SEC Football Fans Should Hope Ohio State Gets Reamed by the NCAA

Ohio State head football coach Jim Tressel may buy his sweater vests in bulk, but apparently integrity is sold separately.

Friday's revelation that Tressel emailed a mentor of quarterback Terrelle Pryor in an attempt to protect his player's eligibility undermined his initial defense that he kept his knowledge confidential so as to avoid interference with a federal investigation.  It also destroyed whatever shred of credibility Tressel had left.

Tressel’s pointless and confusing initial press conference that lacked anything resembling contrition for his admitted flagrant disregard for NCAA rules.

In between the spin job, circular reasoning and overactive use of passive verbs, Tressel admitted that he knew all along that six of his players had sold their Buckeye memorabilia for unauthorized benefits that rendered them ineligible, but he played them anyway, and mislead the NCAA about his knowledge of the situation to boot. 

His excuse, at the time, that he could not tell a soul about this information for fear of blowing up a federal investigation, is one that we now know he did not even himself believe.

College football fans everywhere should be angry over this story, but three Southeastern Conference Schools—Alabama, Tennessee and Vanderbilt—have a particular interest in how this story plays out. 

In the mid-1990s, the NCAA found that Alabama cornerback Antonio Langham signed with an agent immediately after the completion of his junior year and that then-Alabama head football coach Gene Stallings knew about it but still allowed him to play the following season. 

Based on these findings (along with rumblings out of Tuscaloosa that Alabama officials, while never actively misleading the NCAA, refused to volunteer any incriminating information in aid of the NCAA’s investigation) Alabama received a one-year bowl and television ban, scholarship reductions that crippled the program for years and was forced to forfeit every game that Langham played in the 1995 season.

Tressel’s deception was at an entirely higher level than was that of Stallings. Tressel knowingly played not one ineligible player for an entire season, but six. Tressel not only failed to volunteer his knowledge of his players’ ineligibility to the NCAA, he presumably actively mislead the NCAA by claiming no prior knowledge of the situation when the NCAA investigated the players’ merchandise sales in December.

Alabama fans, who have long theorized that they were the inexplicable target of disproportionate NCAA wrath, have every reason to expect and demand at least equal punishment for what appears to be, if anything, a more serious violation that the one for which they got hammered within recent memory. 

Comparing the two cases, one would expect Ohio State to beg for the NCAA’s mercy and self-impose sanctions similar to the ones Alabama received, in the hopes the NCAA would be in a good mood and overlook the additional aggravating factors. 

Alabama fans and Tennessee fans have not agreed on much in recent years, but the necessity of a severe punishment for Ohio State may be an exception. Former University of Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl committed a Tressel-ike violation in lying to the NCAA. While Tennessee’s full punishment has not yet been revealed, Pearl has already lost his job and suffered a fine of millions of dollars. 

This was, you may recall, for Pearl lying about committing a secondary violation (improper contact with a recruit) rather than lying about a major violation like knowingly playing multiple players known to be ineligible. 

Tressel’s explanations for knowingly playing players ineligible to compete makes no sense.

First, Tressel claimed that the NCAA implications of his players selling their school merchandise never crossed his mind. Tressel thus expects us to believe that when the NCAA asked him in December if he knew anything about players receiving improper benefits it never crossed his mind that their doing so might have been an NCAA violation. 

He expects us to believe that when A.J. Green of Georgia was suspended four games this year for selling his game jersey, it never crossed his mind that his players might be breaking the rules by for doing something substantially similar.

Perhaps realizing the flaws in this argument, Tressel initially went on claim that he was silent about his players misdeeds because he did not want to interfere with a federal drug investigation concerning the man who received the players’ team merchandise.

Tressel went so far as to imply that the government itself requested confidentiality, neglecting to mention that this “confidentiality” request came not from the government for the sake of protecting the investigation, but the from the attorney of the alleged drug dealer, for the sake of shielding further potential wrongdoers from facing consequences for their actions.   

The irony of an attorney breaking his own ethical duty of confidentiality toward a potential client while simultaneously requesting confidentiality from the person with whom he broke that duty is worth noting. 

But Tressel’s explanation came apart on Friday when it was revealed that he did not keep this information confidential at all. Instead, he emailed Terrelle Pryor's mentor, presumably without regard for that same investigation that he claimed prevented him from passing on his information to the NCAA. 

Given that Tressel’s misconduct in playing ineligible players was more severe than Alabama’s in doing the same, and that his lie to the NCAA was also more significant than Pearl’s, one would have expected Ohio State to suggest to the NCAA a punishment combining that which both universities suffered, in the hopes the NCAA would not aggregate the Buckeye’s misconduct into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. 

Instead, Ohio State has suggested the NCAA  suspend their wayward head coach for five games (mostly against bad non-conference opponents that Ohio State could beat with Brutus the Buckeye running the show), and fine him $250,000, roughly six percent of Tressel’s $4 million annual income. 

In other words, Ohio State and Tressel believe that as punishment for coaching an entire season in knowing violation of NCAA rules, Tressel should receive $3.75 million for his services. 

If the University’s approach sounds tone deaf, consider the source. The only bigger hypocrite in this mess than Jim Tressel is Ohio State University President Gordon Gee.  It was Gee who, not too long ago, eliminated the position of athletics director and dissolved the athletics department while president of Vanderbilt University. 

In doing so, Gee argued that college athletics had taken on a disproportionate role in the function of major colleges, and that he wished to return athletics to their proper scope as a mere subset of student life rather than a freestanding department. 

Conveniently, Gee’s view of the proper role of intercollegiate athletics seemed to change the instant he left Vanderbilt for Ohio State, as the athletics department there stands in tact. 

Gee’s former position that athletics paled in comparison to greater academic missions like teaching education and morality stands diametrically opposed from his pronouncement that not only would he not fire Tressel for his acknowledged violation of NCAA rules of fair competition, but that he hoped that he Tressel "would not fire him" for having the audacity to slap Tressel on wrist for his misconduct.   

If Gee ever actually believed his self-righteous proclamations of academic responsibility at all, his conscience apparently disappeared the moment he arrived at a school capable of making a BCS bowl game. 

If he and the band of rogues under his watch at Ohio State get away with this act, SEC fans should be furious.