Smith held saying that Tressel’s job wasn’t in trouble.

From that point forward came a media onslaught unlike anything Ohio State had ever experienced. And yet through all the pseudo investigations, especially the discredited hack job that proved more false than true perpetuated by Sports Illustrated, Tressel’s only misconduct was and remained his incredibly stupid decision to not forward on an email.

In fact, with the distance that a few months provides, it’s become clear that not one other Buckeyes player has come under the NCAA’s microscope or been threatened with suspension. No assistant coach has been shown the door for engaging in any sort of background dealing or in some way facilitating the misconduct by the Tat 5. Most importantly, despite the reckless allegations of drive-by journalists, there has been not a shred of evidence offered, despite all of the digging and probing, that Tressel was running any sort of rogue program or that the Ohio State athletic department generally had a wild west approach to compliance.

But yet the white hot glare of those drive-by journalists proved to be more than the weak leaning trustees, or at least some of them, could handle and thus Tressel had to be sacrificed. Officially it was a resignation but what happened unofficially probably won’t come out for years if at all.

Meanwhile far worse scandals have hit college football in this same season and in each case the head coach has retained his job. There’s the whole Cam Newton affair in which it’s actually been proven that his own father was offering him up to the highest bidder. The claim was that Auburn didn’t pay Newton a penny and indeed it’s never been shown that Auburn did in fact pay Don King Wannabe Cecil Newton anything for his son’s services.

But yet Newton, after a checkered and short career at Florida that saw him get thrown out of that university allegedly for both stealing and cheating, ended up in Gene Chizek’s lap in Auburn. Maybe Chizek never got the scrutiny that Tressel got because Chizek’s career up until he met Newton was about as mediocre as they come. But even more galling is that even the NCAA let Newton slide because it was his father that engaged in the misconduct and not the son.

I said then that was a loophole that you could drive a truck through and it remains one today. Put it this way. Terrelle Pryor and the rest of his cohorts could have skated past any suspension had they just said that they thought their fathers paid for the tattoos, even if it had later been revealed that the currency was their sons’ memorabilia.

So give Cecil and Cam Newton credit for being cleverer than Terrelle Pryor and DeVier Posey.

That doesn’t erase in the least what Tressel did, but it certainly would have taken the players off the hook and then the program suddenly doesn’t look any more rogue than Auburn’s.

As bad as the Newton affair was for college football, it may end up a mere sideshow to what’s going on with Chip Kelly and the University of Oregon program. Yahoo Sports, which first took on the Ohio State story, has revealed in just the past few days that Kelly personally approved a $25,000 payment to Will Lyles to secure the services of two high school players.

When the allegations were first revealed how it was that Oregon was able to sign key players, including running back LeMichael James, the university scrambled to put together a report that demonstrated it had done nothing wrong. The payment to Lyles, they claimed, was for recruiting services, a quaint notion that Lyles was just a guy getting by running a little service to help out cash strapped programs with recruiting budget shortfalls. As if.

As a point of clarification for the uninitiated who want to think that this is still the 1950s, there are actually “recruiting services” out there that get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars from some programs to provide video and other reports on various high school players. It’s not clear whether the players directly “sign” with these services because that would make it look like they had agents, something the NCAA frowns on. And yet these services end up forging special relationships with certain players, usually from tough inner city backgrounds, in order to better market themselves to good and receptive programs just trying to give a kid a break.

It may not be illegal at the moment for any school to use a recruiting service but it is unusual. Oregon for example said it used Wyles as part of its overall approach to making efficient use of its recruiting budget. Given that kind of fallacy it almost makes you feel empathy for Cecil Newton who basically served as a one man recruiting service for his son.

But getting back to the point it appears that Oregon’s defense of it termed wholly innocent acts was a sham. Yahoo Sports, after interviewing Wyles several times, claims among other things that Wyles’ reports, in other words the actual services he was supposed to provide on various recruits, were put together months after the fact and at the request of Oregon once they knew they were in the crosshairs of an investigation that was blowing the cover off its shady practices.

The Yahoo Sports story also claims that Kelly was personally involved and has the evidence to prove it including a note Kelly personally wrote to Wyles thanking him for chaperoning three highly touted recruits to a Ducks’ game in 2009.

But if you think that’s the worst of it, you’d be wrong. Wyles was straightforward in admitting that the only service he really provided was to cuddle up with a few elite recruits and get them to Oregon for money. He did this by personally supervising the transfer of James from one high school to another that didn’t require a standardized test to graduate. That little task directly paved the way for James to get to Oregon, otherwise he may have never graduated high school.

He also did it by helping another recruit, Lache Seastrunk, obtain a different legal guardian because Seastrunk’s other guardian, his mother, didn’t approve of his decision to attend Oregon.

The only thing more outrageous than the conduct itself is the media’s lack of obsession with it, save for Yahoo Sports. Maybe that’s because it’s the Oregon Ducks and not the Ohio State Buckeyes. Maybe it’s because it’s Chip Kelly and not Jim Tressel. Maybe it’s because it’s more convenient to get to Columbus, Ohio than Eugene, Oregon for the mostly lazy journalists plying their trade these days.

It may be that Kelly will eventually lose his job but right now I’m not hearing Mark May or any of the other conveniently outraged at ESPN obsess over it. In fact Kelly and the Ducks’ program are getting mostly a pass even though their alleged misconduct is far, far worse than anything that went down at Ohio State.

No one accused Ohio State of putting together an after-the-fact justification of its own misconduct. Indeed, if anything Gene Smith and Gordon Gee were too forthcoming about the underlying but isolated misconduct. No one, including Tressel, is accused of paying or arranging the payment of money to players or their recruiting services.

If any program was playing on the fringes of legality it was Oregon and not Ohio State.

But the difference here, particularly in retrospect, is that Smith and Gee threw together an ill-conceived press conference to defend Tressel when what they should have done was taken the Oregon bunker mentality approach. That press conference served as convenient red meat for those who felt Smith, Gee and Tressel needed a comeuppance for being, well, so successful.

In one sense it is nice that the trustees at Ohio State took a stand and didn’t lower the university’s standards to those of Oregon and Auburn and the multitudes of others over the years that have been found to have done far worse. But in another sense it’s shameful that the trustees didn’t at least take the benefit of time and distance to place all of this, including Tressel’s misconduct, into a larger context. Instead they caved to the popular opinions of people that don’t know any better and in the end took down a man who deserved punishment but not the death penalty.

Tressel deserved a better fate then he got from those trustees and here’s hoping that his former employer and the political appointees who control it eventually realize that and come to the conclusion that the next permanent head coach for Ohio State is the one still living in their backyard.

Shades of Scarlet and Gray

Somewhere, Cam Newton just smiles.

Maybe the Ohio State Buckeyes players suspended Wednesday by the NCAA just should have had their fathers negotiate the memorabilia sale. That's the lesson I think the NCAA was trying to send when it suspended quarterback Terrelle Pryor and four of his teammates on Friday for selling their own personal items to a shady Columbus tattoo parlor owner, as if there were any other kind of tattoo parlor owner.

Assuming that Pryor and his suspended teammates return for their senior season, the Buckeyes will have to muddle through the first four or five games without them as they ponder their sins if they can just figure out exactly what they were.

See, the NCAA, with a rulebook as thick as the skulls of the people that enforce it, had to figure out for themselves why it is that student-athletes can't sell items that are rightfully theirs for whatever the market price might be. They eventually landed on something and now the players will be carrying a scarlet and gray A on their records for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

The danger of pointing out the ludicrous nature of what just took place at Ohio State is that you'll be labeled a Buckeye apologist. But the alternative is to assume that the rules in this case are black and white, which they aren't, and that nothing about this situation yields even the slightest shade of gray. In truth, that's all there is here, every shade of gray imaginable.

Let's put this into context, shall we? Pryor and Company didn't break any laws, at least the kinds of laws that you and I adhere to each and every day as we muddle through life. What they did was violate a NCAA rule that when bent to read whatever you want it to read says that items you were given for your accomplishments on the field aren't really yours until you leave college. Thus if you try to do with them what millions of others do with similar items via EBay each and every day, your eligibility will be in jeopardy.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

What I'm still having difficulty understanding, and I'm a lawyer, is exactly what Pryor and company did wrong. Personally it bothers me that the group placed such low value on awards they received like Big 10 championship rings and gold pants awarded for beating Michigan each season that they had no qualms about selling them. (OK, I understand the gold pants because, frankly, how many do you really need?) But that's a moral issue of sorts, not legal.

Surely if a player has a 1998 Ford Escort or a bike he wants to sell, the NCAA would not have a problem or perhaps a far lesser problem anyway. But because these were awards each earned on the field, suddenly it's a problem, a really big problem, the kind of problem that requires really, really harsh punishment.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

It's a fine line and one that doesn't exactly make sense. One guess is that the NCAA is most concerned about the uniqueness of the items (except, of course, the gold pants for beating Michigan which, after the last 10 years, are as plentiful as grains of sand on a Florida beach) because they garner a higher price from the shady sorts trafficking in memorabilia that makes the NCAA nervous. But if that's the issue then it's easy enough to say when awarding the items that it is against the NCAA rules to resell them while still in college, except that there is no NCAA rule on the book that actually says just that.

Which is why even if you understand the policy implications at work the action that took place here still doesn't make sense.

That a generic NCAA rule would be interpreted thusly came as a bit of a surprise to everyone involved, including, by the way, the NCAA. It admitted in doling out this particularly harsh punishment that its education on this rule at exactly the time it was supposedly violated was less than stellar. Then it went ahead and whacked the players a tad harder because they didn't report their misconduct, which they didn't know was misconduct, sooner. This circular logic makes sense only in the context of the NCAA giving themselves enough wiggle room down the road to negotiate down the punishment a bit as a concession to the fact that their decision is questionable in the first place.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

This is what aggravates most. Newton escaped any punishment whatsoever even though the NCAA had verifiable proof that the person closest to him, his father, was trying to sell him to the highest bidder. In the NCAA's view, it wouldn't be fair to punish Newton because he could smile and say. “gee, I didn't know my dad was doing that. He just told me where to go to school and I showed up.”

Pryor, Posey, Herron and Admas will get no such leeway. They knew they sold their stuff and they knew they made a little money off of it when doing so. They just didn't know it was a violation of any rules. Why would they?

The scuttlebutt is that the players, or at least some of them, sold the items to help out their families. It's a nice little twist to the story that makes their decisions a little more understandable (assuming it's true), but even if they kept the money for themselves I still struggle to understand the problem.

As scholarship athletes they get their education free. I've paid plenty of tuition to plenty of colleges so I understand the value of what the athletes are given in exchange for performing on the field like trained seals. It's not insubstantial. But they don't get a cash stipend as athletes and they don't dare work part time anywhere because of all the problems that can cause with the NCAA. Not all of them come from even middle class backgrounds and thus don't have parents with enough means to front them the spending money that nearly every other non-athlete has as they go about their college lives.

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

As a lawyer, I understand intimately that ignorance of the law is never an excuse. Imagine if it were? But this isn't the law, it's a freewheelin' NCAA rulebook whose application changes seemingly every other minute. And if you don't believe that then just consider how the NCAA dug out an even more arcane provision of that rulebook to make sure the 5 players weren't suspended for the Sugar Bowl.

Basically, the enforcement folks felt that punishing the players for the Sugar Bowl would have been to the extreme detriment to the Bowl itself and all the fans from both teams that plunked down cash to attend. In other words, the NCAA wanted to appear magnanimous in not punishing the innocent for the sins of a few.

It's a nice thought, certainly, but how about all the innocent players the the NCAA has punished over the years because their ex-coach ran afoul of NCAA rules? Is it fair that 80 or so players at USC for example must suffer the consequences of the real sins of Reggie Bush (a player who knew he was violating about the only black letter rule the NCAA has) and the athletic director and coaching staff that facilitated those sins? Aren't they innocent victims suffering far worse and for a far longer period of time than anyone who may have plunked down their dollars to see a meaningless Sugar Bowl game just because they thought Terrelle Pryor would be playing?

Meanwhile, Cam Newton just smiles.

What this all demonstrates, really, is that the NCAA enforcement process has grown beyond the ability of the current regime to handle it. The issues are more complex than a rulebook written in the 1950s can now handle and every time they try to apply outdated rules to modern situations they end up with answers that undoubtedly are going to leave everyone scratching their heads.

Now of course the Buckeye haters out there are relishing the suspensions because, well, they are Buckeye haters. Nothing breeds contempt like success. But the real cautionary note in all of this is that the inconsistent hand of the NCAA will come down anywhere at any time. So before you start feeling righteous about your team and looking down your nose at another's misfortune, just know that sooner or later that random hand will come down on your team as well. It always does.