Lingering Items--Johnny Football Edition

It’s hard to know whether to be more surprised by the NCAA’s hypocrisy or its ability to be shamed into doing the right thing, at least when pressure gets to them.  I guess I’ll go with the latter since the former isn't really much of a surprise.

A mere days after the Jay Bilas of ESPN exposed the NCAA’s abject hypocrisy in using its own web site to profit off the players it would simultaneously punish for trying to do the same, the NCAA actually succumbed to the shame of it all and shut down the site, though not necessarily its profit churning possibilities.

Oh we've talked about the NCAA and it’s hypocrisy in every manner of operation several times by now so really nothing should be a surprise.  And yet, there it was earlier this week engaged in the kind of “really?” type of behavior that has come to define its existence.

By now you've heard the key elements of the story.  Bilas (who you should follow on Twitter (@jaybilas) was sitting around not doing anything more than simply pondering why Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel faces suspension for allegedly profiting off his autograph when he wondered whether the NCAA was simultaneously profiting off of Manziel in other ways.  So he went to the NCAA’s shopping website, typed Manziel’s name in the search bar and up came a Texas A&M replica jersey bearing Manziel’s number.  Bilas then repeated the exercise for other players, like Jadevon Clowney, and got a similar result.  Then Andy Staples of Sports Illustrated did likewise for even more players and got the same results.  Buy any one of those jerseys and the vendor, the NCAA and the member schools will split the proceeds.  Manziel, Clowney, Braxton Miller, and on and on, won’t see a dime.

In other words, the NCAA raises the increasingly more ludicrous banner of preserving the quaint notion of amateurism when a player wants to profit off his own name, likeness or signature.  The NCAA has no such problem when it’s the one doing the profiting, at least until others caught on.

But character is what you do when no one is looking, not when everybody is and we know that until Bilas opened our eyes to what was actually out in the open, the NCAA was more than content to count the dollars it was making off Manziel and others.

This is the frustrating, hypocritical message the NCAA’s been sending for years and is exactly why it is in the midst of a lawsuit it can’t win.  That action, filed by former UCLA player Ed O’Bannon, has been certified as a class action of former and current players who claimed that the NCAA retaining in perpetuity a college player’s image, likeness, name, what have you, and profiting handsomely from it without sharing any of the spoils with the player is blatantly unfair.

The NCAA’s defense has essentially been that it owns your rights as the privilege of participating, even after you’re long gone from the college ranks.  If it were a fair fight, that might be a good argument.  But in the context of 18 year old kids, all of whom at that age are locked out from pursuing a professional career in either professional football or basketball for at least a year (three for football) by those leagues (due in no small part to the unholy, unspoken alliance between those leagues and the NCAA), the argument loses its luster.  Throw in the fact that a kid who would stand up to the NCAA’s draconian contract terms essentially strikes the death knell for his chances of a pro career and you can understand why what the NCAA does to them is so unfair.

The entire financial underpinnings of the NCAA are jeopardized by the O’Bannon lawsuit and even though Rome is burning around them they continue to walk around its open flames toting 10 gallon cans of gasoline.

The NCAA operates like they’re Tony Soprano only not as smart.  It’s as if they don’t realize that you can’t keep your earners from getting a little taste for themselves.  Everyone in Tony’s chain of command has to earn a little something to keep the wheels of his brand of commerce flowing.  Not so with the NCAA.  Instead it comes across not even as generous as Feudal kings but as high minded pre Civil War plantation owners. Think Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained.  A rise up was inevitable.

As much as I love NCAA football and basketball, the chief earners for the NCAA kingpins, it wouldn't raise my blood pressure if those sports ended up as the collateral damage in bringing an end to the NCAA’s silly moralistic and anachronistic view that student athletes should be grateful to play for free.  I don’t mind the NCAA earning its fair share.  I do mind it earning the complete share.

The NCAA isn’t going to fundamentally reform because it doesn't want to.  It purposely lumps the schools with conflicting interests together in the same category in order to keep fundamentally fair change from happening.  The Big 10 and a few other big conferences have floated the perfectly reasonable idea of paying the players enough of a stipend to keep them from feeling like they have to sell their own stuff in order to make ends meet.  The midlevel schools countered with the perfectly reasonable response that they can’t afford those payments because they don’t have access to the same kind of money as the big schools.  And there the proposal sits, dormant and adrift, unable to get out of its own shadow, the net result of which is all the money stays where it’s always been at, with the NCAA and the schools.  Similar conflicts abound and that’s what prevents any real movement.

Make no mistake, the NCAA is in trouble and if they’re smart, and they've shown such predisposition, they’d plan for the future.  Their lawyers may be fighting the good fight but it’s the NCAA that doesn't even understand that the only thing worse for its future than losing the lawsuit is winning it.

The NCAA’s business model that hinges on the systemic and almost complete exploitation of college athletes is bound to collapse on itself like a stack of Jenga blocks.  Either the O’Bannon lawsuit dismantles it through the legal process or it gets dismantled all the same when the athletes have had enough, it will get dismantled.

It doesn't have to be that way.  The athletes in revenue-generating sports ought to share in some of the revenue generated.  It’s not that hard of a concept and there are plenty of intelligent folks around that could actually figure this all out in a fair and reasonable manner.  I just wouldn't trust anyone associated with the NCAA with the task.  Their heads are stuck so far in the sand that they've forgotten what daylight actually looks like.

**

If you want to understand how insidious all this is, consider the plight of Desmond Howard.  True he’s an obnoxious little shit that went to Michigan, but that doesn't color the fact that he’s caught in the middle of a weird lawsuit that stems from the infamous Heisman pose he struck in the end zone all these years ago and the photo that captured the moment.

The complete story was reported by Yahoo! Sports, increasingly the go-to place on the internet for actual sports journalism.  I won’t bore you with the full details, just Google “Desmond Howard photo lawsuit” and you’ll find the story.  But the upshot is that there is an intellectual property fight over who exactly owns the photo.  Know this, however.  No one is claiming that Howard owns it.  Indeed, Howard’s caught in the lawsuit because he once used the photo for a brief period of time on his own web site and now the outfit claiming ownership of the photo is seeking damages from him and everyone else that supposedly used the photo without authorization.

What makes this story most interesting in the context of the O’Bannon lawsuit is that it illustrates nearly perfectly what the fuss is all about.  There are plenty of people profiting from Howard’s likeness as captured in that photo, including the NCAA and Michigan, to this day.  Of all those who are, the one person who’s not is Howard.  That’s because, again, he was forced to sign over his rights in order to gain the privilege of playing NCAA sanctioned football.

Does anything about that story seem right or fair?  You could argue that the person who took the photo really owns it and I wouldn't have that big of an issue with it.  But the larger truth in it is that he doesn't own it completely and thus isn't able to exploit it completely.  Because the photo is of an NCAA sanctioned football player, the NCAA owns that likeness and the photographer has to pay a licensing fee before he can exploit that photo financially.

If you think the NCAA should hand over some of the fees generated over the years to Howard then you really haven’t been paying attention.  That would entail a thread of enlightened thinking that the NCAA isn't capable of institutionally mustering.  They’d rather bleed their subjects bone dry.

For now Howard is thinking of signing on to the O’Bannon lawsuit and for the life of me I can’t understand why he hasn't already.  But then I remember he went to school at Michigan and realize that it will take him a bit longer to connect all the dots.

**

As a final bit of moralizing on this topic, let me just say that I’m struck at the seemingly sympathetic tone that Yahoo! Sports and even ESPN have taken to the sad plight of Johnny Football Manziel given how hard they went after Terrelle Pryor et al for engaging in virtually the same conduct.

I’m not one to see racism at every turn but it’s worth considering whether the attitudes of those outlets are at all colored by the race of the individuals involved.  It’s easy to see Pryor as a street hustler and Manziel as the white bread victim but nothing is ever that easy.

Pryor had plenty of flaws and demonstrated them repeatedly.  So, too, does Manziel.  In both cases they stem from the same entitlement attitude that puts them at the center of increasingly larger groups of people unwilling to tell them “no” to anything let alone give them a solid piece of advice.  Indeed Manziel’s parents seem to be front and center in helping cultivate Johnny’s reckless party boy image.

The truth is that the same issues that tripped up Pryor and the others at Ohio State appear to be tripping up Manziel.  For reasons I’ll never completely understand the NCAA simply will not allow players to profit from their own property at any level and as long as that remains the rule there will be cases like these that leave other right thinking folks scratching their heads.

Pryor deserved the same sympathy and understanding that the media is now giving Manziel and for the same reason.  The NCAA’s rules on this issue serve not to better the student athlete in any discernible way but instead to serve the NCAA and its members’ school unbridled greed.

**

That was exhausting.  Now for this week’s question to ponder as the Indians seek into their inevitable abyss:  Can even Terry Francona save a semi-promising season from completing slipping away?

Lingering Items--Competition Edition

Maybe the best way to really know that NFL football is back was how quickly the mind-numbing nature of exhibition games sets in. It didn't take long.

The Cleveland Browns beat the Green Bay Packers on Saturday night in a surprisingly easy fashion, 27-17. The starters played well, for the limited time they were out there, and overall it gave a nice little vibe to the upcoming season.

That doesn't mean it wasn't the mostly typical boring preseason game. It was.

For the average fan, which means pretty much everyone except stats geeks and assistant coaches, exhibition games, particularly the first one of the season, lose any sense of luster once the starters disappear at the end of the first quarter/beginning of the second. From there it's a race to stay awake, which is why I've been advocating for years that the game start no later than 4 p.m. (Ok, that last part is not really true, but it just occurred to me and it's actually a pretty good idea, isn't it?)

Of course none of that will stop Browns fans from dissecting the team's exhibition opener and the point that stands out above all others was was how in sync the offense under quarterback Colt McCoy looked with but just a few practices dedicated to learning a new system under their belt.

McCoy isn't always going to complete virtually everyone of his passes, so we can probably disregard for the moment the 9-10, 135 yards, one touchdown pass and another touchdown drive level of production. But it shouldn't really be that much of a surprise that he looked sharp.

First of all, McCoy is an accurate passer. It's his stock in trade. Second, this kind of offense plays to every one of his strengths. He moves around with ease in the backfield, can throw on the run and isn't required to throw 40 yards down field all the time in order to keep the team moving. I don't know if you can say McCoy is a “system” quarterback but if he were, this would be his system.

Before moving off the topic of McCoy, one thing I noticed from the small but obnoxiously vocal anti-Holmgren/pro-Mangini branch of Browns fans is how quickly they are to minimize any contributions from McCoy. In that vein, everything Mangini did was vastly misunderstood by a too anxious fan base while anything either Mike Holmgren (or his general manager surrogate, Tom Heckert) or McCoy does is consistently dismissed with a “we'll see, won't we?” sort of attitude.

I'm not sure McCoy is the second coming of Tom Brady, but right now, with essentially 8 regular season starts and exactly one truncated off-season in which he knew he would enter the next season as starter, McCoy has looked consistently far more impressive then any other Browns' quarterback in the new era of the franchise, Derek Anderson's one sublime season notwithstanding.

True, that's not saying much because McCoy is essentially competing against no one for that honor, but that still doesn't diminish his performance thus far.

Consider for example his work last season. About the best you can say about the Browns' offensive schemes under former head coach Eric Mangini is that they were too clever by half. A lack of overall talent on offense often leads coaches to devise gimmicky schemes to deflect attention from the inability to go toe-to-toe with most other teams in the league. And if that's why Mangini's offense looked so confusing most of the time, then so be it.

But McCoy came into that mess and took charge as best as anyone could. Jake Delhomme, when he wasn't injured, played mostly shell-shocked from a career that had gone on a season or two too long. Seneca Wallace showed the usual flashes that backups tend to but also all the flaws that backups tend to when forced to play for longer periods of time. It was McCoy, the throw in 3rd round pick, that came in and looked more like a starter than either of Delhomme or Wallace.

Not everything McCoy did was brilliant, of course. But he never lost his composure (even when those around him were losing theirs) and made the best of a confusing situation. Forced into the apprenticeship role, his reps from training camp through the regular season were limited. He basically had to learn by watching, not doing. Still, it was clear he paid attention and when given the chance his throws were accurate and the offense moved. Only the most strident Mangini supporters, who had little tolerance for a Holmgren pick succeeding, wouldn't admit as much.

Fast forward to Saturday night's exhibition opener. McCoy, in charge, looked like he and the team had been working with this new offense for years, not weeks. In some sense, McCoy actually had been in that system for years because it's mostly what he played in college. The wonderful thing though to watch was that his college experience had actually translated to the pro game in a way that should give all fans comfort that the team finally has a quarterback around whom it can build.

As for the rest of the game against the Packers, despite the way the team was playing thank goodness for the remote control and a relatively compelling Indians game on Sportstime Ohio.

That's not to suggest anything about the way the team played. It is to suggest that from the point the starters left the game until the game ended seemingly 6 hours later, there was nothing much going on to inform the average fan. For the coaching staff, though, that surely wasn't the case.

The garbage time of exhibition games that bore us to tears is the critical time in which decisions are made about the last 10 or so players to make the final roster. Coaches are looking at all the nuances of technique and positioning, things the average fan isn't trained to see let alone understand. It's important because the best teams in the NFL are those with the most depth. But for fans watching, it has about as much entertainment value as a video of someone listening to a book on tape.

It's always good to start with an actual victory in the preseason. But the real point of the game, as head coach Pat Shurmur said prior to game, was to check the team's progress. On that level, it was quite comforting to see progress made and actual, legitimate building blocks in place.

**

It will be interesting to check Saturday night's television ratings for the Browns game vs. the Indians game but if you want a clue as to how that turns out, look no further than the fact that the Browns exhibition opener had almost double the attendance as the Indians, or at least double the announced attendance of the announced attendance of the Indians.

If past is prologue, the television ratings will be similar proving, if nothing else, that Cleveland is a Browns town first and foremost.

It's remarkable, actually, that with the Indians clearly in the thick of a pennant race garner about half the interest as a Browns team in the thick of another reboot. But this town likes its football.

At this juncture of the season the Indians are, at the very least, an interesting if not completely compelling team. They are borderline awful on defense (with an infield dominated by rookies and a rookie in center field), are in the bottom half of the league in scoring runs, and yet remain strongly in contention because of a pitching staff that is far better than anyone imagined when the season opened.

It's not exactly a recipe for winning the World Series but it is enough at the moment, or should be anyway, for keeping fans interested. And while most fans seem to be keeping at least one eye on the team, they aren't showing up at the ballpark. The Indians are 25th in the league in attendance averaging just over 22,000 fans a game. By contrast, Minnesota, which is having a mostly nightmare of a season due to injuries, is still averaging over 39,000 fans per game, a staggering differential.

Certainly the usual culprits will be cited for the weak attendance: a bad economy, a dwindling population, a front office that's consistently come up short. But what seems to be taking place is a shift away from the generations long theory that the Indians are one of those “sleeping giant” franchises where fans, starved for a winner, are just looking for a reason to spend their money on them. Despite all its shortcomings as a pennant contender, the team has hung in their well enough, particularly against tough competition the last few weeks, to force fans to take better notice. Even the front office has cooperated by pulling off a rather important late season trade to make the team stronger.

Unfortunately with the Browns season now getting into full swing it's unlikely that much will change in the minds of Indians fans, most of whom really don't believe in their heart of hearts that this team came make the playoffs. Maybe it will take a few seasons for this to change but at least it's mid-August and the Indians are playing meaningful baseball. That's all you can really ask.

**
As a follow up to my column earlier in the week about ESPN's all too obvious vendetta against Ohio State, it still is worth noting that it's not as if ESPN didn't make a few good points in its flimsy Outside the Lines segment.

The underlying premise, that the university has courted an environment that trades on the the accomplishments of its student athletes, is essentially correct. The Buckeyes aren't alone in that, certainly, but there has been an atmosphere around the Buckeyes in which revenues have been maximized on the backs of its players.

As an example, you can go to the Buckeyes web site and bid on all manner of game worn jerseys and the like. If you attend a game at the 'Shoe, there is a weekly auction of literally dozens of pieces of signed memorabilia that takes place on the concourse by the entrances to the luxury boxes. The proceeds from these get plowed back into the athletic program and these ancillary revenues are important to maintaining a budget that supports dozens of athletic programs at Ohio State, but only a fool could deny that in some fashion that same athletic program wasn't at least partially complicit in sending a message to its athletes that their signatures on jerseys or helmets are quite valuable.

In that context it's not a surprise that some of those athletes might want to trade on their own names and reputations in order to put something in their own pocket. So in that sense ESPN makes a good point and it should have been a launching pad for exploring the same issue that is just as prevalent at every other college with a major football program.

Where ESPN went off the rails was in staying small with their story in order to advance their self-created narrative that the Buckeyes are a uniquely dirty program that deserves more justice than the NCAA will apparently dish out. That's why the ESPN story descended into the usual unproven allegations by anonymous shadowy figures instead of exploring the same issues on the campuses of say, Alabama or Auburn.

It will be interesting to see if Ohio State tones down its use of player-signed memorabilia as a fund raiser going forward. That, more than anything else, will serve as the marker for whether the university truly understands that a problem of this nature isn't just a function of a few bad apples but an outgrowth of seeds they themselves planted.

**

With the NBA in lockout mode and the only action being all the players who are contemplating playing overseas next season came news that LeBron James won't be one of them. That leads to this week's question to ponder: Is James' decision not to play overseas a function of his not wanting any more wear and tear on his body or more a fear of not being able to lead a team on another continent to a title?
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Standing Outside ESPN's Lines

While factually the tide that’s been buffeting Ohio State these last several months is clearly receding, you’d never know that from the attitude of ESPN. In a continuation of the unusually intense and negative coverage the network has devoted to all things Ohio State, ESPN’s usually thought provoking and award-winning “Outside the Lines” show decided to step outside its own lines to once again hit the Buckeyes across the chops.

In sum and substance, the show essentially suggested that Ohio State and Jim Tressel set themselves up for this scandal by allowing autograph sessions with players after they had already used up their eligibility, a perfectly NCAA-compliant thing to do. But the innuendo was clear. The program itself is dirty and as proof they offered nothing. More interestingly,not a mention of the most salient fact: there is nothing new to report nor has there been since February.

On the surface this makes ESPN look, at best, petty and at worst, biased. Frankly it's both. The Buckeye haters, who ESPN is clearly courting, and many in the media too cowardly to challenge the World Wide Leader, dismiss any such claims as sour grapes.

But the facts are the facts. With a scandal every bit as troubling as the Buckeyes troubles brewing in Oregon Ducks Country, ESPN has done little more than give it cursory attention. It's devoted little air time to the matter and hasn't publicly attacked head coach Chip Kelly (let alone call for his dismissal). The reason is that ESPN has done little if any leg work on reporting the story, certainly nothing even remotely related to the time it's put in to trying to find dirt that doesn't exist in Columbus.

ESPN has devoted hours and made dozens of public records requests of the Buckeyes, seeking every bit of information it can possibly uncover to try and bury the team and the program. Meanwhile, it's made only two very perfunctory requests of Oregon, despite a level of activity that raises very serious issues about the program's integrity in general and Chip Kelly's in particular. But more on that diparity in a moment.

To get to the nub of the issue when it comes to ESPN's most recent hatchet job on the Buckeyes, it is well worth noting that nothing new was actually brought forth in its latest expose. In fact, while ESPN is reluctant to admit it for selfish reasons (would it do any good for ESPN to advertise a show to potential viewers that offers no information?), there’s been nothing new on this story since the initial facts were brought forth by the Buckeyes last February.

There were a handful of players that had sold memorabilia for free tattoos and other minor goodies and that former head coach Jim Tressel was warned about it and failed to inform his bosses about it.

The first part of the allegation was always the least troubling because it was basically dumb college kids doing dumb college things for chump change. The second allegation, that Tressel knew about the situation and lied about it, was always far more damning. In the end it cost him his livelihood.

You would think that ESPN might actually devote its one sports investigation show to contrasting how the media machine has an unquenchable appetite and has long since stopped discerning between the good and the bad it's fed. It could have showed, for example, how the NCAA had already determined that there was not a lack of institutional control and that, in actuality, Ohio State's compliance program was actually pretty good. That would have been the responsible thing to do.

But responsibility has long since left town, which is what happens when one media partner comes to dominate the spectrum, not to mention the fact that this would not have played well with the narrative that ESPN and Sports Illustrated have offered up for these last several months. It's almost as if ESPN in particular merely decided to double down, putting the Buckeyes program and its fans back through the wringer, almost for sport.

Most of what both outlets reported were sourced anonymously and never proven. Especially egregious was the Sports Illustrated expose by George Dohrmann that was actually repeatedly discredited by the facts. Sports Illustrated still hasn’t apologized and that piece of shoddy reporting still forms the basis for much of what ESPN has been doing since.

This kind of thing is certainly commonplace as the byproduct of a country founded in part on freedom of the press. Responsible news organizations sometimes get things wrong and that is the burden we all have to bear in order to have a more open and free society.

Indeed I have no particular axe to grind with ESPN simply because they may be wrong. However the axe I do have to grind with them is over their incessant need to appear to be not just correct but responsible all the while cloaking a bias for reasons that defy logic. By sheer repetition of the same unproven allegations and the almost total ignorance of the simple fact that this story hasn’t changed one iota since last February, ESPN has kept up the illusion that despite having its ratings driven in large part by college football (and hence the carriage fees it can charge for its service that gets passed along to those same fans via their cable or satellite bills), it can fairly cover that industry.

Hardly.

Ohio State may have a hundred pound gorilla of a football program but that hardly serves as an excuse for going after it as if it’s a piñata to be poked periodically on the off chance that something will fall out. Even the lawsuit that ESPN filed over but a handful of records that were withheld from the volumes of records requested was done in part to add further cover to the illusion of responsibility ESPN is trying to portray in its antics.

What that lawsuit really does, in context, is shine a light on how irresponsible and unbalanced ESPN really has been toward the Buckeyes.

In an exhibit to that lawsuit, ESPN reveals the dozens of records requests its staff made of the Ohio State media relations department. That same exhibit also details the yeomen efforts that the OSU media relations department made to comply with those requests. The exact dispute of the lawsuit deals not with a general stonewalling of ESPN by Ohio State but with a very narrow group of records that OSU held back as allegedly exempt under privacy laws. OSU claims that the documents, which are records of certain individuals (none of which are OSU officials), are protected by the same privacy laws that prevents anyone from indiscriminately poking into the goings on of, say, students.

This is not to get into the merits of the lawsuit either way. It will work itself out as these things usually do. It is to get into the extreme and unfair efforts ESPN has made to try to uncover what they surmised was the dirt of the program, their almost complete failure in that regard and their abject unwillingness to apply those same shoddy standards elsewhere.

At the same time Ohio State was supposedly running a rogue program, the University of Oregon, another major college program but far from the media center of this country, was actually engaging in far shadier practices, as Yahoo Sports detailed.

Oregon and its head coach, Chip Kelly, were actually paying a private individual for supposed recruiting services. The amounts were far more than any player at Ohio State received for his memorabilia individually or the players received collectively. The recruiting services, according to Oregon, were to supplement the Oregon’s staffs’ own apparently inadequate recruiting efforts. As Yahoo Sports detailed, however, the payments were far more akin to a fee and agent, or Cam Newton’s dad, would get for bringing certain players to a certain program.

We know all this because Yahoo Sports (the same outfit that first revealed the Ohio State problems and did so without the attendant innuendo or overreaching) actually had the alleged recruiter on the record admitting as much. In fact, the alleged recruiter, Will Lyles, went further and described in rather sordid detail that he didn’t perform traditional recruiting services but instead was paid to exercise his influence over certain recruits. In this regard Lyles was a veritable font of information. He said that after Oregon came on to the NCAA’s radar, Oregon then asked him to prepare scouting reports on certain players as part of an after-the-fact justification for his services. He further details, for example, how he advised the family of LeMarcus James to transfer to another high school in his last semester in order to avoid a standardized test he couldn’t pass so that he could then be recruited by Oregon (an idea Lyles said Oregon congratulated him on). Lyles detailed other shady conduct and had the handwritten thank you note from Kelly to prove the intimate nature of his access to the Oregon program.

These are some deeply troubling allegations, far more troubling then what occurred at Ohio State (save for the allegations related to Tressel’s dishonesty), and have the added benefit of the benefactor of the cash on the record admitting what he had done. But it’s Oregon and they are out west and ESPN could hardly be bothered with the story.

How do I know? Well, let’s start with the fact that it’s barely been mentioned by ESPN in any of its formats or the fact that there has been no “Outside the Lines” documentary created to detail it.

But let me advance that notion a giant step forward. I sent a public records request to the University of Oregon media relations department to specifically get a copy of each and every records request that it has received from ESPN since December, 2010 about the Ducks football program.

Two weeks ago came back the answer: two. The first request was a list of all the revenues and expenditures from the athletic department. The second was for a list of anyone who received complimentary sideline passes since 2007. ESPN refined its first request when Oregon sent them back a financial report, by asking for expenditures the athletic department made for recruiting services. Ultimately though that’s the extent of their investigation into Oregon.

Contrast that again with the literally volumes of materials they’ve requested from Ohio State (as ESPN itself acknowledged in the lawsuit against Ohio State) and ask yourself whether ESPN really is being the fair and balanced outlet they claim to be.

For example, while ESPN was acutely interested in every email, text or phone call Jim Tressel or Gordon Gee or Gene Smith ever sent or had , in the material Oregon sent me ESPN didn’t even bother to request any such material from Chip Kelly, who the recruiter admitted he had direct contact with, or the athletic director.

There were no requests of Oregon into any internal investigatory materials, including their procedures manual, nor any requests of what Oregon may have sent to the NCAA. These same requests were made of Ohio State and for which Ohio State complied.

The difference between these two scandals has everything to do with geography and perception. Unquestionably the Buckeyes are the far more successful football program but it’s not as if the Oregon Ducks are some minor school. They played in the BCS National Championship game last season and in the Rose Bowl the season before that (and lost both). Before that the Ducks were mostly playing in minor bowl games but recent history shows that it’s a program on the rise and that Kelly is the reason.

ESPN can offer up any excuse it wants for the disparity of intensity with which its pursued these two stories, but the only explanation that makes any sense (outside of abject laziness) is bias. ESPN started with a theory about the Buckeyes and is hellbent on either proving it right or at least making sure others share that same unproven theory.

Ohio State, or rather certain individuals within Ohio State, did some wrong things here for which they’re being punished. That’s not the problem. Rather the problem is an irresponsible media, particularly ESPN, continuously hammering the program beyond all bounds of fairness while not applying those same standards to another Division I program with its own serious problems. That amounts to bias, a charge which ESPN would never own up to.

Having been affiliated with the “media” for years now there’s one thing I know and will readily admit before nearly any other media member: as professionals they are incredibly thin skinned. They rarely if ever accept any responsibility for the results of their irresponsible actions, wrapping themselves instead in the First Amendment and then claiming that the public are too big of idiots to understand exactly how journalism works.

What both ESPN and Sports Illustrated have done in the case of Ohio State is borderline journalism at best. It only qualifies tangentially as journalism because they were able to get some facts right—the facts that Yahoo Sports uncovered originally. The other stuff is the kind of currency that tabloids like the National Enquirer traffic in more frequently—breathless accusations anonymously sourced. Occasionally they get something right but mostly they are wrong an unapologetic for it. That’s not journalism any more than Page Six of the New York Post is journalism.

I said from the beginning that the Ohio State story had no victims but I was wrong. The victims are the profession of journalism and all those who use media as a proxy to uncover the real scandal. I never understood why journalists are so lightly regarded because so many of them do good work. But just like a rogue coach can sully that profession so too can the irresponsible many that dot the payrolls of places like ESPN and Sports Illustrated sully the good working journalists just trying to do a decent, responsible job.

The tattoo scandal and all it actually wrought is certainly not Ohio State’s proudest moment. The real irony though is that while Ohio State is already on the road to recovery from it the profession of journalism is all the worse for it.