Ohio State Football: The Jim Tressel Debacle, One Year Later

Memorial Day will mark the one-year anniversary of Jim Tressel's resignation from Ohio State. It was a swift and stunning fall from grace, one that will continue to reverberate through Columbus for years to come. Let's take a look back.

The spring of 2011 was supposed to be a good one for James Patrick Tressel. The Ohio State coach was coming off one of his best seasons ever: 12-1 with a Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas, scoring 38 points per game and giving up an average of only 14.3.

Terrelle Pryor was among five players whose bowl eligibility had been secured in exchange for returning to Ohio State for the 2011 season, albeit with suspensions looming. Everything was in place for a banner season.

But Tressel knew better. He knew what was coming. He must have. And soon, so would the NCAA, so would every college football fan in America, and so would every resident of the great state of O-hi-o.

Tressel knew what was coming because Christopher Cicero, a local attorney and former Buckeye, had informed Tressel that Terrelle Pryor's name had came up in a federal investigation of a local tattoo parlor, as had the names of other Buckeyes.

Cicero had told Tressel that in April...of 2010. Armed with that information, Tressel had done nothing. He didn't inform his athletic director, his president or his NCAA compliance office.

And that's the problem.

This information eventually made its way to Ohio State in January, so even as the school reported the violation to the NCAA in March and offered a two-game suspension and a $250,000 fine for Tressel, even as school president E. Gordon Gee joked that he hoped Tressel didn't fire him, and even as fans gathered in solidarity in Columbus, Tressel knew what was coming. He must have.

As the weeks passed after Ohio State's revelation to the NCAA—one hastened by a Yahoo Sports report just days prior to the school's admission of violations—outside scrutiny descended upon Columbus, and all of a sudden the proposed two-game suspension was a liability. Ohio State had a problem.

One of Jim Tressel's nicknames was "Senator," but as the investigation progressed, his public persona evolved from that of a small-s senator, one more associated with statesmanship and professionalism, to a big-S Senator, the type that sits in Washington and is universally reviled for their corruption and cynicism, cloaked in cheap appeals to authority.

And thus, with public support eroding and the specter of a car loan controversy looming on the horizon (one which, upon investigation, would prove to be nothing), Jim Tressel resigned. 

He had a 106-22 (66-14) record and six straight seasons of at least a share of the Big Ten crown. He had taken the Buckeyes to BCS bowl games in eight of his last nine seasons, with a 1-2 record in BCS championship games. He was 9-1 against hated rival Michigan.

And he was gone. Gone with him were 12 wins, including the Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas, all vacated per NCAA rules.

Ohio State fans were outraged at what had transpired, and it's hard to blame them. Tressel was beloved, and the strongest impulse was to blame the media and primary offender Terrelle Pryor for the mess that had ensued.

Even Michigan players couldn't blame Tressel for resigning (though Martell Webb's logic was a bit, er, unorthodox).

The college football world got to know Luke Fickell, and Fickell gamely tried to salvage a 2011 season that saw Terrelle Pryor kicked off campus, DeVier Posey suspended for 10 games, and a host of other Buckeyes receive multi-game suspensions.

Fickell, who coming into the season had as much head coaching experience as the players around him, led Ohio State to a 6-7 record. Nobody really blamed him for it, even as it was the Buckeyes' worst season since a 4-6-1 (2-5-1) campaign in 1988.

He quickly ceded his role as head coach as soon as the season was over. 

In came rock star Urban Meyer, who was courted and hired by Ohio State during the 2011 season with the intent of taking over for Fickell after the season. Buckeye fans were understandably ecstatic with the hire and were eagerly anticipating Meyer's arrival, but mere days before Ohio State's bowl game against Florida, the NCAA announced an unexpected one-year postseason ban as punishment for the Tressel scandal.

Some have called the ban a blessing in disguise, and there's some truth to the idea that the Buckeyes could use a consequence-free year to learn the offense and get acquainted with their new roles.

In actuality, the ban means no bowl game, no bowl practice and no shot at a Big Ten division title in a Leaders Division that's woefully thin on contenders. 2013 is only one season away, to be sure, but if postseason bans were good things, then they wouldn't be used as punishment.

Looking past all that, the lasting reverberation of the Jim Tressel scandal is one magnified a hundred-fold just months later in Happy Valley. Columbus' adoration of Tressel before the scandal made Nick Saban look comparatively invisible to Tuscaloosa residents. Ohio State administrators, players and fans wanted to keep Tressel.

But they couldn't. They didn't. Tressel was brought down by his own hubris and the looming titanic thunder of an NCAA hell-bent on making sure no coach ever decided not to report known transgressions ever again.

Perhaps it will work. Perhaps Tressel is a suitable cautionary tale for every other coach in America. Or perhaps, as Bobby Petrino proved, as long as there's power to be had in coaching, there will always be temptation to abuse it.