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

When now former NBA player Jason Collins revealed that he was a gay athlete last year, it was hard, actually, to appreciate the courage it took.  To understand it, no better context exists than the circus that is the Miami Dolphins at the moment.

Richie Incognito, the hulking lineman who seems hell bent on trying to outlive the suggestion his last name would seem to mandate, is a crude, boorish, possible racist with deeply rooted insecurities.  He’s bullied his way through the NFL at various stops and while his behavior at times has caused a few teammates to just shake their heads, it’s always been in the “that’s Richie just being Richie” sort of way.  His past has been his prologue with no seemingly ill effects.

Jonathan Martin is a Stanford-educated second year lineman of some talent who put up with an unceasing amount of verbal crap from Incognito and other “teammates” until he could take it no more.  It seemed mostly related to his status as first a rookie and now a second year player.  He left the team last week and on the way out the door after an unspecified run-in during a team lunch he decided not to go quietly.

The stress of the abuse seemed to overwhelm Martin and by all accounts he has nothing particular in his background that elicited the attacks.  But could you imagine if he did?  Could you imagine if he had been Jason Collins?  Every person has a breaking point.  Yet, since then little sympathy has been generated his way, in particular little sympathy from “teammates” and others ensconced in and vested with the perpetuation of the unique culture of a professional sports locker room and its status as the last bastion of the all boys club.

There’s enough disappointment around about those who have stood silent or defended Incognito at the expense of Martin to fill up a book the size of a typical Stephen King novel.  Others better suited to that exposing that sort of outrage have weighed in.  Personally, though, I was disappointed in Brian Hartline’s reaction.  Rather than come to Martin’s defense or at least add a balanced perspective, Hartline evaluated the politics of the situation and his place in the locker room and came out squarely against Martin.  I would like to think an Ohio State athlete schooled under Jim Tressel would have reacted better than that.

Nonetheless, the overwhelming amount of analysis about this situation inevitably lands at the intersection of jock behavior and NFL culture.  But it’s not just NFL culture for the same kind of abuse takes place not just in NFL locker rooms but in the locker rooms housing male athletes in virtually every athletic pursuit from middle school to professionals all across the country if not the world.  The typical male athlete is infused with arrested development anyway so it shouldn’t surprise that the behavior that starts young carries over to well beyond the point it ceases to make any sense whatsoever.

Most “locker room behavior” isn’t clever.  It’s the same sort of derogatory abuse that picks first at the scabs of the most vulnerable.  Nothing Incognito said or did to Martin, for example, is any cleverer than the towel-snapping and wedgie escapes of high schoolers.  The only thing that’s changed really is the economic status and the physical size of the participants.

Until you can stop and consider this culture for a moment you can’t begin to fathom how difficult it would have been for Collins to be an openly gay athlete during the prime of his career.  Collins may have been wrestling with his own sexuality for years, conflicted by it, tortured by it, but all the while the overhang to the self-analysis was the unforgiving, uncompromising attitudes of his “teammates.”  The chances of acceptance were always slim and that is the real tragedy of the kind of culture that Incognito, Harline and all the others coming to his defense are trying to protect.  Collins, Martin and all the others deserve better.

To an extent, athletes reflect society, but only to an extent.  There is plenty of intolerance these days for anyone the least bit different.  Sarah Palin is on her latest book tour railing against religious intolerance by ginning up for profit a phony War on Christmas supposedly being waged by people who just want the same religious freedom to not have her beliefs mainstreamed on them.  Indeed we’re so accustomed to institutionalized intolerance that middle America is to willing to accept without even a sliver of the outrage we have for Incognito a Congress that wants to deliberately preserve the right of businesses to discriminate against gays and transgenders.

But yet in most workplaces where professional athletes don’t toil, the kind of behavior that Incognito attempted to justify in his shameless Fox Sports interview would never be tolerated. Most workplaces are even well ahead of Congress.  They already outlaw discrimination in any form.  If they didn’t, if they tolerated the abuse of others, productivity would fall at roughly the same rate that liability to a major dollar lawsuit would rise.

For some reason though, Incognito and all those who by word or deed support what he did to Martin are essentially trying to convince the rest of us that professional athletes (any athletes, really) should be held to a much lesser societal norm.  To that a simple question: to what end?

It’s not just the particular abhorrent words that Incognito used to refer to Martin that offend.  It’s the whole approach.  It’s the notion that a co-worker, someone supposedly working just as hard as Incognito to reach the same goal for their employer, should nonetheless be subject to unceasing abuse because of status that offends.  Incognito, quite frankly, is just too stupid to understand that concept.  Listen to his interview again and you’ll see what I mean.  I’d say his agent should be fired for green lighting the interview but an agent with integrity and a sense of decency wouldn’t be associated with Incognito in the first place.

But guys like Jason Collins understand better than anyone what a nitwit like Incognito never will.  It’s the notion that status is irrelevant.  Performance is what matters and those who are offended by status of any kind aren’t just lunkheads but cancers to the goal of the enterprise.  They can’t even see the small irony in calling themselves teammates of a player they can’t tolerate.

I’m not naïve to think that this problem is limited to the Dolphins.  I’ve covered sports and have been in plenty of locker rooms.  The fate suffered by Martin, for example, is commonplace.  Women, who make up an ever increasing segment of the working sports press, still get the occasional eye roll and sexist attitude from their subjects.  It’s improved, but it’s not been eliminated.

This is why above all else that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell had no choice but to launch an investigation into the Dolphins’ farce.  It speaks to an entire multi-billion dollar enterprise and its own attitudes toward a diverse workforce.  The NFL’s bread is buttered on the backs of its multitude of corporate sponsors, none of which would want to be directly associated with any organization that openly tolerates the kind of conduct Martin exposed.

But Goodell has to do more than just punish the Dolphins and if past is prologue, he will.  Goodell showed an uncompromising approach to the New Orleans Saints that in large measure eliminated an analogous form of misconduct, bounty hunting of opponents, by subjecting it to significant consequence.  That, too, was a behavior initially justified by the supposedly singular nature of the NFL culture.  It was fraud as defense just as Incognito’s explanations are now.  And if, in his investigation, Goodell finds that Dolphins officials and/or coaches helped facilitate Incognito’s behavior then they should suffer a fate similar to that of Sean Payton, the New Orleans Saints head coach.

There’s no reason, no good reason anyway, that the NFL or any professional sports team should tolerate an atmosphere where racial slurs, derogatory comments about sexuality or family or friends, should be seen as just part of the bouillabaisse that makes our sports unique.  The Incognito situation can and should serve as a flashpoint for a sea change in behavior.  There are plenty of Jason Collinses in the NFL right now and even more that desire to play professional football but don’t dare dream for fear of the abuse they’d be subject to in the name of preserving an antiquated culture.

It’s time for the NFL to be a leader once again not just for itself but this time for a whole swath of our culture.

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?

The Complications of Life

The death of former Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno is a reminder, if nothing else, of how complicated life really can be.

In most respects, Paterno lived a life worth emulating. In other ways, though, he became a tragic figure with the fatal flaw of not knowing exactly when to say when.

In a tribute broadcast by ESPN, Jeremy Schaap pulled out a revealing Paterno quote to explain why he hung on for as long as he did. Paterno said he wouldn’t retire because of Paul “Bear” Bryant, the long time head coach at Alabama. Mere weeks after retiring from Alabama, Bryant suffered a massive heart attack and died, having lost, apparently the will to live once his coaching days ended.

And so it was with Paterno. He stayed long past his sell date for the most understandably selfish reason of all: he feared his own death. Despite a loving and devoted family, including 5 children and 17 grandchildren; despite a legacy of accomplishment and philanthropy; despite, really, having squeezed as much life into his decaying frame as humanely possible, Paterno refused to retire because the loss of the one thing that sustained him above all others would kill him.

In the end, we’ll never know if that’s true though we certainly have every reason to believe that his firing and the loss of the only job he ever really knew, coupled with the awful circumstances surrounding it, sapped Paterno of any remaining fight left in his body. His advanced age and broken spirit prevented him from taking on the vestiges of a supposedly mild form of lung cancer, to which he succumbed mere weeks after its diagnosis.

The last interview that Paterno ever gave, with Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, revealed a man who was seemingly at peace with the conflicts inherent in his legacy. He certainly did not come across as evil. But neither did he come across as any more aware of the truly awfulness of the situation at his beloved university and his role in allowing it to metastasize.

Paterno admitted he didn’t know how to handle the situation and that’s why he went to his bosses. It all sounded reasonable if not conveniently naïve. Paterno really had no bosses, only figureheads that had absolutely no power to control the institution within the institution that Paterno eventually became.

Paterno had long since stopped listening to his bosses anyway about how to handle problems within his football program. As the Sports Illustrated expose details, Paterno worked tirelessly to keep any misbehaving players from being punished within the context of the general university population. Having created a “we take care of our own” culture within the team, it was hardly a surprise really that Paterno’s bosses did nothing about the Jerry Sandusky allegations. If Paterno was punting, which he was, why wouldn’t they? It was, likely to their warped thinking, just a football team matter.

Now that he has passed on, there will be even further re-examining of this tragic situation in the context of the greater good that Paterno accomplished in his life. The construct of the argument advanced is whether one “incident” should wipe out nearly 5 decades of positive contributions.

It doesn’t but not because Paterno’s death demands a re-examination of the judgment rendered just a few months ago. It doesn't because the question as posed is a false one because the answer isn’t one or the other. Paterno, was every bit as complicated and conflicted as the rest of us. Iconic status and coaching achievements don’t give anyone a pass at the more difficult aspects of what we all face on a day to day basis and in the end they didn’t give Paterno a pass either, nor should they.

Running a major college football program, these days or any days, is not a task for the feint of heart or the weak of mind. Paterno could come across paternalistic in the best sense of the word but he also had enough guile to honor his Brooklyn roots well.

He didn’t want the university disciplining his players because that discipline could cost him a victory or two. Far better for him to have the players run laps or whatever other form of antiquated punishment Paterno could conger up then kick them off the team or out of the university. A coach that doesn’t win is an ex-coach.

Paterno saw football glory as a means to a better end for the university as a whole because the riches it brought did indeed enhance the overall educational experience for everyone on campus. And Paterno honored that goal with his time, his talents and his pocketbook.

But let’s not lose sight of the fact that Paterno was using the ends to justify the means. He wasn’t a cheater, like the Jackie Sherills and the Barry Switzers of the world, both of whom Paterno despised. That doesn’t mean though that Paterno didn’t cut his share of corners or manipulate the circumstances with his well earned clout in order to serve some short term needs. He did. That’s life.

Paterno’s story, his rise, his fall from grace, the constant reexamination, is the same really that has played out with Ohio State’s Jim Tressel, if only on a lesser scale and without the tragic ending.

Like Paterno, Tressel had gained a healthy dose of clout within a major university setting as a result of nearly unprecedented success on the football field. That success raised the profile and the bank account of the university. It enabled Tressel to use that clout for much good but he was always more cagey then most wanted to acknowledge. Did Tressel use that clout to achieve some short term gains? Probably, but that shouldn’t surprise.

Tressel’s explanation for his lack of response to the tattoo situation was understandable only in the context of understanding Tressel as the same kind of complex figure as Paterno. He wanted to do right by his players and his program and the university and ultimately hoped it would all sort of work out without any real repercussions.

But Tressel, like Paterno, fell to the forces of convenient outrage that only want to see every issue as a black or white choice until, of course, those same forces are faced with their own complex challenges.

It was never a question whether Tressel was a good man or not. He was. His downfall, just like Paterno’s, was that his god-like image that he helped cultivate ultimately caused those around him to punish him more harshly for his transgressions then if he had just been more upfront about his sure humaneness.

Any sort of tragedy causes a bit of self reflection in everyone else. Ultimately, though, with Paterno as with Tressel, most doing the reflecting will struggle to see the real point. It’s not that either was actually less then the sum of their parts. It’s that both were fully the some of their parts. Life is never paint-by-numbers and it is possible, indeed entirely reasonable, that a person can be both good and bad at the same time.

It was true for Paterno, certainly, and true for Tressel as well. If we're being honest with ourselves, as situations like these call for, then let's all admit, too, that it's also true for the rest of us. And perhaps that is the best lesson for us all to learn.

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.

Lingering Items--Perspective Edition

The Ohio State Buckeyes' football program may not be quite out of the woods just yet, but Friday's actions by the NCAA confirm that whatever else the drive-by sanctimonious and moralizing numbskulls at the Columbus Disptach, ESPN and Sports Illustrated want to have you believe, the Buckeyes are not the rogue and lawless program they've been unfairly painted to be.

By telling Ohio State on Friday that there will be no new allegations against the program (in other words, the vast conspiracy alleged by Sports Illustrated, flamed by the Dispatch, and piled on by other even lesser media outlets who felt they were late to the party, wasn't true), the case sits where it started, with one man, Jim Tressel, having lied to the NCAA about potential NCAA violations by a handful of his players.

Tressel, having paid the ultimate price for his sins, now stands as the new face of all that is supposedly wrong with college athletics but at least we know that the Buckeyes program is hardly USC of the 1980s. And while I'm sure that ESPN and Sports Illustrated will continue to excoriate Tressel as a means of deflecting their shoddy coverage and treatment of the Buckeyes generally, it may be best if you read the transcript of the NCAA's 5-hour interview with Tressel yourself in order to draw your own conclusions.

If there's a picture that emerges of Tressel from that interview, it's one of a coach who cares very deeply about his players and his program but constantly wrestled with all the day-to-day realities of the multitude of issues that can veer either or both wildly off track. In many ways he comes across as perhaps too naïve to have ever gotten himself into the position as the head coach of a major Division I program, too unsure really of how to handle situations that his own upbringing may never have prepared him for. What he doesn't do, though, is come across as a cold, manipulative phony deliberating shielding himself by creating a false public portrait of who he really is.

On the key issue of a small group of players trading on their status and memorabilia for free tattoos, Tressel was straightforward in admitting that he understood this was a NCAA violation. But the circumstances surrounding those infractions were complicated by the shady character that at least some of the players had gotten themselves involved with and the specter of a FBI criminal investigation of that character.

Tressel didn't make light of the potential NCAA violations that these players had committed but like a parent he casts aside that immediate concern for what he believed was a far greater threat—their safety and personal welfare.

Where Tressel blew it and admits as much is that he should have taken this to the university's lawyers or the compliance department (which, by the way, comes across pretty well actually in the Tressel interview) and gotten their input. He says he didn't do that because he was working off of what he thought was confidential information that if disclosed could make the situation even worse, from a safety standpoint, for those players.

Ultimately, it was this bad calculation and what Tressel did to hide it that cost him his job. But yet when you ponder the interview it does leave you with a sense that as wrong as Tressel was he shouldn't have lost his job. It makes me wonder whether anyone on the school's Board of Trustees bothered to even read the transcript before arriving at the conclusion that the only way for the school to get past all of this is for Tressel to go. Shame on them if they didn't.

We undoubtedly live in a society where we too readily and too often dismiss simple truths in favor of far more elaborate and cynical explanations of human behavior. Thus I have no real expectation that those who jumped to crucify Tressel and Ohio State so quickly will be swayed by anything that came from the NCAA on Friday or anything they read (or probably glanced over) in the Tressel interview. But this case was always more nuanced than any of them had time to uncover in favor of a story line about a phony coach leading a too successful program that flaunted the rules in order to get that way.

I'm far from suggesting that Tressel was a victim here. He brought this on himself by making what amounts to two really bad decisions. But Tressel never was and still isn't the worst person in the world. What was needed most in his case was what the university gave him first and then abandoned—the benefit of the doubt. As the facts continue to emerge, his actions may not be any less wrong but they are for more understandable.

What's less understandable and always will be, is why so many people were so quick to judge and then to revel in the downfall of a decent, honorable man.

**
The NFL's lockout still hasn't been lifted and the reason for that remains the same as it was when the lockout was first imposed. The National Football League Players Association is an overmatched, outmaneuvered trade organization wholly incapable of adequately dealing with the complicated issues of a multi billion dollar business.

Led by DeMaurice Smith, a lawyer by trade who talks a good game but whose inexperience in labor negotiations put the union at a disadvantage, backed by a group of players too ill-informed and disconnected from the business side of their sport to fully comprehend exactly what's taking place, and supported by a group of clever lawyers more interested in making their bones on the backs of the players, the NFLPA has bungled every step of this labor dispute to the point where they found themselves backed into a corner by the owners. Now they're trying to scratch their way out and look rather small doing so.

Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner and the de facto lead negotiator for the owners, always faced two real challenges in this negotiations. First he had to corral a group of owners who are nothing more than a loosely affiliated group of competitors. No small task certainly but Goodell did a good job of keeping them in check throughout the negotiations. Second, Goodell had to find a way to keep Smith and his advisers from leading their lambs to slaughter. That's been the far more difficult task as these recent and final days of the lockout demonstrate.

While there appear to be a few remaining issues between the parties that could get quickly resolved if that was the players' desire, it appears that what's mostly keeping the lockout lasting these few extra days is Smith and his executive board's parochial interest in looking like they won't be bullied by the owners. Thus does Smith and his executive board continue to insist, for example, on using the most inefficient means available to re-certify as a labor union, a prerequisite to actually having a collective bargaining agreement, just because they want to demonstrate one last act of defiance, as if they're punishing the owners when all they're really doing is hurting themselves and the fans they claim to love.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. For those too jaded to want to pay attention to all the nuance and minutiae of these labor negotiations, let me just refer back for a moment to the process I laid out previously about how this matter gets resolved.

The collective bargaining agreement the owners voted on is merely tentative because the NFLPA, in a wrong headed strategy that has served only to prolong the lockout, claimed they decertified as a labor union. Thus until they recertify, the parties can't enter into a new collective bargaining agreement. And before they can recertify, they have to get all the lemming-like players they got to sign decertification cards last year to sign recertification cards this year. The union could accomplish this electronically but has chosen not to, opting to have the cards signed once the players report to camp. But of course the players can't report to camp until the lockout is lifted so what this is about is Smith and his executive board, the same group that caused this headache in the first place, telling the owners to go ahead and lift the lockout and trust them that they'll get their business taken care of.

Understandably the owners are in more of a “trust but verify” mode at the moment though I really think that a leap of faith could be taken here with little harm. Still it's a measure of the unnecessary acrimony that this situation created that this kind of issue is further holding up the NFL.

Smith claims that he and the players will work through the weekend, meaning that by the time they end up voting it will be close to six days since the owners tried to end the lockout. In the grand scheme, these six days will be meaningless. But likewise in the grand scheme, these six days are a marker for why this dispute has dragged on for as long as it has. The owners have always been willing to get a deal done. Sometimes the biggest roadblock is not an opposition that continues to say “no” but an opposition, like the NFLPA and Smith, that don't know how to say “yes.”

**
If there's one thing to really admire about the Cleveland Indians' management at the moment, it's that they've learned their hard lessons. In the days when former general manager and now club president Mark Shapiro used to come out and readily admit things like the Indians didn't have the budget to make any significant off-season or in-season moves, he would be lambasted by the fans who were tired of hearing excuses.

Not this time. Shapiro and general manager Chris Antonetti have done an effective job of using beat writer Paul Hoynes to get out the word that they really, really are looking to make a few moves before the trade deadline in order to bolster the roster in a pennant race. It's the right thing to say and it may actually be true. We won't really know until a move gets made.

If the Indians do make a move, the goal should be a bit more long term. Grady Sizemore, once again on the disabled list, has now proven to be a player that you can't count on. He's injury prone. And with each injury he comes back a little less effective than he was before. He's a centerpiece of this roster and because of that his absence becomes more magnified.

The Indians, like any other team in their situation, will probably end up relying on the if/come with Sizemore until it's well too late. His potential remains alluring, but pinning their hopes on his health and a permanent return to productivity will end up being a fool's game. Sizemore's injury-plagued career has followed a resulting pattern of regression. At this point it's far more likely than not that he'll never be the player we always thought he could have been.

Every sport has their Grady Sizemores and it's always sad when such promising careers end up never being fully realized. Sizemore is a good guy and the kind of guy that teams should build around. But in this case, whether it's because of his style of play or because he just has one of those bodies that injures more easily than others, baseball will end up never seeing the full value of his potential. That is until the Indians dump him.

Seriously, though, it's doubtful that the Indians can really replace Sizemore in a late-season deal. It's a problem that needs a larger solution. But when/if the Indians make a move, whether it's next week or in the off season or the one after that, it will undoubtedly be with the realization that what they really have to do is not supplement a roster but fill a new hole they were praying wasn't going to open but secretly feared always would.

**

With the NBA in lock out mode as well, here's this week's question to ponder: What's more likely to occur first, the end of the NBA lockout or a long-term solution to the nation's debt crisis?

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.

Connecting the Dots

The Ohio State Buckeyes are certainly entering the Season of their Discontent and there are many too willing to pile on. Whether it's the Columbus Dispatch, The Lantern (the OSU campus newspaper), ESPN the Magazine, Sports Illustrated, the Associated Press, Yahoo Sports and any other outlet looking for its own spin, the stories coming out of Columbus don't look to end any time soon.

There are no real victims in this story which is why it must feel so good for so many to pile on. Most everyone associated with this story did something wrong in some way so there isn't much sympathy that any of them can generate. But still there is a sense that the real story is being missed.

As all of these publications are busy trying to uncover their own little dirt on the Buckeyes program they can't seem to connect the dots. It's not that hard.

The “big” scoop this week, courtesy of The Lantern, was their interview with former Buckeyes receiver Ray Small. He talked about how he knowingly broke NCAA rules by selling his Big Ten championship rings so he could pay rent and then went all Maurice Clarett on it by saying “hey, everyone was doing it” as a way of justifying his own misconduct.

Predictably, Small is backpedaling in light of the abuse he's taking publicly from some of his former teammates. Small's inability to follow rules is almost legendary as his multiple suspensions from the Buckeyes program attest to. But that doesn't mean Small didn't do exactly as he said—break NCAA rules. He did and claims it was the smartest plan he could come up with to pay his rent.

There's nothing new in Small's revelations except to the extent that that Tattoed Five were not acting alone. I don't think anyone thinks they were anyway, including the NCAA. But if we're going to take Small at his word, then let's take him at all his words—he did it because he needed the money. That's a key dot.

In the last few weeks, another emerged when several Big Ten athletic directors, including the Buckeyes' Gene Smith, pushed for the Big Ten to increase the value of their scholarships so that they include stipends for players to meet every day living expenses.

The issue Smith and his counterparts are trying to address is the same that Small spoke to: money. College athletes are students and they like to do a lot of things that other non-athlete students like to do, spend money. I've been funding college education for three daughters since 2006 and I can personally verify that students like to spend money.

College athletics, even at the Division III level, demands a heavy price from its participants. Their time is rarely their own. There is practice and conditioning and drills and study. There is downtime, but not enough for most athletes to take on a part time job as well to get some spending money, assuming the NCAA would even allow it. You don't have to feel sorry for the athletes but they are just kids. And like any other kid in college they want money to spend when they go out.

The proposal by the Big Ten athletic directors is designed simply to account for this reality of every day life, but it's not without some controversy. Schools in the Mid American Conference, for example, oppose it not on philosophical grounds but simply on cost. Ohio State athletics has a budget to rival that of several small countries. It's a cost it can more readily absorb. Kent State, not so much.

Then there are the philosophical reasons. An athlete on a full scholarship at a school like Ohio State is already receiving around $80,000 in benefits, at a minimum, in the form of a college education assuming he or she sticks around for 4 years. At private schools, the value is even higher. That's a nice perk not available to 98% of the rest of the student population. To some, that is more than enough. Maybe it is.

Then there are those who feel that even the modest proposal by the Big Ten doesn't go nearly far enough. This is the camp who believes, with some justification as well, that colleges exploit their athletes. You could make the argument that the value the players receive in comparison to the money generated by just one BCS game is a little lopsided in favor of the schools and that would be true as well.

There is no right answer to any of this but that's not any reason to ignore it. The reason the media outlets piling on the Buckeyes at the moment are focusing only on the alleged dirt in the program is because it's the easiest of stories to communicate. We tend to like our narratives as simple as possible and what's more simple than the hero taking a fall?

But if you want to put another dot to connect on the map, then consider for a moment the deafening silence from virtually every other program as the Buckeyes take their turn twisting in the wind. Whether it's Michigan or Alabama or Florida or pick your favorite team, there isn't an athletic director out there that would dare come out and say that similar activities haven't taken place in their programs.

A simple search on Ebay will reveal that you can buy a Florida Gators 2006 national championship player's ring. With a little digging, I'm also certain you can find player rings from virtually every other team somewhere on the internet or some local pawn shop.

None of that is to excuse any aspect of what the Buckeyes players did. Unquestionably the NCAA has a rule against a player selling his own goods for money while still in college and the players broke that rule. But the trafficking in memorabilia is strong, the money is good and young kids are immature. It's a powerful confluence of events that makes probably every program dirty at some level.

The problem is trying to convey all of this to a public that likes its news in clever quips from snarky journalists. Most just don't have the time or inclination to see what's going on at Ohio State at the moment as a cultural turning point in our approach to college athletics. It's far easier to label Tressel a hypocrite, consider Pryor as just another loser who couldn't live his life any better than the rest of the general population and treat bragging loudmouths like Small as just another joke.

Perhaps the final dot on the map has everything to do with the raging debate over how exactly this great nation should go about crowning its college football national champion as if that is perhaps the most pressing issue of the day.

At the center of every debate I've ever read on the subject is the supposed money that can be made from a playoff system. That's because the only way to get something done is to appeal to everyone's most basic instinct: greed. The same journalists that are imploring college presidents to further sell their school and their football program for even more money are decrying the awfulness of Buckeyes players selling their rings and baubles for a pittance. And Tressel's the hypocrite?

What bothers me most about all of this is the abject failure of nearly any of these same people going after the Ohio State program with pitchforks in hand to put this in the larger context. There's a way to explain that doesn't have to come across as acquiescence.

Instead, they pick on the most vulnerable pieces of this entire equation, the kids, and rub their hands in smug self-satisfaction without ever recognizing they missed the far bigger story.

I think kids, particularly big time college student-athletes, need constant reinforcement in how to conduct their lives between the ditches of what's right and what's wrong. But when every adult in every room, whether it's those running ESPN, CBS or ABC, or the college presidents, or the athletic directors or the coaches, constantly send the message the cash is king, it gets awfully hard to really blame the kids who stupidly think that there's nothing wrong with getting a little cash of their own.

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.