The Death of Context

It all goes back to tattoos.  The idiotic “scandal” that started with immature football players trading off their transitory status as big men on campus in order to score some ink they’ll regret getting someday has now claimed its biggest prize: Ohio State president Gordon Gee.  

Gee announced his retirement effective July 1 and its timing coincides with some goofy and at best mildly offensive comments about Notre Dame, the SEC, the University of Louisville, the University of Kentucky and the University of Cincinnati.

But make no mistake, this all goes back to tattoos.  When that story broke and another good man, head football coach Jim Tressel was in the crosshairs, Gee stood there at the press conference like it was open mic night at the Chucklehut, awkwardly eking out a joke without realizing perhaps the full gravity of the situation.  Gee was trying to acknowledge the popularity of Tressel and be self deprecating at the same time.  It had all the humor of a plane crash joke made at the funeral of a 9/11 victim.

But of course the tattoo scandal was a national scandal because it happened at the biggest university in the country and involved a head coach with a squeaky clean image that others, particularly a sports media that seems to hate success, felt couldn’t be true.  Tressel lied to the NCAA about the matter and paid the price.  That incident may define him to others that don’t know better, but it hardly defines him at all.  Tressel was a good man then and is a good man today, still doing what he does best: helping young people find the right path forward.

When Gee made his awkward joke he probably didn’t realize that the same drive-by jackals with no concern for context that skewered Tressel were doing the same to him.  Gee’s joke began to define him in a way he ultimately could never escape.  So when Gee when off script once again, which was always his wont, and made innocuous but hardly anything more than mildly offensive jokes at the expense of Notre Dame and the SEC, well that was more than the jackals could abide.  The ginned up outrage that was first spewed at Tressel and had since been brewing bubbled over once again and at Gee in a way that would tarnish his ability to lead Ohio State forever more.

Let’s not have a debate about what was said.  There’s no hard line that he crossed.  It may seem a bit undignified for any university president to make jokes at the expense of others but let’s also acknowledge that what some saw as offensive, others saw as humorous and both seemingly conflicting points of view can coexist without the globe spinning off its axis.

The jackals that went after Gee as if he had murdered a ward full of babies with his bare hands should be ashamed of themselves.  In the pursuit of another scalp sacrificed at the altar of political correctness the world of higher education in this country is now worse off than it was just a few days before.  Exactly why anyone would celebrate that is beyond my limited abilities to mentally grasp.

Gee embarrassed Ohio State and by all accounts the board of trustees there took appropriate actions, just as they should have.  But apparently it wasn’t good enough for the pristine among us that apparently are without sin, venial or mortal.  They had to surmise for us all that somehow Ohio State couldn’t stand for what’s right and good and still stand behind Gee.  They were wrong.

Gee’s retirement, forced or otherwise, is but the latest example of a society that has completely lost its ability to contextualize an issue.  It won’t be the last.  Scandal and what passes for scandal are now exactly the same thing.  Joe Paterno knowingly shielding a pedophile is not greater than Gordon Gee mocking the shortsighted nitwits at Notre Dame or the ethically challenged in the SEC.  In a society fixated on destroying one another to make ourselves feel better, all things are equal.

Meanwhile, does anyone even care what Gee actually stands for or what he’s accomplished?  Does that somehow get negated because he’s lousy at making jokes?  Had he been better at it the jackals would be applauding his wicked sense of humor and his willingness to gently jab at the dual sacred athletic cows of Notre Dame and the SEC.  There are plenty of perfectly appropriate jokes to be made at either’s expense and when done with, I suppose, more sensitivity no one will raise an eyebrow.  Right now someone somewhere is making those jokes.  But because Gee is a better administrator than joke writer, the subtext becomes the subject and the messenger gets shot.

Gee is saying publicly that he wasn’t asked to resign and I suppose there’s reason to believe that’s true.  The actual jokes were made last December and the board dealt with it before the Associated Press ever got wind of the issue in the first place.  But I also suppose that there are those who recently whispered in Gee’s ear that this incident, when combined with his equally poor joke during the tattoo scandal, put Ohio State back in an unfavorable light.  If there was one thing Gee couldn’t abide, and it’s exactly what made Gee a great president in the first place, was putting the institution he loved in an unfavorable light.

So now is this finally the end of the tattoo scandal?  Is it?  Can it finally be put to rest now that Gee has been put out to pasture or must it be the ink stain that can never be removed?  Do I really need to ask because we already know the answers, don’t we?

Urban Architecture

How you feel about the Ohio State Buckeyes hiring Urban Meyer as its next football coach probably says a lot about how you feel about college football in general these days.

For Buckeyes fans, Meyer’s hiring, assuming he’s the Meyer of two national championships and not the burned out Dick Vermeil-type that left Florida in the lurch, this is the best possible outcome to the worst possible scenario.

No one outside of the drive-by moralistic hypocrites in the national media who simultaneously scream for an even bigger payday for a national championship while belittling the sordid side of what all that money brings with it wanted to see Jim Tressel leave the Buckeyes.

Tressel committed a serious infraction of NCAA rules. The system depends on honesty from those running programs and Tressel wasn’t. It’s highly debatable whether he deserved the equivalent of the death penalty for his single transgression, but that plane has flown and there won’t be a return trip.

Having Tressel be replaced by Meyer is almost scripted too perfectly for the locals, kind of like Al Lerner pushing his friend Art Modell to move the franchise to Baltimore and then buying the new one in Cleveland. It surely makes the nervous nellies think that Meyer in Columbus can’t possibly end well, even if he wins big.

Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Meyer has a consistent record of high achievement and the requisite Ohio State roots so there isn’t any reason to think that his success won’t continue. Yet for many fans, particularly those in Cleveland who understand that every silver lining in their sports world exists merely to deflect attention briefly from the dark clouds, they’ll watch with that same skeptical eye usually reserved for the Indians and the Browns.

For those solely focused on the Buckeyes, like the more pragmatic folks downstate, they tend to take their luck when they find it and don’t question its source. So Meyer as a Buckeye is the lucky penny with no downside and if he does fail there will be someone better to come along anyway.

Indeed there really isn’t a downside to the Meyer hiring. He’s the right age. He’s coming off a self-imposed sabbatical, which means his batteries are fully charged, and he seems poised to pounce like a dog at the ankle of the UPS guy. He says the right things. He does the right things.

Once we step outside of the parochial world of the Buckeyes program and its fans, though, all that the hiring of Meyer suggests is that for all the good talk about reigning in a sport that is careening out of control, no one’s serious. Not Gordon Gee. Not the NCAA and certainly not the media despite their constant moralizing.

It starts with the money that Meyer is being paid. We’ll know soon enough the exact terms because it will be a public record. But it’s multi-millions over multi-years. And yet in the context of the Buckeyes program it’s a blip. No non-revenue sports will get cut and overall it’s a cost that’s easily absorbed by a nine figure enterprise.

The fact that any college team, public or private, can afford to pay that kind of money to a football coach is really a rather shocking thing, isn’t it? Yet it’s common place, so much so in fact that complaining about the spiraling costs of high quality football coaches puts one in the “get off of my lawn” category.

But isn’t all this piling on of the cash what got programs like Ohio State, Auburn, Miami, Boise State, Michigan, and, of course, Penn State, in trouble in the first place?

Maybe that answer, too, depends on your perspective. Still it’s hard to not place the latest volley in the arms race that is big time coach hiring in the context of the larger picture about all that is wrong with college football.

There rarely is a week that goes by when one program or another has run afoul of the NCAA. Part of that stems from a rule book so draconian and yet so oblique that it’s hard sometimes to even find a thread of logic for the underlying rule. The other part of it stems from the fact that the pressure to win in college football is every bit as great as it is in the NFL because the money is too great to be ignored.

On the same day that Meyer was hired by Ohio State, 10 other coaches, at least, lost their jobs and all for the same essential reason, the negative impact those coaches were having on the athletic department’s bottom line. That includes big names like Rick Neuiheisel at UCLA and Ron Zook at Illinois to the next tier down like Turner Gill at Kansas to still another tier down like Ron Ianello at Akron.

The Ianello firing is instructive because even at the level at which the Zips play, winning and the money that follows winning, guide the decisions. Ianello won exactly two games in his two seasons so on the surface the firing shouldn’t even raise an eyebrow.

But in reaching the decision, Zips athletic director Tom Wistrcill had to notice the increasing abundance of open seats at their new stadium. Akron’s stadium is modest by Big 10 standards but keeping it mostly filled is still important to the overall health of the football program’s budget. So Akron will find a new coach, pay him about $400,000 and hope for the best, which means more butts in the seats.

Meanwhile Meyer’s top assistants will be pulling down at least that much to further ensure that a football program teetering at the moment doesn’t have an extended stay in the land of 6-6. Money doesn’t always guarantee success. But spending big money to make even bigger money should guarantee against extended failure.

Meanwhile it’s not hard to wonder what must go through the minds of all those players, particularly the likes of Dan Herron and Devier Posey who got smacked down so hard because of their desire to have even the faintest of taste of the big bills being thrown around like confetti after the BCS title game.

Surely they must shake their heads and wonder why the system conspired to hurt their brief careers so harshly over chump change while it greatly enriches those at the top of the pyramid. Consider just the example of how a failure like Rich Rodriguez ended up with a bigger salary from Arizona then he was pulling down from Michigan before he was fired. They’re hoping certainly that the Michigan experience was an anomaly and he’ll go back to being the Rodriguez of the more successful West Virgnia experience. Their budget depends on it.

It all just proves the point that no mistake is too big to overcome if there is even a slightest chance that it will bring more money to the program.

If it weren’t for the fact that nothing in the great State of Ohio is more beloved then Buckeyes football, given this kind of economic disparity underscored by the Meyer hiring you could almost see the roots of an Occupy Ohio State movement take hold. Almost.

I’m not going to begrudge the Buckeyes their glamor hire because I’m a Buckeyes fan like the rest of the sane citizens of this State. It’s important to me for reasons that are completely stupid in the grand scheme of life to see that the team succeeds. I happen to think Meyer is a fabulous hire and since I’m not directly paying for it, I couldn’t be happier. The real worst case scenario to me would have been hiring the next John Cooper. That’s not going to happen.

Yet I’m nonetheless perplexed at the insanity that has enveloped college football generally and keep batting around the question in my mind if the Meyer hiring is a further sign of the coming apocalypse or just another head shaking moment in a sport so corrupt that these things now seem perfectly acceptable.

There’s no question, though, that with all that the money has brought the sport, things like constant conference re-alignment, jerry-rigged national championships, low-life boosters, players and their “consultants” gaming the system, shady coaches who look the other way because they are just as scared as anyone as to what lies down that dark alley, a day of reckoning is coming. Let’s just hope it’s still a few years and another Buckeyes national championship away.

Now This Is What A Scandal Looks Like

Does there ever come a point where the Board of Trustees at Ohio State slaps their collective heads and wish that they had perhaps waited for perspective to sink in just a big longer before deciding Jim Tressel had to go?

They wouldn’t have had to wait long and they might have come to a different conclusion.

Given the state of major college athletics today, which combines outdated rules with an almost unbridled money grab fostered by the university hierarchies and their media partners, it was inevitable that a new scandal would develop and envelop the sport in a way that would make what happened at Ohio State seem quaint by comparison.

Well that new scandal has happened, perhaps quicker than anticipated, and it’s a real shitstorm of a scandal that looks to have the University of Miami Hurricanes engulfed for years to come. If even a quarter of the allegations bear out (and the way they are backed up by hard evidence rather than innuendo suggests that will be a minimum) Miami may have to abandon its football program completely.

OK, the Miami scandal isn't an absolute shitstorm yet because ESPN hasn't declared it as such by oddly giving as much if not more attention to minor claims by former Buckeye Terrelle Pryor's lawyer that Pryor supposedly acknowledged in Mayhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif that he committed even more infractions then have been reported (since denied by OSU) then they have to a much more far reaching scandal in Miami.

Maybe that’s because ESPN can’t figure out how to report the Miami story without sending its viewers over to Yahoo Sports to read Charles Robinson’s incredibly well documented expose of about as wide ranging of problems in a college sports program that the NCAA has ever seen. Read the full report here

As Matt Yoder at AwfulAnnouncing.com said about the brewing controversy the “Miami case is OSU, GT, UNC and every scandal from the past year combined, multiplied by infinity, and exploded with a nuclear bomb.” He may have understated the case.

The Miami situation is so far over the top and beyond all bounds of what was even imaginable in this day and age and was apparently conducted in such an open and notorious manner that it truly does put exactly what went wrong at Ohio State in far better perspective. The Ohio State scandal, such as it was, actually involved just a handful of athletes involved with a small time criminal who offered them free tattoos in exchange for signing memorabilia. It was wrong, the players knew (or should have known) it was wrong, but plowed ahead anyway.

In terms of infractions, this hardly constituted the dirty bomb of a program that ESPN and Sports Illustrated tried to paint it as through the use of shadowy figures and unconfirmed allegations. And if that’s as far as the Ohio State story had gone, then we wouldn’t be talking about it much more.

But what set it apart were two factors. First, it was Ohio State. That apparently is a real line of demarcation for ESPN and Sports Illustrated because, frankly, the scandals at Boise State and Oregon, for example, are far more extensive in nature and far more greatly ignored by those two media outlets.

Second, the head coach lied about the problem. ESPN and Sports Illustrated, with no interest in perspective and no tolerance for explanation and because, it was Ohio State and not, say, the University of Connecticut basketball program, kept applying the pressure to the school’s board of trustees so intensely that they effectively gave them no choice but to issue Tressel the death penalty. See, problem solve?

Not so fast. There's no reason to rehash the Ohio State story except as to place it in contrast with the very next and far worse controversy that hit. According to Robinson’s reporting, the Miami scandal reaches to at least two athletic directors, several assistant head coaches and even, potentially some former head coaches, most or all of whom are now employed elsewhere in NCAA-sanctioned schools.

In a delicious bit of irony, one of the former athletic director’s involved, Paul Dee, also served as the chair of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions. According to a report in the Miami Herald, Dee said he expects to be interviewed. Indeed he will.

It won’t be a case where, if Robinson’s story holds together, Dee can simply say he didn’t know what was going on. Ground zero for the extensive allegations was a very prominent booster of the Hurricane’s program, Nevin Shapiro, a convicted criminal of far more major proportions than the hood at the center of the Buckeyes scandal. Shapiro is now serving time in federal prison for running a Ponzi scheme, the proceeds of which Shapiro claims he used to shower the Hurricanes’ programs and players with things like cash, gifts, prostitutes and anything else I suppose a young athlete’s heart may have desired.

The reason the Dee connection is important to this story is because of how hypocritical it can be for a self-policing agency like NCAA to actually self police. It will be almost impossible for Dee to credibly claim absolutely no knowledge about what Shapiro was doing on some level because Shapiro was such a prominent booster that the athletic department named an athlete’s lounge after him. And if that wasn’t enough, Shapiro had access to the press box and once got into a physical altercation with a member of the athletic department’s compliance group during a game while in that press box.

Meanwhile, flushed with that knowledge, Dee was overseeing punishment for other schools guilty of far lesser crimes. I know this: if I was the lawyer representing a school who was punished under Dee’s tenure as chairman of the NCAA’s infractions committee I’d immediately seek to have that punishment revoked on the basis of self-dealing and conflict of interest.

What’s so amazing about the Miami story is the sheer breadth of the allegations. It doesn’t just touch prominent former players like Kellen Winslow, Jr., but also current players like Jacory Harris. It includes in excess of 70 players in all as well as several recruits. It involves alleged payments to players by Shapiro for putting vicious hits on opponents like Tim Tebow. It involves allegations of hooking recruits up with prostitutes. It even involves Shapiro eventually buying into a sports agency and then funneling cash to Miami players in order to represent them after they graduated. That’s a pretty wide swath and I’m just getting started. You really owe it to yourself to read the story.

What’s also so amazing is the difference between the initial response by Miami and that by Ohio State for what amounts to a pimple of a scandal in comparison. Where Ohio State tried to get ahead of the story and took much criticism for it, Miami has basically stayed silent except for the perfunctory “we’re cooperating with the NCAA” press release and that they're taking this seriously.

Maybe Ohio State University president Gordon Gee and athletic director Gene Smith and even Tressel conducted what was surely a rushed and clumsy press conference, they at least said as much as they could at the scandal’s flashpoint. Sure, that gave the critics more to work with and perhaps increased the pressure on Gee and Smith to distance themselves from Tressel, but at least they stood up from the outset and took the heat.

Miami, meanwhile, seems to be in a state of shock fully unable to even utter a coherent word. In their press release they shamelessly tried to deflect attention away from Miami by saying that this was a marker for the need for fundamental change in college football. That's true to an extent, but they can't very well avoid blame by blaming the system they cultivated. Moreover they haven’t even begun to take action by at least suspending the current players named pending further investigation, a usual first step.

And of course, it’s worth noting again that ESPN seems dumbfounded by the whole darn thing. On its Tuesday late night edition of SportsCenter, which was filmed well after the story broke, ESPN actually had a the negative reference about Ohio State and Pryor on the air well before it even bothered to mention that there was some sort of kerfuffle going on in Miami. Thirty-five minutes into that edition of SportsCenter and the Miami story hadn’t even been mentioned.

There’s little doubt that the overhang on the Miami-Ohio State matchup in a few weeks will be significant. But where ESPN tried to manufacture a far bigger scandal than actually existed at Ohio State in order to push an agenda, the Miami scandal looks like it could actually push that sea level change that’s actually needed. It will be interesting to see which story ESPN gives more prominence to in the run up to that game.

There are significant problems in college sports and everything that allegedly was going on at Miami and at the level it supposedly was taking place underscores just about every possible misgiving people ever had about the state of the enterprise. But solving those problems will be almost impossible when media outlets like ESPN, like crack dealers, are actually helping foster those very problems by showering certain programs (like Texas) and conferences (like the SEC) with millions upon millions for preferred access.

When these schools and conferences take that money to line their own pockets they and their bloated budgets get addicted to it and find themselves suddenly unable to say no, let alone solve the problems that all that money creates. As for the lesser schools and conferences trying to get their own piece of the pie, the message is sent: similar deals await similar successes. That pushes those programs more toward the edges and further away from the mainstream. The circle of NCAA life.

Meanwhile the kids who make those programs go see all the money changing hand, money fostered by the moralizing half-witted hypocrites at ESPN, and wonder when they’re going to get their taste. When the NCAA tells them they're amateurs and shudders at the notion of sharing the wealth with them, that hardly quenches their thirst. They just go underground and hence it's just a matter of time until the next great scandal.

It would be nice to think that all of this would scare the NCAA and their members school straight but it won't. There's no 12-step program for any of them to get clean.

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.

Closing Another Chapter

Terrelle Pryor was always supposed to leave Ohio State after his junior year. It’s just that it was assumed it would be through the front door and not some back alley during finals week of his spring quarter.

Whether Pryor left of his own volition or was pushed probably doesn’t matter much. He’s gone and off to wherever his mercurial life takes him next. He’ll probably latch on to a NFL team at one position or another at some point. He may have to take some detours first, like the CFL. Maybe he just fades away. For Pryor, his next career will only take him as far as he’s willing to let it.

If past is prologue, that thought doesn’t bode well for Pryor. On the other hand with kids past rarely is prologue. So there is hope.

There are new allegations of course about Pryor that came out the same day he left Ohio State for good. The latest set is from someone who labeled himself as a one-time close friend who got tired of Pryor’s arrogant attitude. This anonymous source claimed he witnessed Pryor being paid between $20,000 and $40,000 in exchange for signing various pieces of memorabilia.

It’s a pretty damning accusation if true but the principles involved, including the person who is alleged to have made the payments, claim it never happened. There have been no cancelled checks produced and no proof other than a disgruntled ex-friend. On that score, it’s always instructive that those making the accusations try to bolster their credibility by claiming a close relationship with the alleged perpetrator but then are too afraid to identify themselves publicly.

At this point, not much of this really matters much anymore anyway. Pryor didn’t so much leave the Buckeyes as he did the jurisdiction of the NCAA. No longer bound by their rules and under no compulsion to subject himself to any more investigations or interrogations from them, Pryor’s exit is more about relieving himself of the headaches that come with acting like a professional in a land of sham amateurism.

Pryor will be vilified for years because he’s an easy target. He comes across as arrogant and entitled but let’s remember, since we’re the adults in the room, that usually these are just the outward manifestations of the real affliction—raging immaturity.

His charge going forward will be to learn and grow. It won’t be a straight line because it never is. For Pryor’s sake, though, hopefully he can learn from the adversity that he inflicted upon himself in the same way that Maurice Clarett, Pryor’s like-minded bookend to the Tressel’s years, finally learned from his.

In a story from Rusty Miller for the Associated Press, Clarett gave an interview on The Dan Patrick Show and offered a surprising, refreshing and yes, mature, perspective on what’s taking place at his former school.

In no uncertain terms Clarett blamed the players, just as he blamed himself, for the trouble that followed their actions. Clarett dispensed with the notion that Ohio State has been infiltrated with a cadre of boosters preying on unsuspecting players. Instead it is the players themselves that go looking for trouble, looking for ways to capitalize on their local fame, and doing it under the radar. As Clarett said, boosters didn’t reach out to him, he reached out to them.

Maybe that’s little solace to Buckeye fans at the moment, but it does illustrate that even if it does seem like the Buckeyes are trapped in a do-loop of accusations and investigations, the world indeed does keep on spinning.

For now though, those caught in this ring of Hell, including most Ohio State administrators and the Board of Trustees, are just as happy just to close the book on Pryor as he likely is on them. As it is, Pryor will now essentially be remembered for nothing on the field (though his contributions there were considerable) and always for being the catalyst for the program’s more destructive instincts.

Whether that assessment is fair likewise doesn’t really matter anymore anyway. What matters most is public perception and once Gene Smith and Gordon Gee, at the urging of the most senior members of the Board of Trustees, determined that Pryor, like Jim Tressel, became the stain that couldn’t be cleaned, he had to go, graciously or otherwise. If Tressel was getting lukewarm support from Smith even as he was being dangled as the entrée for the NCAA’s investigative appetite, Smith’s silence toward Pryor was deafening.

In most ways, what’s happened to the Ohio State Buckeyes football program since the end of last season is unfathomable. I doubt anyone thought that the Buckeyes program was pristine in the same way that no one thinks that any major football program is pristine. But I doubt that anyone thought the Buckeyes program was built like a Bluth Family housing development, impressive from the outside but lacking virtually any substance behind the façade.

And yet here we are, just 6 months from the end of last season and the Buckeyes program looks more worn and tattered than a fading 2002 National Championship banner hanging from a flag pole in the neighbor’s yard. It seems like a week hasn’t gone by since the run up to last year’s Sugar Bowl when another negative story about this player or that coach hasn’t come out.

There’s a certain fishbowl quality to any major program, but the Buckeyes aren’t just swimming in a fish bowl. At the moment it seems like they are the only fish in a very large aquarium and all anyone can do is fixate on them at the moment. That glare will end at some point. Sooner or later another school will step into it and become the next target of the collective wrath.

But until that happens, it’s going to be body blow after body blow and like the captive Louis Zamperini, the hero of Laura Hildebrand’s excellent book “Unbroken” had to do in front of his Japanese captors, Buckeyes fans will just have to take the punches and the kicks and the constant degradation without flinching lest even more then be inflicted.

Even as this latest chapter in the Summer of Hell for the Buckeyes unfolds, I suspect that eventually those fans that bother to stop and consider Pryor in a broader context will begin to understand and empathize, if just a bit, recognizing that in many ways he, like every other Cam Newton of the world, is the byproduct of the intense greed that rests at the center of big time college football.
For whatever else this sordid tale tells us, it screams for major reforms. Until that happens, until those issues are finally and forcefully addressed, those laughing at Pryor and the Buckeyes at the moment would be wise to keep in mind that the next Terrelle Pryor may very well be working his way through your favorite college program right now.

Asking the Right Questions

If you’re wondering whether the Ohio State “story” would ever die down, you’re not alone. It seems like too many folks just aren’t as satisfied as they thought they’d be taking down Jim Tressel. They want more bodies as they look for more people to blame for their own loss of innocence.

The story is no longer Ohio State. It’s all the sanctimonious hand wringing taking place by self-appointed moralizers in the media who are getting a unique thrill dragging the lifeless corpse of Tressel through the streets again and again.

We’ve seen it from the dullards at Sports Illustrated to the dimwits at Yahoo Sports to the empty heads at ESPN. If that isn’t enough for you, then you probably haven’t picked up your local paper in awhile (and you wouldn’t be alone on that count) because the locals aren’t going to miss an opportunity to jump in, late as usual.

If there is a victim here, it’s perspective. Lost in the two-step everyone is doing on Tressel’s grave is that in his 10 years at Ohio State, there were probably 900 or so players that went through the program. We know that in that time, Maurice Clarett and the Tattooed 5 broke NCAA rules. Ray Small admits he broke rules but was never charged. The Sports Illustrated story names about 28 players although there isn’t verification of that number from any credible, independent source.

Still, using the number of players that sold their own memorabilia for tattoos and possibly marijuana (although there isn’t any confirmation from any credible source of that accusation) identified by Sports Illustrated, it represents just 3% of all the players that went through the program at that time.

In one sense, that suggests 97% of the players were clean. Now all the moralizers like to throw in comments like “we know it was more than that” but that’s just a way of making the problem look worse without having to bother to offer actual proof that it really is. It may very well be that the number is higher. But even if it doubles, that means that just 6% of all the players that went through the program broke the rules.

That isn’t to excuse any of that behavior, either. The rule they broke is dumb but it is the rule. And 97% might get you an “A” in class but as far as the NCAA is concerned, anything less than 100% compliance is considered a failure. Fair enough. That’s the program these schools signed up for and they have to live with that blood pact.

But the point is that rampant vilifying of Tressel and Ohio State as running a criminal program just doesn’t match the facts. It only matches the convenient narrative of a bunch of lazy journalists who can think of nothing better to do then kick and punch a body that’s already been beaten to a pulp.

What should be frustrating to most people at the moment is that the underlying infraction by Tressel was his failure to tell the truth and yet so many moralizing on Tressel at the moment are themselves far more willfully ignorant of the truth than Tressel ever could have been in his time at Ohio State.

Does it matter that Sports Illustrated’s entire article was built on conjecture dressed up as fact? To me it does and hopefully it will to the NCAA, but who knows? They’re as random as any sports governing body anywhere and that’s taking due notice of outfits like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee.

There is virtually nothing in the Sports Illustrated article, outside of the admissions from the players we already knew about, which could ever stand up in a court of law. Maybe that’s not the right standard when this is being tried in the court of public opinion but it strikes me that before you impose any form of death penalty, whether it’s on Tressel, Gene Smith, Gordon Gee or a bunch of college kids, you ought to have something more to go on then supposition, conjecture, half truths and supposition.

But why single out Sports Illustrated? Terry Pluto, who usually gets things right, used his bully pulpit in the Plain Dealer to call for Ohio State to dismiss Pryor from the team. There is not one shred of logic, let alone fact, to indicate exactly why Pryor should be subject to such a drastic action. It’s just Pluto saying that it will help rid the team of its problems.

I’m not here to defend Pryor except from unfair journalism. If he did more than what he’s already been punished for, then by all means he deserves whatever action comes next. But Pluto hasn’t suggested that Pryor is guilty of anything other than supposedly bad judgment for showing up for a meeting in a brand new used car for which no one has accused him, let alone proven, that he didn’t pay for. Indeed, both the university and the dealership went to the unusual step of publicly demonstrating that Pryor got no such special deal on the car.

Maybe Pryor used bad judgment, I’ll leave it to moralizers like Pluto who live at a higher level than the rest of us to decide. But it isn’t a reason in and of itself to kick the kid off the team. Let’s at least wait until there’s an actual factual reason to do so.

Then there was Bob Frantz, the morning blowhard at WTAM who apparently has someone transcribe his ramblings into a column in the News-Herald. He gave a nice little shout out to the Sports Illustrated story and then piles on without any actual facts with the kind of throwaway line that tends to make these situations far worse than they are. He talks about the 28 players named by Sports Illustrated and says there were “probably more” even though he has nothing to back up that kind of statement than the view he has from inside his dark little studio in Cleveland.

Frantz’s larger point had to do with beating down the notion that paying college athletes won’t solve problems like this, it will only make them worse. I’m not sure how he got from Point A to Point B on that theory, but that’s the least of the problems with his column. Taking an even higher and more naïve moral ground than Pluto, Frantz says that amateur athletes must remain amateurs and it’s up to the adults in the room to make that happen.

The problem with the premise is that college athletes, at least those in Division I on scholarship, have never been amateurs. If what distinguishes a professional athlete from an amateur is payment for services rendered, then the mere fact that the payment a college athlete receives is in the form of an expensive education and not cash is a distinction without a difference. Both are still quite valuable. The college athlete is only considered an amateur by fools like Frantz because that’s how he chooses to label them. It doesn’t mean it’s true.

It’s really just a question of how much more college athletes should be paid. It’s a fair question to debate but suggesting that giving them a cash stipend like graduate assistants get will make things worse has no basis in fact.

This whole scandal at Ohio State will serve a greater purpose if it becomes a watershed moment by which everyone who ever made a buck off of it re-evaluates their own priorities. But these things rarely work that way, even if they should.

I’m tired of every writer at Sports Illustrated who ever bothered to publish an opinion advocating for a college football playoff because of the money moralizing against a stupid college kid wrongly thinking that he can’t get in trouble by following the actions of those who are supposed to be shaping his development.

There's a real food chain in college athletics. It starts with the media and the networks that pay millions upon millions for the right to broadcast games. It extends next to the universities that take that money and millions more in sponsorships of all sorts, from luxury boxes to exclusive apparel deals with the likes of Nike. It extends next to the athletic directors who are rewarded financially for putting good competitive teams on the field and increasing the athletic program’s revenues. It extends next to the coaches who are usually the highest paid employees at their universities. They get paid enormous sums for winning and they jump from program to program without care or concern to enhance their own bank accounts. The final link is the kids who actually make it all happen—the fuel without which this train would go nowhere. They get a free education but are constantly lured by the professional ranks, if they're good enough, to leave early and not even finish that education.

In that entire chain, the most pressure is actually put on the least mature and least equipped--the students. They are the ones that aren't supposed to act like every other money-grubbing adult in the chain above them and God forbid if they do. The chain gets broken and high minded thumb suckers at publications like Sports Illustrated lead the parade over the dead bodies by stupidly asking “how could this all happen?” not realizing that they didn’t even bother to ask the right question.

It reminds me of the scene from Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” where Frederick the artist is telling his girlfriend about a dull show on Auschwitz that he had just watched on television: “More gruesome film clips and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions.” As he shakes his head in bemusement, he says “the reason they could never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is ‘Why doesn’t it happen more often?’” As Frederick notes, it does just in subtler forms.

Indeed. That’s the state of college athletics at the moment. Given what’s been created, the focus shouldn’t be on the individual perpetrators but the conditions that have come to exist that all but guarantees it will happen more often.

Surviving This Mess

Maybe if Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel had been more like University of Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun, the Buckeyes wouldn't have an interim coach for the upcoming season. But instead, as Memorial Day dawned, Tressel showed himself far more sensitive to the criticism and damage to his program than Calhoun ever could for his. And so, as Memorial Day dawned, Tressel held an early morning meeting with his players and his coaches and announced he was resigning.

The timing of Tressel's resignation could have been the impending story that George Dohrmann wrote for Sports Illustrated but if it was it's not necessarily for what the story contained but what it represented. This was a story that wouldn't end no matter how long Tressel had remained with the program. You can't move on until you move on.

With each passing day until the next media target emerges, and one always does, bits and pieces of the Tressel resignation story will emerge. Already it's being said that university officials encouraged him to resign and that's probably true. The only way to quit worrying about what's around the next corner is to start walking a straight line.

The sadness Buckeyes fans are feeling at the moment over this most miserable of stories is understandable. No matter what one thinks of what Tressel did or didn't do, he remains a great man and a great coach who deserved better.

Even as that sadness has taken hold for fans, it will compete with a healthy dose of anger as well, mostly directed at whoever they feel is to blame for this most stunning of developments.
As people pick over the bones of what remains of one of the all time great coaches in NCAA history, they will predictably stack up the blame for this result like so many cords of firewood.

The media, of course, is taking its usual blame not necessarily for reporting the story but for piling on. But blaming the media seems so Sarah Palin. The underlying story had to be reported and the fact that the coverage was incessant is more a function of the proliferation of news sites than anything else.

Still, the media in some sense is always to blame but let's face it, they had a lot to work with.

Terrelle Pryor, Boom Herron, Devier Posey and the rest of the crowd trading off their small-time celebrity status for privileges they didn't deserve are getting their share of blame as well. These kids, stupid as kids can be, are now classified as low character individuals and evidence of what happens when you shake hands with the devil.

Those players and others did have a responsibility to follow the rules and repeatedly did not. But it's still a little unseemly, isn't it, to talk about college kids that way? Heck, their character is hardly even established at this point. So let's ease off on harping on the kids, even the bad ones. Tressel, probably more than any other coach, seemed uniquely qualified to teach them life lessons and the testimonials from former players for whom he did just that back up this point. The fact that his success rate wasn't 100% is not much of a sin.

Still, in the law of negligence there is the concept called last clear chance and in this case Tressel had the last clear chance to avoid their negligence and did not. He had his reasons and it really doesn't matter what any of us think about those reasons. His decision making was flawed but so is most when judged in retrospect.

I still don't think that what Tressel did was a dischargeable offense. He was taking the medicine he deserved for the misconduct he had engaged in but he has a body of work to consider and all of those factors in my view more than weighed in favor of his remaining with the program. Indeed, I didn't think it was even a close call.

But there was blood in the water and there is a certain segment of our population that just loves to circle around those pools. In that sense then it's not a surprise that Tressel took the measure of the situation and realized that he'd never be able to swim safely to shore and neither would his program with him in the lead.

Some will see the Tressel resignation as a cut and run, for him and the university. In many ways, though, it was the ultimate act of courage and loyalty. The program is and always should be bigger than any individual.

Now what? That's very hard to figure. One thing though that is clear is that the question is far more significant now than when Tressel took over the program from John Cooper. What Tressel did for Ohio State can't just be measured in wins and losses, though his record is nothing short of amazing. It can't be measured in victories over Michigan, although his record their too was amazing.

Far more was the complete restoration of a storied program that took place under his watch. The head football coach for the Ohio State Buckeyes has always been a plum job but never more so than now and that's because of what Tressel did for this program.

Cooper left the program a mess. He recruited well but coached poorly. Discipline was lacking as was direction. Tressel brought a steady hand and methodically built the Buckeyes into such a juggernaut that his position became one of the top two or three coaching jobs in the country. Put it this way, Tressel made it so that no coach would ever leave Ohio State to become head football coach anywhere else.

Athletic director Gene Smith has an incredibly difficult decision on his hands and how he handles it will say a lot about where he and university president Gordon Gee want to take this program in the wake of all the criticism it's received. Surely they don't know yet what they want to do which is why Luke Fickell was named interim head coach for the rest of next season.

The speculation started months ago that Urban Meyer would be available in 2012 and perhaps he will. Hiring him would be tantamount to telling Buckeye faithful that the Ohio State program they came to know and love under Tressel will continue.

On the other hand, they could keep Fickell or go with a lesser name, like Michigan did in hiring Brady Hoke, as a way of staying off the radar screen for awhile and letting the program absorb the self-inflicted body blows.

I'll stay out of the prediction business. I thought Tressel would survive this and that was clearly wrong. But for those feeling sad and a little despondent over this all, just remember that no matter what comes next the program survived Cooper. It will survive this.

Churning Tressel

When is a mistake too big to overcome?

That’s the question that Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith, Ohio State President Gordon Gee and each member of the Ohio State board of trustees is actively weighing when it comes to the future of head football coach Jim Tressel.

It’s been a few weeks now since the notice of infractions from the NCAA that everyone knew was coming finally did show up on Ohio State’s doorstep. Though it really didn’t contain anything knew, it provided another round of fodder for those who were looking to knock the Buckeyes down a peg or two anyway. That’s not the problem.

The problem is it also gave fodder for those who have been defending Tressel another opportunity to rethink their position and each time that opportunity arises, undoubtedly some will do just that.

For me, I won’t be revisiting where I landed on the Tressel situation initially. That said, I do understand those that are beginning to feel differently. If nothing else you just get the sense that Tressel’s dishonesty or naïveté or however you want to paint his reaction to emails from a Columbus attorney about his players trading memorabilia for tattoos is starting to spook some of his most ardent backers.

Smith, for example, all but threw Tressel to lions in a recent and somewhat bizarre interview with USA Today. Smith intimated, for example, that Tressel was supposed to apologize at that initial press conference and did not, requiring Smith to remind Tressel of his obligations in that regard. Smith further intimated that Tressel was even somewhat reluctant to apologize because of, essentially, pride.

Well, Tressel did apologize and took full responsibility at the press conference. Apparently it wasn’t exactly in the format Smith wanted. Fair enough, Smith is the boss and has the right to dictate the terms and the obligation to express his unhappiness when performance falls short.

But Smith going public about that small point, and it was a small point, is evidence that this incident has worn Smith’s patience thin and that for now and the foreseeable future Tressel has absolutely no margin for error. It’s also suggestive of a clear rift between the two.

This isn’t at all to demonize Smith. The responsibilities of his job make it absolutely critical that the inmates never be seen as running the asylum and in this circumstance and irrespective of his status, Tressel is still one of the inmates.

But it’s still a little unseemly for Smith act that way toward Tressel publicly. If Smith has lost confidence in Tressel, that’s understandable. If that’s the case, then replace him and move on. But treating Tressel publicly like a pariah says at least as much about Smith’s lack of leadership skills as Tressel’s lack of candor says about his credibility.

The irony in all of this is that neither Smith nor Tressel lack for leadership skills or credibility, generally speaking. Both have been extremely valuable additions to the Ohio State athletic family. Yet because a group of knuckleheaded 18-20 year olds with an entitlement attitude and a desire to cut corners put both of them in the most difficult of spots, both now find themselves having to account for careers that essentially were unblemished until then.

Then of course were the recent comments from B1G Ten Commissioner Jim Delaney seeking a little distance between himself and his involvement in allowing Terrelle Pryor and company to play in the Sugar Bowl. Delaney went down the predictable “if I had known then what I know now” road by suggesting that on second thought he shouldn’t have gone to bat for the group.

The national writers, like Stewart Mandel at Sports Illustrated, treat every story related to this sordid mess as more evidence to support a completely made up theory that Tressel’s job status is in trouble. Joel Hammond, writing recently for Crain’s Cleveland Business, made Mandel’s same points, just on a local level. So have many others.

And yet there really hasn’t been anything new in this story since that initial press conference because Smith isn’t commenting (except when he does), Tressel isn’t talking and someone put a harness on Gee, probably for good reason.

For those who are starting to question whether Tressel can or should continue, I understand the argument because it’s the easy one to make. Pull out a copy of his book, The Winners’ Manual, find a passage or two about honesty and integrity, and then label him a hypocrite unfit to coach young men.

The problem with that narrative is that it suffers from a false premise itself. Tressel isn’t a hypocrite, by text book definition or otherwise. A hypocrite is one who pretends to have certain virtues that he in fact doesn’t have. Where’s the evidence that Tressel meets any of that criteria.

Falling short on one occasion doesn’t make one a hypocrite or, if it does, then let the first person among us who isn’t a hypocrite apply for the Buckeyes’ head coaching job. It won’t be a very long line outside of Gene Smith’s office.

A hypocrite implies someone having a pattern of saying one thing but doing another, like Newt Gingrich running on a family values platform as he moves on to his third wife, or is it his fourth?

When it comes to Tressel no one has suggested such a pattern because there in fact isn’t one. Indeed, the reason virtually every former Buckeyes player not named Kirk Herbstreit, not to mention virtually every notable college football coach in the nation, has come out so strongly in support of Tressel is because his actions here were so anomalous.

That isn’t to suggest that any of them agree with Tressel’s actions here because they are indefensible. He had any number of other ways he could have handled this and chose absolutely the wrong one. He’s in the midst of being punished, may be subject to more, and the program is likewise going to be punished. It’s all deserved.

But the punishment, too, has to fit the crime. There is a reason that not every crime carries the death penalty and whatever else one may think about what Tressel did, he didn’t commit a death penalty crime.

There may come a point where Tressel’s future should be seriously reconsidered but simply because the formal allegations everyone expected finally arrived isn’t it.

Tressel will survive this mess and so, too, will the Buckeyes. It will be tough in the near term when the additional penalties finally hit. But there’s a cycle to this story just as there is with most others and I suspect that those writing Tressel’s death notice now will be the same ones writing about his remarkable resurrection sometime down the road. Because the thing to remember most is that if there’s one story people enjoy more than the one where the hero alls from grace it’s the one where the hero rises again and redeems himself.