SI.com reveals Tressel's long history of looking the other way

On one hand, Tressel seems to be a caring coach, trying to teach these young men about right and wrong, and on the other, he looks the other way or rationalizes when wrong choices are made (his or theirs) as not being all that wrong in the big picture.

I won’t say that he is a scumbag or some such, but he does clearly seem to be at least a hypocrite, and one that will likely cost tOSU quite a bit more than they would ever have expected. Part of that is the university’s own fault, as it seems that they were also eitehr willing to look the other way, or simply clueless about the actions of the football team.

Neither would seem to be much of an excuse…

Tressel and the rest of the staff at tosu have been able to plead ignorance for so long that they missed where stuff on the internets is never really gone.

The infractions by the players are small and stupid. It’s the coverup that will be the problem.

Because I used to come here and rib you guys about the Caroll and Bush thing, I felt the need to come her and comment on the situation at Ohio State and for the NCAA. I also wanted to come back here as I felt my ideas would simply be ignored by the OSU fans who are nuts and too raw to hear it right now.

Some of what I posted here earlier was good natured antagonism between competing teams played out on the web, and part of that was because I think Carroll and USC were years ahead in dealing with something that all of college sports is struggling with: walking the line between business and amateurism. For those who want to field a team consistently capable of playing for number one this is no small issue.

I thought the NCAA was going to use their ruling on USC to set landmark precedent that would help schools navigate this new era of hyper commercialism, which they clearly did not do.

As someone who has been troubled by the commercialization of college sports for a long time, I was so disgusted by Tatgate, that I did not watch the bowl game at all, and really washed my hands of it. It really bothered me that the NCAA, the Sugar Bowl, and others needed the cheaters to play and make it a good game to protect their revenue. It made me angry when Ohio State’s administration found a way to get these player to play. And it made me f*cking meltdown when I found out Tressel lied and withheld information that let everyone else act like dumbasses. Yes, they all made bad decisions, but Tressel made this turd ripe and really threw this at everyone’s feet.

I am glad Tressel is gone, and sorry it took this long to get him to leave. It was too much for me to take when Gee was used as a beard and the calming “serious” voice of the university to say everything was alright. Ohio State is actually an institution aside from football. Its been my experience, from the president, to the deans, to the professors, and even the TAs, all are free to judge the so called student athletes as students, not as cash crops for the university. By speaking up the way he did, Gee put all the integrity of that system at risk in a way I’ve never thought would happen, and I fear started the school on a bad path. Mind you, I know the athletic department works to find ways to make it work for the players, but thought the president imposed limits on them. The tat5 nonsense took all this to a new level that is bad for the school.

Back when the Clarett thing played out, I was convinced that tressel’s “ignorance” was either by design or because he was simply lying about what he knew. At the time, I thought his people built in sort of a plausible deniability that protected him from actually knowing the specifics of what was going on, even though he probably was aware in a general sense that their was a low level sleazy set ready to compensate players. When I say low level, its not to minimize that breaking the rules is wrong, but rather to observe if guys are selling memorabilia for cash, they are probably not getting a lot of money elsewhere. Of course, if you look at the recent SI article clearly some guys are getting bigger payouts, so I guess we’ll learn more about that going forward.

As for the state of things at OSU, its become such a dynamic situation, it hard to describe. I don’t think we know what the NCAA knows, and I think that even if they rule on what they do know, they’ll have to open more investigations and revise their initial findings. If the death penalty is on the table, I’m ok with that

I’m not trying to marginalize the importance of what happened at OSU, but the long and short of it is until the NCAA reconciles their rules with the realities of the business of sports, these kinds of things will keep on going. And some “stipend” to cover a players exchange for labor, will fail to address that the athlete posses one of the scarcest commodities of all “celebrity” and sports fans being among the most irrational consumers of all will be willing to spend that extra dollar to get as close to that as they can. In other words even if paid the NCAA won’t be able to impose some sort of meaningful cap, and the rules will still be broken.

Make it an explicit business, but if its a bidding war to be the best funded minor league sports teams with the most NFL bound talent, I’m glad OSU is/will be out it for a while.

With the investigations at Ohio State, and Auburn requiring the justice department, even if only in a tangential role, I’m sure we are but a few years away from more of a market driven system that still relies on the schools. I’ve got to think a number of top coaches/ADs/and even companies like Nike and Adidas are looking at what is happening at OSU, USC, and Boise thinking they need the protection and reliability of a more stable system. But really this is minor league sports made big with students and alumni, but its nothing the universities need to be involved in anymore. Let the NFL figure out how to grow talent, and let a guy like Maurice Claret, or Cam Newton reach their full athletic potential without making them subject to a black market, or without threatening the integrity of the school.