There must be much more under the surface to cover up to have him resign like that. Ohio State was pretty much an NCAA untouchable in my lifetime.

If Alabama and USC got punished, why wouldn't OSU?

Mark Emmert is the current NCAA president, he was the president (and an alumnus) of the U. of Washington. No reason to think he will be lenient on OSU...

We'll see.

Brilliant news. He's such a good coach. Hopefully Ohio State will return to the John Cooper years.

The big schools aren't untouchable because their rivals also have clout. UCLA and Stanford won't stand for USC getting away with shit and Michifan and Penn State and Wisconsin use their clout in the NCAA to ensure OSU can't slide. However, my feeling is that the Big Ten isn't really as acrimonious as some other conferences. I get the feeling that Carroll and USC's whole athletics operation was/is really despised by the rest of the Pac10 for their cockiness and lack of class. Tressel is well respected by his peers. OSU has attracted it's share of thugs, but it's not really an outlier in that regard and has generally been willing to suspend or expel troublemakers as appropriate.

I'd guess 2 years bowl probation and the scholarship reduction package that USC got. OSU's violations were more egregious.

The SI story is now up. I haven't read it yet, but apparently Tressel is accused of rigging a raffle at an event where recruits were at so they won big prizes back when he was an assistant. Hilarious.

In some respects, this seems much worse than USC. $C's violations occurred in football and men's basketball (as well as a female tennis player, FFS), but what the SI article alleges had been going on for a very long time. And it certainly points to those big words..."lack of institutional control."

pretty funny indeed:

"The latter interpretation is suggested by a story that has long circulated among college coaches and was confirmed to SI by a former colleague of Tressel's from Earle Bruce's staff at Ohio State in the mid-1980s. One of Tressel's duties then was to organize and run the Buckeyes' summer camp. Most of the young players who attended it would never play college football, but a few were top prospects whom Ohio State was recruiting. At the end of camp, attendees bought tickets to a raffle with prizes such as cleats and a jersey. According to his fellow assistant, Tressel rigged the raffle so that the elite prospects won -- a potential violation of NCAA rules. Says the former colleague, who asked not to be identified because he still has ties to the Ohio State community, "In the morning he would read the Bible with another coach. Then, in the afternoon, he would go out and cheat kids who had probably saved up money from mowing lawns to buy those raffle tickets. That's Jim Tressel."

One of the more interesting observations in the article is that the attitude towards OSU in Columbus is more like the fawning adoration common in the SEC than the respectful admiration the Big Ten likes to pride itself on. I'd be interested to hear Reed's view on that.

They obviously deserve everything they get, but the fact that this scandal centers almost entirely on memorabilia just highlights how broken the current system is. Nike and OSU make zillions off the backs of some talented kids, who have to cheat to get tattoos.

It seems to be more there than here fawning. Not much fawning for Joepa these days. He's treated more like a curmudgeonly but beloved grampa who can tell you everything about how to fix old cars or the Battle of the Bulge but needs help operating the TV remote. And several of the bigger papers in the state seem to be hostile to Joepa.

All credit is due the Columbus Dispatch for doing this investigation. I'm sure they got death threats.

Penn State doesn't have the monopoly on sports interest here like college football in the SEC states because most fans are all equally if not mor interested in the Steelers, Eagles, Giants, Phillies, Penguins, Flyers, Pirates, etc. You'd think that same dynamic would pervade in Ohio, but it doesn't seem to.

I don't know if Tressel is a good guy or not. I'm just glad OSU is in distress and may not get so many good recruits. I do know that they have never been the paragon of academic excellence their fans imagine. They recruit by promising the NFL.

It does give me some Schadenfreude to see Tyrell Pryor mixed up in this. His dad wanted him to come to Penn State but he deemed it "too country."

I don't like Ohio State or Jim Tressel's sweater vests, so this is somewhat amusing. But of course I wouldn't exactly be shocked if Texas (or any other big college football school) got busted for recruiting violations, either.

I sometimes think big college programs should just turn into professional squads that "represent" a college, like Pumas and Tigres in the Mexican Primera División.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I think that it is only "big time" fooball and basketball that are irreparably broken. The vast majority of college athletes have nothing to do with those programs and would be fine if there were relatively minor fixes (allowing modest stipends and a share of merchandise revenue, for instance).

Give the "big time" programs a choice of either competing in a new professional league of Pumas, Tecos and Tigres (perhaps with 4 or 5 year limits on playing for any one team and tuition credits for post-career education) or scaling down to an Ivy/Division III style of program.

It will never happen, but it would make a lot of sense.

ursus arctos wrote:
Perhaps I'm naive, but I think that it is only "big time" fooball and basketball that are irreparably broken.

Maybe, but the article shows that there was some dirty stuff going on when he was the coach at Youngstown State--in Division III!

Weren't they 1-AA?

Sorry, you're right--when he played there in the 1970s they were in Div. III, but yes, were 1-AA in the 1990s.

Cheating in Div III is pretty much on the level of buying your star quarterback a frozen custard after the game.

Again, I see the NCAA as an absolute horseshit organization. Kids got free jerseys ? Kids got free tattoos ? Kids weren't allowed to use their knitting skills to sell knitted hats (the kid from Boise State who proposed and married the cheerleader) ? Get A Fucking Life.

I hate the NCAA with every ounce of my soul. Absolute bastards.

There is something intensely perverse about the potential for everyone connected with big-time college football to make loads of money apart from those who actually play the game.

The reason players can't sell stuff like that is because in the past, it was a way for players to get paid by boosters. They'd get paid a lot for some do-nothing job or they'd sell something for way more than it was worth or just sell something that they only got by virtue of being a player, which appears to be what has happened here. If that was allowed to happen unchecked, then the sports would be far less competitive than they already are. After all, even the NFL has a salary cap.
You'd certainly never see VCU or Gonzaga in a final four.

I don't have any sympathy for players or coaches who try to get around the rules and say that the players "deserve" it. I might think I deserve to get paid more as a reporter, but that wouldn't make it right for me to take bribes from PR companies or moonlight for a competitor or plagiarize. The rules are the rules.

The players know what they are signing up for when they signed the scholarship offers. The revenue from basketball and football subsidize the other sports. That's how it works. If they don't like it, they can play professionally in Europe or whatever.

If the player wanted to be a professional, then he should go out and try to find a professional team that will take him on. See how well that works out. If you really "deserve" it then the market will prove you right.


Having said that, I recognize that there are some artificial barriers. The NBA needs to get rid of their stupid one-year rule and perhaps some kind of minor league football circuit would help, but I'm not sure that could sustain itself financially. The truth is that college football is as much, if not moreso, about the "brand" of the university and the campus experience, not the quality of the playing. So in that way, the players need the university a lot more than the other way around.

I do think that players on a full scholarship who aren't allowed to work should get some kind of modest "walking around money." Their books, room, and meals are paid for, why not also their laundry and a few bucks to go out with their girlfriends or whatever? It seems sensible. Of course, that would be an added expense and not all schools would want to pay that. In that case, maybe it's time for the richest programs - roughly the BCS, but not even all of them - to split off and form a Premier League separate from Division 1. We already have three divisions (there are actually five divisions of college football already) based on how much the school can and wants to pay for sports. Maybe we need more.



There's a lot of room for improvement - and I think the NCAA has made some great strides in this area - but I don't think the scholar-athlete business is nearly as much of a farce as it's often purported to be. In some cases, yes, but you have to consider the alternative. It seems that the people who say that imagine that if there weren't so much money sloshing around in college sports, that would all be like idyllic ivy-league & service-academy-land where players are all renaissance men planning to go to med school, etc. Or that somehow the youth of America (the world too) would suddenly become a lot more interested in their studies if there were no money in sports. But there are tons of college athletes who know they have no chance of having a career in sports (rowers, fencers, women's lacrosse players, etc) and yet still commit a huge amount of time and energy into it. So it's not just the money that's distracting kids from school. It's just how young people are. So encouraging them to keep their grades up to stay eligible for sports will help them later on when they're more mature and understand why education is more important.


And as long as there are people willing to pay money to see sports, there will be professional sports, and as long as there are professional sports, there will be young people aspiring to play at that level. So if there weren't college scholarships for these sports, we'd have a system like Europe in which kids make sports a priority at a very young age. To a lesser extent, that's what junior hockey in Canada does too. Is that really preferable? I don't see how it is. For example, the statistics I've seen show that about 80% of guys who play NCAA hockey end up eventually graduating from college, whereas only about a third of guys taking the major junior hockey route ever get a university degree. Of course, more CHL players make the NHL, and it's good that players have a choice, but if it were my kid, I'd want him to get a degree, regardless.

So I tend to see the situation more as a glass half full. Yes, there are too many athletes who go to college and don't really study and never graduate. But I'd hazard to guess that in almost all of those cases, if not for sports, they'd never have even thought about going to college anyway. Meanwhile, there are a lot of guys who do graduate from college who never would have aspired to attending college if it weren't for sports. Either they wouldn't have had the motivation to get their grades up, they wouldn't have been able to afford it, or it's just not a world that they'd ever have been exposed to. The existence of this latter group justifies the risk of the former, I think. At least in some cases. There are D1 schools, like Penn State, which graduate athletes, black athletes, basketball and football players at much higher rates than anything you'd want to compare to. So that shows that it is possible.