Gene Smith, Hypocrisy and the NCAA: Why Won't Smith Admit the Problem?

At some point you would think Gene Smith would have to start being honest with himself.

The long list of violations that has come out in the past year is a strong indictment of an athletic department run amok.  Violations cropping up in different forms and different areas of the football program. It all began with the original violations surrounding five Buckeyes that received hundreds of dollars worth of tattoos in exchange for memorabilia, followed by the athletic department's gambit to keep those players eligible for last year's Sugar Bowl.

Then it all fell apart.  Jim Tressel had known about the violations for months, yet sat on them knowing full well that he was playing players that were ineligible under NCAA rules.  That is where the whole scope of the violations changed.  

No longer was this just about players trading merchandise for something else—something that most college football fans aren't wild about but can sympathize with given the restrictive nature of NCAA scholarships on earning money legally and the exploitative nature of merchandise sales and likeness rights by athletic departments across the country.  Tressel took it in a new direction.  Don't take your medicine, cover it up.

Now, almost a year later there are a string of violations that involve a handful of different people and incidents, thousands of dollars exchanged and multiple shady influences from people outside the program*.  

Add to that the recent extension of Dan Herron and DeVier Posey's suspensions (and a first suspension for Marcus Hall) in relation to being overcompensated for summer jobs, and it is becoming crystal clear that Gene Smith and the Ohio State athletic department have a compliance problem.

But don't expect Smith to say it.

"

These failures are individual failures: failures of individual athletes, and as you know unfortunately a previous coach, and a booster. So it's not a systemic failure of compliance. I'm optimistic and I'm confident that we will not have those charges.

"

No, Gene, they aren't just "individual failures," and repeating it to yourself doesn't make it any more true.

Gene Smith paints a picture of an athletic department working diligently to police itself.  Over a period of 10 years starting in 2000, the Ohio State NCAA compliance office self-reported more violations than any other major conference program.  All in a days work, says Smith.

The problem isn't in the compliance department; that much seems obvious to Smith.  The compliance department is doing all it can (and no it doesn't look fishy at all that Ohio State has more violations to self-report than any other school).  

It's those bad apples like Jim Tressel, who was always so bad at dealing with NCAA compliance that eventually Smith decided to do all NCAA compliance performance evaluations in person rather than with written reviews—getting rid of that pesky paper trail at the same time.  

It's the student athletes that put themselves in bad positions and acted "out of selfishness," or was it just that they didn't know the rules?

Despite running the well-documented, dirtiest athletic department north of Dade county, Smith continues to thumb his nose at the NCAA.  He lobbied for ineligible players to be permitted to play in the Sugar Bowl, stood behind Jim Tressel when it came to light that the coach willfully covered up his prior knowledge of the violations for nearly a year, then pawned the entire thing off on Tressel when it became politically expedient, only to claim that willful cover ups done by the head coach of a major college football program do not count as lack of institutional control.

Garbage.  What is the head coach of a program then?  Is his most important job not oversight?

In an age when college football is big business that nets universities the kind of money that would make Scrooge McDuck envious, many expend a lot of effort trying to explain the virtues that make the whole system worthwhile.  

It is fine not to pay the athletes, to use their likenesses in video games and on jerseys and to cut them loose when they cease to serve the football program's greater purpose of the almighty win.  

It is fine to do all of these things because what college football does is build boys into men.  Coaches mold not just fine football players, but upstanding citizens and the leaders of tomorrow.  In no other coaching profession is the hypocrisy so ripe and overpowering.  

Coaches espouse the value of putting the team first, then jump to the NFL for a big pay day.  Coaches talk about the health and safety of their players, then play them the week after a concussion.  Coaches talk about the football program as a family, then negligently contribute to the death of a student assistant for a competitive advantage.

College football can be a lot of things to a lot of people, but it is hard to take the sport seriously as a molder of men when the one value that trumps everything else is "wins=dollars."

Gene Smith has at no point in the last year done what is the best for the student athletes in his athletic department.  Instead of accepting the punishment handed down to five players in December, holding Jim Tressel immediately responsible for a calculating cover up hell-bent on pulling the wool over the NCAA's eyes and then finally admitting that there is a larger problem within the Ohio State athletic department given the string of NCAA violations of the past year, Gene Smith has only done one thing: look out for his bottom line.

If building good citizens and teaching life lessons is really the most virtuous goal of a college football program, shouldn't Gene Smith finally do the right thing and take responsibility instead of passing the blame off on everyone else?  Or will Smith keep ignoring what most of us learned in kindergarten: the most noble thing one can do is take responsibility for one's actions.

*(None of this includes the shady dealings with car dealers, or the humiliation spared the program once Terrelle Pryor left before being forced to testify about the thousands of dollars he allegedly received for appearances arranged by Buckeye boosters.)