Of course there's a bias

Dear Mr. Forde:

As an ESPN viewer/ESPN The Mag subscriber and a fan of the perspective you offer on behalf of the WWL, I felt compelled to write you regarding your piece on the O.J. Mayo/USC situation. As a Trojan alum, I was saddened to learn, given his past history with both Jeff Trepagnier at USC and the NCAA penalties against Fresno State, that Ron Guillory seems to have been allowed to lurk around the USC basketball program. If the allegations about monies being funneled to O.J. Mayo from BDA via Guillory are proven to be true, then I agree that USC should be held accountable for not policing the situation better. If the NCAA doesn’t feel it can level a verifiable charge, then USC should self-impose its own penalty and Mike Garrett should hold a press conference to allow questions to be asked and answered.

However, I strongly disagree with your decision to lump in the Reggie Bush allegations with the Mayo story. You write as if the Mayo story is strike #2 against USC, seemingly putting these 2 wholly different scenarios on an equal footing. For the record, I believe there’s a good chance that Reggie Bush and his family may have received benefits which could put his NCAA status at the time in question, and there’s a chance the Trojans will suffer indirectly as a result of Bush’s selfishness. At the same time, there was no Guillory involved in the Bush story. Was Lloyd Lake a known quantity around Heritage Hall a la Guillory? Respectfully, I think the idea that Coach Carroll and/or his staff are responsible for knowing who is making the mortgage payments for a player’s parents or even, yes, that they should stand in a campus parking lot watching for any player’s car that might show up pimped out is ludicrous. Pete Carroll is famous for his open-to-anybody practices and that, too, may have to change, but your reasoning seemed to include critical assumptions about USC’s culpability in the Bush matter which must come either from inside knowledge you chose not to share with your readers or some very adept leaps of logic you felt compelled to make.

Your piece began by referencing the infamous SMU “death penalty” case, in which both SMU campus officials and athletic department staff members were charged (themselves) with funneling payments to a couple dozen players on the football team. It then went on to imply that USC’s yet-to-be-proven transgressions (turning a blind eye? plausible deniability?) are on a par with those of the SMU staff, yet suggested USC will likely only escape a similar punishment because the NCAA isn’t interested in revisiting those days. As a proud Trojan, I want USC to represent the best in college academics AND athletics, and I absolutely support adequate penalties where bylaws have been broken. I was just disappointed in your choice to set a punishment in advance of an actual conviction, or even a fair hearing of USC or the NCAA’s findings.

Sincerely,
P.E. Thomas