No Such Thing As a Bad Win

Sports in general and professional sports in particular are the ultimate bottom line businesses.  Success is measured week by week and chronicled daily in a million or so outlets.  While it is definitely true that a team that consistently wins more than it loses can be considered a success in the same way that a team that consistently loses more than it wins can be considered a failure, on a micro basis there are truths to be learned in both the wins and losses irrespective of a team’s record.

This past weekend, both the Cleveland Browns and the Ohio State Buckeyes walked away with wins. And while that should be good enough to all the bottom liners, of course it was not because the wins were not impressive in their crafting against ostensibly lesser competition.

In the case of the Buckeyes, I guess what this means is that unless 50 or more points are scored and 500 or more yards are compiled on offense, the win might as well have been a loss.  In the case of the Browns, I’m not even sure what it means.  Given the Browns rather consistent pattern of losing at least twice as many games as it wins, season after season and that just the previous week it actually lost to a winless team, the Oakland Raiders came into the game winless and left the same way and that is somehow unsatisfactory. 

I understand the frustration of Buckeye fans.  The preseason seemed to hold realistic hope of the team getting to the first ever national championship playoffs. But the injury to Braxton Miller, coupled with very inexperienced back up, altered both the perceptions and the reality.  Couple that with a home loss to what is, at best, a very average Virginia Tech, and this season seemed like it wouldn’t take any flight.

But since that game the Buckeyes have completely turned the season on its head.  Quarterback J.T. Barrett, playing for the first time in two years, seemed to have the light go on immediately and suddenly, against weak competition, the Buckeyes’ offense turned into a juggernaut.

Well, that juggernaut got slowed on Saturday night against Penn State, a supposedly vastly inferior team and that got everyone all upset.  Rather than acknowledge the growing pains of a team that has been far better than most imagined when Miller first went down, fans and most of the media instead chastised the Buckeyes for apparently not destroying Penn State at their home field at night in front of the national media and a drunk and crazed fan base making it almost impossible to call out any signals.

There was plenty to critique in the Buckeyes’ win, but let’s keep that critique in perspective and acknowledge what is likely to be one of the more important wins this team will have in the next few seasons.

Probably the biggest issue in the entire game was the play calling.  This isn’t the first time, just the most recent, when Urban Meyer went ultra conservative in a big game.  Meyer has a fascination with letting his quarterbacks carry the entire running load even when his running backs have more than proven capable.  Michigan State last year late in the Big Ten championship game was another prime example.  Meyer seems to lose faith mostly in himself.  Stated differently, he goes into small ball protection mode too quickly at the first sign of trouble.

But let’s also remember that the Buckeyes mostly dominated Penn State even if the score didn’t reflect it.  The only Penn State touchdown in regulation came on a very well thrown pass into very tight coverage.  Sometimes the other team is going to win a battle.  It happens.

The far larger point though was the manner in which the Buckeyes reversed a huge momentum swing and found a way to win.  In thinking about the Ohio State win on Saturday and fan and media reaction to it, it was best to recall the words of LeBron James last week when talking about what it takes sometimes to build a team, according to the Plain Dealer:

 “You got to go through something in order to create a bond, and that means for the worse. You've got to lose ball games that we think we should have won. We got to get in an argument here and there every now and then just to test each other out. It has to happen. It's going to happen. I know it's going to happen. A lot of guys don't see it but I see it. That's the only way we're going to be able to grow.”

That’s exactly what Saturday night’s victory ended up being, an opportunity for this team to get tested, to bond, to grow.  If this is a team with big aspirations, whether by a confluence of events this year or a more defined approach next season, this Penn State victory will be the fulcrum on which those aspirations pivoted.  We’ll see soon enough as the Buckeyes go into hostile territory in a few weeks against Michigan State.

As for the Browns, it simply is a case of confusing progress with success.  The two concepts can intersect and sometimes they can be almost the same thing.  But for now, for this Browns team, they are at best 2^nd or 3^rd cousins.

What most of the dissection of the Browns’ win has been is to highlight the team’s faults without acknowledging some emerging strengths.  The Raiders, easily one of the worst if not the worst team in the league, is horrible in every phase of the game, including stopping the run.  Yet the Browns couldn’t find a way to run the ball because, again, Alex Mack is apparently the most important player on this team.

And yet, despite the numerous 3-and-outs, the bad passes, the lousy routes, the blown blocking assignments, this team found a way to pull together late and overcome whatever adversity it faced, much of which was arguably self-inflicted.

For all that went wrong on Sunday, plenty went right, starting with the defense.  Joe Haden, of whom I’ve been a frequent critic, played one of the best games of his entire career.  Sure he was in the right place at the right moment to field an oddly errant mid-air fumble, but his coverage was at an elite status the entire game.  Late in the game on a sideline route deep with a receiver seeming to have a step on him, Haden close fast and made a textbook deflection.  It was the kind of play that coaches from other teams at all levels will use to demonstrate proper technique.

Let’s also mention Paul Krueger who is fulfilling this year much of what was expected of him last year.  Maybe it’s head coach Mike Pettine’s defensive schemes that appeal more to Krueger’s sensibilities or it’s a case of just being more in sync with this coaching staff.  Whatever it is, Krueger played well Sunday as he has this whole season.  Even poor Justin Gilbert, who has mostly appeared overmatched since the first preseason game, looked better. 

There is still plenty of improvement this team needs.  Buster Skrine is still, well, Buster Skrine and the Browns might be the worst team I’ve ever seen at any level fielding and returning punts.  But this team is already at four wins for the season and it’s a season that’s only 7 games old!

Just as with the Buckeyes, the Browns have gone through the kind of adversity now that tends to bond teams together.  Indeed, the little battles it fought in other games is largely responsible for the team’s ability to respond late this past Sunday.  In almost every other year in the last 12 other Browns teams have crumbled under like circumstances.  The fact that this team didn’t and the fact this it won should be celebrated for what it was, not the Super Bowl, but a gritty win.

I’ve been part of the fabric of this town’s crappy sports teams for more than 50 years now so I understand the manner in which all performance gets filtered.  But that doesn’t make it any less irritating for the same tired narrative of pulling defeat from the jaws of victory every time it doesn’t go to some ill-informed predetermined script.

Winning games at any level, be it Division I college football or the NFL, is hard enough.  Let’s not make it harder on ourselves by constructing impossibly high standards just so we can satisfy our inner insecurities that our teams will never be good enough to win something meaningful. And if that task is too hard then keep it simple and just remember that while you often can make the case for a good loss, you can never make the case for a bad win.

Lingering items--Collective Shrug Edition

On Tuesday night, the Cleveland Indians beat the Oakland A's 1-0.  It was the second straight win for the Tribe over the As. It also was the team’s  8th win in their last 9 games and pushed their season record to 16-14.  Overall, a decent start to the season, right?  The answer depends on what you’re measuring.

While the Indians were winning there were a total of 9,474 people in attendance at that game or about 40 less than the night before.  Those are the kind of pre-Jacobs Field numbers that ought to give fans the willies.  Apparently it’s just giving them shrugs.

The Indians have the worst attendance in the major leagues and they aren’t even sniffing the next worse team, the Kansas City Royals.  In fact, the Indians would have to increase their average per game attendance by a whopping 27%, or another 268,000 fans over the rest of the season, just to equal the Royals’ average.

Parsing further, if you eliminate opening day and the first game of the Yankees’ series, each of which drew over 40,000 fans, the Indians are averaging almost to the person the attendance at Tuesday night’s A's game.  That would mean they’d have to attract almost a half million more fans than the current pace just to stay with the Royals' current average.

Lest anyone think this suggests that the Indians’ attendance is in a free fall, that wouldn’t be quite accurate.  Year over year the Indians are averaging a mere 534 fans less per game than at the same point in 2012.  This year’s poor attendance isn’t news, it’s the norm.

When you think about all this in economic terms it’s pretty clear that the Indians’ are losing more and more ground against their competitors.  If you assume that the average fan spends a mere $20 at a game, including his ticket, the difference between the Indians’ and Royals’ attendance translates to more than $5.3 million less in revenue for the Indians and that’s being exceptionally conservative in estimates.  It’s probably far closer to $10 million and likely even more than that.

There are a multitude of reasons for the Indians’ poor attendance including the deadening approach that the owners, Larry and Paul Dolan, have taken over the years.  A seemingly never ending string of poor personnel decisions wrapped around an exceptionally tight budget have combined to make the Indians not just a perennially lousy team but a boring one as well.  The fans have been systemically conditioned to expect the worst.  This past off season the Dolans decided to switch the paradigm, at least for one season, by spending money in advance of the revenues.  It’s resulted in a marginally better team and a less boring one to boot.  They lead the league in home runs, for example. But the revenues at this point aren’t following.  Indeed they are still dropping.  If that trend continues, don’t look for deficit spending next off season and so the spiral will deepen.

The Dolans haven’t been the worst owners in team history or even the cheapest.  But they haven’t done much to infuse the franchise with much excitement either.  They've entrusted their  franchise to Mark Shapiro, first as general manager and now as team president, and the results, well, speak for themselves.  Chris Antonetti is relatively new to his job but he’s a Shapiro acolyte and subordinate so there’s no reason to expect a different approach or result.  The on field results this group has achieved are dubious.  But perhaps the broader indictment is that they’ve been part of a far larger problem.  Their indifferent ownership and poorly executed approach has helped foster a town of indifferent sports fans, people that at best casually care about what's happening but certainly not enough to invest.

The Indians mostly own the spring and summer and as they’ve wallowed in the muck and mire, people who were once fans have been infected not with disdain but indifference.  At least when fans show animosity toward you they’re feeling something.  They’re engaged still on an emotional level.  When they’re indifferent it simply means they just don’t care what happens.

But we can’t lay this all at the feet of the Indians though because they have the longest season they get a slightly larger share of the blame.  Cleveland is a Browns town and it hardly bears mentioning the soul-sucking siege that this team has inflicted on this area.  Randy Lerner was not just a reluctant owner he was an indifferent one as well and it showed in both his approach and in his results.

The sale to Jimmy Halsam was at least two years too late.  Yet even with all the issues Haslam is facing professionally, he still remains the best hope to re-energize the moribund franchise.  Unfortunately, those professional issues are a huge distraction to Haslam personally and will be for months, if not years, to come.  Meanwhile he’s entrusted the day to day operations to perhaps the most boring front office executive ever in Joe Banner.  Holmgren was a joke but his nonsensical outbursts at least added comic relief.  Banner just generally rests his head on his hands and sighs.  It’s the perfect meme not just for the completed draft but for the fans as well.

Then there’s the Cavs, bleeding fans at a faster clip than even the Indians.  The Cavs have been in a free fall for 3 years now coinciding with the loss of LeBron James.  During that time owner Dan Gilbert has been mostly distracted by an expanding empire of other businesses including his casinos.  Fans also know that the NBA is the toughest league in which to turn around a franchise so even a fully engaged Gilbert wouldn’t make much difference anyway.  Fans don’t just know the Cavs are awful right now they know they’ll be awful for years to come as well.  Put it this way, when the biggest selling point going into the next season is to tout the rehiring of a former coach who couldn’t win a championship with LeBron James, the franchise is in more trouble than it realizes.

When you look out toward the horizon on each franchise there’s nothing much to see and there hasn’t been for a long time, especially in the case of the Indians and the Browns.  It’s had an impact, a significant one, on the fans.  They’ve gone well beyond cynicism and are now simply indifferent and if there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear from the Indians’ attendance results thus far, indifferent fans don’t throw good money after bad.

One of these years one of these teams will emerge to reinvigorate this town and give the fans a reason to believe again.  It's just that when you look out into the distance it doesn't look like a ship will be coming in any time soon.

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One team that isn’t suffering from an indifferent fan base is the Ohio State Buckeyes.  According to a study done by USA Today in conjunction with the Indiana University National Sports Journalism Center, the Buckeyes are one of but a handful of schools that have self-sustaining athletic departments, meaning that their revenues exceed their expenses without the need for subsidies either from local governments or student fees. Of the $49 million in ticket revenue generated by Ohio State fans, $41 million was from football.  I'd say that the Indians, Cavs and/or Browns owners would do anything to capture that kind of passion and coin but I know it isn't true.  They've had any number of opportunities and simply haven't done it.

The larger story on the Buckeyes front though is that they are mostly an anomaly in college sports.  They are one of only 23 Division I programs out of 228 that broke even or were in the black.  Within that group of 23 were just 7, including Ohio State, that didn’t receive any form of subsidy from either taxpayers or students in the form of fees.  And of that 7, Ohio State has the most intercollegiate teams to support: 36 overall.

Meanwhile, the NCAA as an entity has never enjoyed greater profits.  It had a whopping $71 million budget surplus in 2012, which, when coupled with the previous paragraph, tells an intriguing and disturbing story about the state of college athletics.

Perhaps the poster child for how wrongheaded things have gotten are our newest bestest buddies, the Rutgers Scarlet Knights.  According to the USA Today study, Rutgers spent over $28 million more on athletics then it took in just last year.  To cover the short fall it had to take over $18 million from other areas of the college and the other nearly $10 million directly from the students in the form of additional fees.  I suspect the financial picture for Rutgers will get a bit better as members of the Big 10 but that alone won’t suffice.  Just over half, 7, of the Big 10 schools are running at a profit and only 5, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Indiana and Nebraska are doing that without any form of school or student subsidy.  Michigan needed over $250,000 in subsidies to make ends meet, which isn’t significant but it is informative.  If they can’t at least break even on their own accord with a facility like the Big House in Ann Arbor and its 100,000+ fans for 7 or 8 games a year along with the massive amount of merchandising revenue they generate, then what hope is there for Rutgers?

There are any number of reasons this matters but the most important is the simple fact that getting a college education has never been more expensive or more out of reach to the middle class than it is now.  When a school like Rutgers is draining other academic programs as well as the wallets of its students to pay for athletics, you have to question what it's trying to accomplish as an institution.  And Rutgers is hardly alone. Fully 90% of Division I schools are doing something similar though perhaps not at the same scale as Rutgers.

If you’re looking for another reason this matters consider Indiana University.  Though the school turned a small profit in its athletic program in 2012, about $276,000, it needed nearly $2.8 million in subsidies from the school and the students to get there.  In other words, it didn’t really turn a profit at all.  But let’s suspend that bit of reality and consider the impact of robbing Peter to pay Paul at Indiana.  Because there are no coincidences, that university recently announced that it is limiting all employees there to 29 hours or less of work each week as a way of avoiding the impact of the Affordable Health Care Act, a result it wouldn’t need to worry about if it would quit paying subsidies to its athletic program. Quality employees who have options will eventually leave IU for a school that offers them better benefits, like health care.  It's a topsy turvy world where school administrators fund a mediocre athletic program at the expense of the larger mission and the general welfare of the rest of the school's population.

The real benefactors of this insane race for athletic prominence and its increasingly illusory promise of pots of gold is undercutting the very reason these academic institutions allegedly exist.  The NCAA could do something about it though that would cut against its own economic interests.

I’m not sure exactly how Rutgers can sustain itself as a viable school, let alone a member of the Big 10, if it continues to run up such huge deficits.  Surely its board of trustees must be asking themselves that very question and if they aren’t they should be removed.  The same goes for virtually every school running at a deficit.  At some point some prominent school will drop out of the race either by force or by conscious, but it will happen unless there is a massive change in attitude and approach.  But as we’ve seen for so long, the NCAA traffics in the small problems like tattoos while the rest of the house is literally on fire.

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The Browns have a rookie mini camp this week and if not for them signing a pile of undrafted free agents it probably could have been held inside a conference room in Berea rather than on the practice field.

To this point two of the draft choices have been arrested with one of them, Armonty Bryant, a serial offender.  I knew Joe Banner was following a rebuilding blue print from other teams, but I thought it would be the Philadelphia Eagles.  I didn’t realize it would be the Cincinnati Bengals.

**
Given the character issues that already have emerged with this Browns' draft class, this week's question to ponder: Does anyone in the Browns' scouting department know how to even do a Google search on prospective draft picks?

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.

Lingering Items--Penalties Edition

Whether the sanctions levied against Ohio State were too harsh or too lenient may be a matter of perspective. That won’t stop nearly anyone from questioning athletic director Gene Smith’s competency, however.

The biggest surprise levied against the Buckeyes was the 2012 bowl ban. Otherwise it seems like things pretty much went down as expected. When Ohio State self-imposed a litany of sanctions against the program, all they really did was give the NCAA a little wriggle room to make a few additional tweaks in order to look like it wasn’t just simply taking the Buckeyes’ word on everything.

So the tweak they made was not the one that was expected mainly because Smith was emphatic time and again that a bowl ban wasn’t on the horizon. So sure was Smith, in fact, that he didn’t even contemplate pre-empting the NCAA on that count by making the 6-6 Buckeyes sit home this bowl season instead.

What fans have now is a meaningless Gator Bowl to soothe their feelings when what they really wanted was to hit like the hurricane new head coach Urban Meyer promised for next season, play for the Big Ten title and possibly a national championship.

Smith is taking more heat for this then perhaps he deserves, though he does deserve some. It’s difficult to take Smith to task for the underlying infraction given former head coach Jim Tressel’s conduct. And assuming the conspiracy theorists are just that and Tressel didn’t take a bullet for Smith (what would be his incentive for that?), Smith’s only real sin was not level setting his bosses or the fans of the program.

The feeling always has been that Smith is wired into the NCAA in ways that other athletic directors are not. Every time he spoke, in that semi-sincere, semi-arrogant way of his, it carried the imprimatur that he knew from where he spoke. It turns out he was just as clueless as nearly everyone else in this whole matter.

One of the cardinal sins you can make in any organization is to overpromise and under deliver, which is exactly what Smith did here. Had he kept his mouth shut and just said that he hopes that the university had done enough to satisfy the NCAA, I doubt anyone would have been surprised by the bowl ban. After all, the NCAA is a random, feckless, morally undisciplined enterprise rife with conflicts of interest and wholly incapable of governing a church picnic, let alone a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

But the one thing to remember is that the NCAA Committee of Infractions ultimately is a group of individuals with their own feelings and emotions and the last thing individuals with their own feelings and emotions want is someone who carries the imprimatur of authority, like Smith, telling them what they should or shouldn’t do.

In many ways, Smith’s constant proclamations that a bowl ban was not in the offing served almost as a dare to the NCAA. So where’s the surprise that they did knock the battery off of Smith’s shoulder only to watch him flinch?

I have very mixed feelings about the sanctions overall. Much of my trepidation is with how the NCAA treated Tressel, a very fine man and educator, who made a serious mistake. But a 5-year “show cause” finding is particularly harsh. It may be that Tressel wasn’t going to coach again in college anyway, but to basically be told that he can’t earn a living at his chosen profession for the next 5 years is an astounding penalty given his one indiscretion.

As for the bowl ban, that seems harsh if only because while the Buckeyes did play in last year’s Sugar Bowl, part of their sanctions was to forfeit the game and give back the money earned. Effectively, it’s as if they have been banned from two bowl games.

Yet the NCAA isn’t going to do much to explain its reasoning mainly because it doesn’t have to, which gets to the other side of my feelings about this. I understand that the conduct engaged in by the Buckeyes’ players broke a rule and I understand that Tressel covered it up deliberately. But the rule makes no sense in any context but one in which the NCAA doesn’t want anyone else earning money that could have instead lined their pockets. The fact that Tressel covered it up just proves the adage, though, that the cover up is often worse then the underlying breach.

I know that a lot of fans are calling for Smith to be fired and maybe he should be as part of the overall housecleaning. I’m not sure he could have ferreted out Tressel’s misconduct but some of the other activities that went unchecked are a failure that occurred under Smith’s watch. He should have had more robust systems in place.

Ultimately, though, the NCAA matters are now finally behind the Buckeyes. Sure they’ll linger because of the bowl ban and scholarship reductions, but the football program itself is on solid footing right now. Besides, it gives Meyer and the players the added chip on their shoulders for the 2012 season and should set them up well for 2013 and beyond. The hurricane may be delayed, but it’s still a good bet that it will hit ground and leave appropriate damage in its wake.

**
James Harrison, the NFL’s reigning and most clueless thug, seems to have reluctantly accepted the fact that his vicious hit on Colt McCoy was illegal. The revelation came to him apparently about the time he lost his appeal and the rest of his Pittsburgh Steelers teammates, while publicly supporting him, privately sate him down and told him that his brutish ways were actually hurting the team far more then helping. That it happened in the wake of a bad loss to the San Francisco 49ers is just a bonus.

But Harrison, as is his wont, doesn’t go down without a fight and thus surmised that the Browns as well should be fined or otherwise penalized for not properly attending to McCoy. So we have Harrison adamantly denying he did anything wrong for most of the last two weeks suddenly getting religion and becoming the voice of concern for McCoy?

Harrison is like the criminal who in the course of robbing a house gets bitten by the watch dog and then sues the homeowner. Lacking an ability to process either irony or context Harrison should just shut his mouth and play within the rules, assuming he can which actually may not be a safe assumption at all.

Meanwhile the Browns were indeed let off the hook for their malpractice when it came to safeguarding their starting quarterback but the rest of the NFL must now pay a price by staging so-called independent athletic trainers in the press box to oversee all the vicious hits and make suggestions to each team’s medical staff as to which players they may want to administer an exam to.

I’m happy whenever the NFL creates additional jobs, particularly for athletic trainers. I wonder, though, exactly why the NFL went macro on this instead of focusing specifically on the fact that the Browns medical and coaching staff screwed up. Indeed, the Browns’ medical staff for the last several years has a distinct history of putting its players in jeopardy but yea, it sounds like the NFL has an institutional problem.

It may very well be that the Browns and their medical staff needed some tough love in the form of some kind of penalty given their history but then again what we know most about the NFL is that they are very reticent to punish management and very pleased to punish the players.

The person to feel sorry for here is McCoy. He’s about to miss his second straight game and whatever grip he had on the Browns’ starting quarterback job. More than that, though, he very easily could have lost his life or at least suffered some permanent damage when he was sent back into the game seconds after getting his brains scrambled.

There was a teaching moment here just not the one the NFL focused on.

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The Cleveland Indians continue to make their quiet offseason noise by signing any retread with a pulse that they can find. The latest contestant in this year’s version of “Who Can Fill the Shoes of David Dellucci?” is Andy “Don’t Call Me Either Adam or Dave” LaRoche.

This LaRoche, the son of former Tribe closer Dave LaRoche, a mediocre pitcher from the mid 1970s, brings a resume that includes a .247 average with 5 RBI in 40 games last season. But there’s more. LaRoche’s high water mark, batting average-wise, is .258.

If it makes you wonder why anyone would continue to sign LaRoche given his age (28) and the fact that he’s never done anything of note at any time for any major league team he played for, just follow the money. LaRoche, like so many that the Indians sign every offseason, is on a minor league contract. The team pays more in laundry bills then it would have to pay LaRoche.

If by chance he makes the big league team out of training camp, and if he does, look out, then he’ll make the major league minimum, which for 2012 is slightly more than $400,000. In other words, what LaRoche lacks in skills he more then makes up for in the fact that he works cheaply.

The one good thing to keep in mind in all of this is that Eric Wedge is no longer the team’s manager. LaRoche is just the kind of player that Wedge loved, mainly because LaRoche’s baseball skills approximate those that Wedge possessed as a player. That would have meant only one thing: a spring and early summer of screaming at the television every time LaRoche grounded out weakly with runners in scoring position.

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The Cavs start their season in a few days, which leads to this week’s question to ponder: Will the Cavs take Jared Sullinger with the first pick in next year’s draft?

Happy Holidays, everyone.

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.

Abolish the NCAA

I don’t know Bobby DiGeronimo or his company, Independence Excavating. But I do know that Bobby DiGeronimo is now in the crosshairs of both The Ohio State University and the NCAA and for all the wrong reasons.

According to a story in Thursday’s Plain Dealer, splashed as it was on the front page above a story on something far more significant, the re-drawing of Ohio’s congressional districts, DiGeronimo takes the blame for getting three Ohio State Buckeyes football players suspended for the first two games of the season. The positioning of the story isn’t an accident. Far more people care about whether Jordan Hall can play Saturday then whether the Republicans in Ohio’s state house rigged the districts to strengthen their own hand.

DiGeronimo claims that he facilitated payments of $200 to three different players to cover their expenses for participating in a charity event last winter. He essentially claims he knew better but violated NCAA and Ohio State rules for two fundamental reasons, one philosophical the other practical. He said that he thinks it’s shameful that these kids can’t even get their expenses covered for going out of their way to help a charity. That’s not entirely true but that’s beside the point. He also said that this would never have come up if not for all the other problems that followed the Buckeyes this winter related to the free tattoo hubbub. It’s kind of a “everybody’s doing it” sort of rationale that is probably true.

There was a time that it would be very easy to take DiGeronimo to task for his activities but that time, if indeed it ever did exist, has long since passed. Let’s quit acting surprised by the near daily revelations, be they about Ohio State, Miami, Auburn, Alabama, ad nauseum in finitum.

DiGeronimo may have known he was doing something wrong but that only measures his actions by a rather arbitrary set of rules that aren’t just antiquated but have a far different purpose then most believe.

The NCAA would like everyone to think that DiGeronimo and the three athletes deserve punishment as the byproduct of running afoul of rules meant to preserve the athletes’ amateur status. It’s a false premise. The rules aren’t meant to preserve anything more than the total submission of the athletes to the unbending and unrelenting thumb of an increasingly obvious illegal cartel called the NCAA.

If the NCAA really cared about its athletes, the biggest favor it could do for them and the common good is to go out of business, now. As a institution and as a concept, the NCAA is so irretrievably broken, there isn’t enough glue in the universe to fix it.

In an absolutely brilliant piece of reporting that should be read by anyone and everyone with even a glancing interest in the subject of college and athletics, Taylor Branch, writing for The Atlantic, shatters any last thought about the supposedly quaint objectives of the NCAA (see article here. Warning, it's long). In convincing fashion, Branch dispels the notion that the NCAA exists to help athletes. Instead, the NCAA exists merely to exploit their labors for the benefit of the NCAA itself and its member universities.

How does it do this? Let’s start with the concept of “student-athlete.” The NCAA uses this moniker to further the myth that all college athletes are students first and foremost. It’s hogwash. Simply, as Branch details, it’s a designation the NCAA invented as a way to fend off lawsuits filed by athletes and their survivors who wanted workers’ compensation benefits for the often debilitating or deadly injuries suffered while playing. It’s a creature of a nefarious fiction not as a shield to protect the athletes but as a sword to ward off any inroads by interlopers like the athletes or their survivors who might want to otherwise rightfully claim a piece of the financial pie.

Now calling them student-athletes and denying them simple workers’ compensation benefits that might seem like a reasonable position for the NCAA to take except when you consider, for example, how colleges must provide workers compensation benefits for the student working part time in the union who happens to slip and fall while working. The benefits are provided because the college can’t deny the existence of an employer/employee relationship. It’s clear cut. But when an athlete like Tyler Gentry became forever paralyzed from a hit while catching a football during a Buckeyes practice in 2006, the NCAA is quick to deny any such employer-employee relationship under the guise of “student-athlete.” It’s a sad and disgusting distinction that more than anything else exposes the NCAA as the heartless, shameless, depraved entity it has grown to become.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The NCAA is a creation of and supposedly serves at the direction of its member colleges. But in its early days it had very little funding or power to do much of anything. Eventually, under Walter Byers, it seized control of virtually every aspect of college athletics through the implementation of almost Gestapo-like tactics financed by the riches generated off those athletics.

It started first with football. The NCAA was initially suspicious of the medium and took great pains to control all television access and contracts. When a few colleges balked, the NCAA sought to throw them out of the system completely and essentially succeeded. Over time, as networks paid more and more for the rights to televise football, the NCAA grew richer and dribbled out the money to the institutions at will and very unevenly. Eventually enough colleges rebelled and actually sued the NCAA to gain control over those riches and won. When that happened, the NCAA’s very existence was threatened.

But undeterred, the NCAA then brokered the massive March Madness basketball tournament and has turned it into a moneymaker beyond all bounds of reason. That tournament, not coincidentally, is completely controlled by the NCAA and serves now as its major source of funding.

Now it’s fair to ask why colleges took on the NCAA over televising football but then have left the NCAA to broker March Madness. Simple. The NCAA learned its lesson and like a drug dealer, doled out enough riches to enough schools to keep them from complaining. College presidents, hooked on the cash like a junkie hooked on coke, have lost the will power to get themselves clean. So they live with the Draconian measures and inherent unfairness within which the NCAA operates in order to preserve their next fix.

I’m like Don Corleone when it comes to most of this. It really doesn’t matter much to me how someone wants to go about making money. But the line gets drawn once you recognize that what the NCAA really does is prey on the weak and vulnerable, many of whom are African-American athletes from impoverished backgrounds, to create its wealth. It cares little for the blood, sweat and bones that are shed or broken in order to enhance that wealth. Indeed the NCAA puts these athletes in almost untenable positions on a daily basis, exploits their accomplishments, their images and their very welfare, and doesn’t have even the common courtesy to give them a decent reach around.

In short, the NCAA treats the athletes not so much as pieces of meat but serfs who must work the lands and survive on whatever crumbs the feudal lord deigns to throw their way. It’s not good enough to say, “well at least they aren’t starving,” as an excuse for ignoring the reality, especially when you consider how fat everyone above them really is getting.

The NCAA plays the role of a supposedly benevolent dictator who better knows what these athletes want and need because they have no minds of their own. It’s an acceptable parental point of view, assuming your comfortable with parents named Hitler and Mussolini. The NCAA works in secret, denies athletes even a modicum of due process during any investigation, and punishes them harshly if they don’t walk whatever straight and narrow line the NCAA decides to draw this day.

Amazingly, it’s not just the athletes that are treated shabbily but the member schools upon whom the NCAA’s very existence relies. There are numerous examples of proscriptive rules that force these schools to bow to the NCAA’s will and forces them to knuckle under at the slightest hint of dissent. And finally there are those individuals who have run afoul of the NCAA, whether it’s Bruce Pearl or the dozens of lesser knowns that have had their livelihoods indiscriminately ripped away from them, that the NCAA makes examples of in order to force compliance.

In any other context, these kinds of actions would cause rioting in the streets. In this context, too many just shrug their shoulders, grab another beer and hope their team doesn’t drop in the rankings.

The NCAA is a scandal of untold proportions that are just now coming to light. If there’s any real justice then Branch’s article will be the catalyst that finally brings down the NCAA. But I won’t count on it. Far more likely to bring about the rightful end to an increasingly illegal enterprise will be the myriad of lawsuits the NCAA is facing at the moment, any one of which can and should destroy its very underpinnings.

One of the key lawsuits is a class action brought by Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA basketball player. He’s wondering, correctly, why the NCAA continues to make money off his likeness and his accomplishments through video games and the like long after O’Bannon left college. He’s not alone. Oscar Robertson is another.

The NCAA’s defense is as contradictory as its very existence. It claims on the one hand that permission to use what otherwise belongs to these players, the rights to their own likeness for example, was surrendered as a condition of playing in NCAA-sanctioned events. It’s an acknowledgement by the NCAA that the players have a valuable property right and a statement that those rights were relinquished in service of the master. On the other hand, the NCAA justifies denying these same athletes any of the basic protections anyone else with similar property rights might have, such as compensation for when those rights are violated, because their pursuit of athletics was not the exercise of any right but merely a by-product of the student experience. It’s a Through-the-Looking-Glass defense that will one day be torn to shreds by a federal judge. But that outcome awaits another day.

Besides, the NCAA may fall by the wayside, as Branch points out, long before then under the crushing weight of all the instability in college football. One thing college presidents have shown in the past is that no amount is too small to fight over when it’s theirs. If that means taking on the NCAA as a means of unlocking all the riches that a super football conference with only powerhouse programs can bring, then that’s what they’ll do. The constant shuffling of the conferences, the destruction of old rivalries, the re-positioning of various schools are not merely a sign but the brightest of red flags. It’s coming. It’s just a matter of time.

All this gets us eventually back to a small timer like DeGeronimo and his lousy $200 payments to three Buckeyes. There was a time when I would have excoriated DeGeronimo for putting the Buckeyes program in jeopardy but not anymore. All he was trying to do was right an inherent wrong, clumsily perhaps, but certainly well intentioned. And even if it wasn’t, so what? There is literally nothing DeGeronimo could do that would make him or his actions play within the same solar system as the kind of corruption the NCAA doesn’t just sanction but participates in on a daily basis.

The high-minded numbskulls that still cling to an era of athletics that never really existed (you want proof? Read the Branch story) will decry any effort to properly compensate college athletes. Paying athletes didn’t destroy the Olympics and it won’t destroy college athletics. By bringing the payments above board, think of all the time and money saved by not having to hunt down wannabes like DeGeronimo.

The enemy of college athletics is not the DeGeronimos of the world that get some sort of vicarious thrill by acting like a big fish in a small pond, but the NCAA itself. Through rules that run counter to the very liberties that every day folk wouldn’t tolerate in any other setting, the NCAA has created a corrupt, unmanageable mess that preys on the vulnerable at the expense of the rich.

DeGeronimo invoked the name of charity to explain his actions. It was all for such a worthy cause. Maybe so, but if it turns out that this incident and the thousands upon thousands just like it end up exposing the fraud that is the NCAA and bringing about its death, then a far worthier cause will have been served.

Fixing College Football

Never underestimate the power of victory to push the demons away.

Ohio State's win over Akron may have righted the ship for its fans just as each win by Miami, Oregon, USC, Auburn and the like will buoy their fans.

But no single win itself is going to do much to right the ship of college football generally. College football is in very serious trouble. It's not the kind of trouble that can be easily fixed and even if it could, there's no will to do so at the moment. But it's foolish to ignore the red flags flying over the sport and wish its problems away. Ignorance is not bliss.

At what point, for example, do we all stop citing to every instance involving every school caught doing something and then try to make the rather pathetic case that these are a series of isolated incidents? And if we're using the words “series” to explain away what we'd like to believe are isolated incidents then aren't we just being our own worst enemies by not admitting that all of it is really a rather disturbing trend.

Maybe the situation in Miami will be the flashpoint for college football, but I doubt it. It's just the latest egregious example. Oregon is wrestling with its own shady behavior as is Boise State. Auburn's resurgence brought with it the predictable NCAA scrutiny and the stink over how exactly Cam Newton got there is never going to quite leave the program. There's also a convincing argument that the flashpoint really should have been USC bringing in Lane Kiffin to fix their problems. Kiffin is nothing if not the poster child for college football opportunism as he left a Tennessee program in shambles and cleaning up its own NCAA mess that he caused as he headed to USC.

And these are only the situations that the average fan is familiar with. Less known are all the literally hundreds of issues that come each week in nearly every program around the country. The NCAA rule book and the method in which it is (must?) be interpreted has become nearly impossible for professional compliance officers. The NCAA would love to upgrade its technology and replace its antiquated fax machine but they never get a chance. It hums with compliance reports 24/7/365.

So, yea, compliance with the rules is an issue but it isn't the problem. The rules are just the NCAA's way of trying to treat a disease, the billions of dollars that have infected college football, that has no cure.

The money grab at the college level is the tsunami that is destroying the very essence of the game itself. With public college budgets strained by state legislatures with their own budget problems is it any wonder why college presidents look at the money generated by big time football and rub their hands in glee like they're Nucky Thompson in Boardwalk Empire?

Football, as practiced at the highest levels, throws of money like Angelina Jolie throws off pheromones. Ohio State and Texas and a handful of others are the tease for all the other schools looking to cash in. The money becomes the siren song that lures otherwise decent thinking and acting human beings to do some pretty ridiculous things. Just saying no is hardly a viable option when there's a whole in the budget the size of Montana.

All this money of course is the byproduct of an amoral media machine that needs these games for its own survival. And of course the machine wouldn't have all these millions to toss about so indiscriminately if not for the various advertisers who just have to get their product in front of all those eyeballs watching all those games.

Leading the pack of course is an increasingly more corrupt ESPN whose organization is so rife with conflicts of interest and self-dealing but likely will escape any real government scrutiny because of a misguided tea-party sentiment that rules and regulations are for suckers and socialists. But ESPN is most certainly helping to bring about the ruination of the sport that right now is a substantial revenue item on its balance sheet. ESPN gets in bed with Texas on the Longhorn Network. It gets in bed with the SEC on its network. And then it spends its time talking down any other team that could possibly overshadow, not to mention devalue, the investments its made in those other teams and conferences. How else to explain Mark May?

With the significant help of outfits like ESPN, college football hasn't just become a cesspool. It's become an untreatable cancer. The funny thing is, everyone associated with college football knows it has the disease but believes the best cure is simply not to go to the doctor.

When you stop to consider college football below the current Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), where championships are actually decided on the field and television money is nearly non existent, you start to more fully understand how thoroughly corrupted the FBS has become from the money.

At schools not worried about winning some mythical jerry-rigged BCS championship, there is a certain retained purity about the sport. The time devoted by the athletes to their sport at those levels isn't quite all consuming, mainly because the participants enter college knowing that there path to later success will be laid not by their ability to punt, pass or kick, but by their performance in the classroom.

No one should have faith in the NCAA's ability to legislate away its problems, either. More rules on what can be served at a players' only pre-game breakfast is surely not the answer. Besides, the NCAA is merely a feel-good creation of and beholden to the member institutions that can, at any time, throttle back its influence.

Real reform will come only when the presidents of the top universities take the problem by the scruff of its neck and demand a real solution in the form of ridding the sport of the corrupting influence of money. And the only way to do that is to stop giving individual schools a financially-based incentive to get a leg up on any other school.

If the key college presidents want to something positive for the sport, something that will really bring about reform, here's a modest but very workable solution.

First, establish one “super” conference of schools willing to pay a five million dollar entry fee each year. That will force every college to decide whether or not it's worth the price. Many won't pay and it will be better off for it. So will their budgets and by proxy their students. They can go back to lower divisions that won't have an entry fee.

For every school willing to pay the entry fee, make them then live with a fixed football budget, a “salary cap” of sorts. Every school would have the same budget. To support it, each team in the super conference will share equally all revenue generated by their sport (and I mean all revenue, without exception). Finally, abolish the BCS in favor of a legitimate playoff system. This will provide the performance incentive that every school that remains in the super conference to want to compete at the highest level.

Under this construct, the NCAA rule book would necessarily get skinnier and the compliance process would be simplified, although it would never disappear completely. Let's face it, being declared “national champions” is still a powerful incentive for some schools/individuals to cheat. Human nature can never be fully anticipated or controlled.

That still leaves one issue to deal with and that's the athletes. Right now they are the fuel that powers the engine and while there is no question that a fully paid education is a pretty decent payment, they should share in more. Grad students are paid a stipend to help teach. Athletes should get a stipend to play and it should be equal across all of the super conference.

Of course this idea won't work because it would require the dismantling of the current system. But the truth is that the current system is being dismantled piece by piece and isn't worth saving anyway. It's just a choice over whether the college presidents want to do it in a proactive way as a means of coming up with something better or want to have it simply tumble down around them when it's too late to rebuild.

Maybe big time college football is not fixable at this point or maybe it's not even worth trying. But left to its own devises, it will implode and that's guaranteed. And when that happens, the right question will not be “how did this happen” but instead “how did this not happen even sooner?”
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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--Competition Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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