This piece on Jim Tressel is pretty amazing. I’m not a big college football person: If I wanted to watch a violent corrupt game whose best years are in the rear view, I’d follow boxing because at least they pay their athletes something. But when a game is on on Saturday, I don’t care about any of that.
And now, we’ll hear about how everybody does it. And we’ll hear how it’s just what you have to do to keep competitive. But like those sorts of excuses in politics, I don’t buy it. If we hold corrupt people accountable, and we take away some of the incentives for corruption, this doesn’t have to happen.
Also like in politics, people substitute other people’s piety for judgement. Oh, he’s a Christian, he can’t be stalking men’s rooms for sex. Oh he’s a Christian, he can’t be a corrupt coach. But the truth is that the most and the least religious people are perfectly capable of disgusting things. If I had to bet, I’d say he probably believes the Christian stuff he preaches. I obviously don’t know, but people have a way of compartmentalizing.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this rambling piece. It was just supposed to be a one sentence link in an open thread, but I’m still writing. I guess to sort of make it local, we’ve all seen the decline of the Huskies since Rick Neuheisel’s recruiting violations, and I can’t imagine that Ohio State won’t suffer as well. Doesn’t really seem worth it, but I don’t suppose they thought they’d get caught.
Wow, he’s creepy and corrupt.
But, I hope this doesn’t turn into some big huge, thing with everyone and their pet poodle piling on like the baseball player that was recently prosecuted or Lance Armstrong. Ban him from coaching and move on.
I wonder if McDonalds will let him wear the sweater vest when he works the register at his next job.
Go Blue!
Everybody does it. But only the true believers can obtain social forgiveness, which is essentially a political judgement.
My team. Right or wrong.
@2 Lee: Nope. He’ll do well on the rubber chicken circuit speaking to larger evangelical and tea party type audiences who will buy his shit. Then he’ll go to Denny’s every nite for the blue plate special, thence to a local cocktail lounge to oogle and feel up the waitresses and get maudlinly drunk.
Beats 8 hrs a day standing in one spot on concrete asking, “Would you like to supersize that meal?”
Yea. You betcha’. Then he’ll tell you how fucking hard he worked. He doesn’t know shit about working hard.
PS, trolls: Working long hours is not necessarily the same as working hard. Just an FYI for you dipshits.
I would remind folks here of an innovative suggestion Lee made here on HA.
Lee, as I remember, you suggested spinning of the NCAA 1 teams as private businesses that keep the university logoes and team names as brands .. not all that different from how the UW gets a buck from NIKE.
In return for the brand, the Huskies would be required to employ a certain number of UW or WA state students, just like any employer has employess. These guys (and maybe gals) would hbe paid wages much like the Aquasox pay their players.
The athletic careers of the students who “work” for Huskies, Inc, would not be the business of the UW at all … Thde UW would treat these students like any other student with a work-study job.
I really like this idea! It seems a lot like doing an internship with Microsoft only .. likely better paid with less chance of leading to a later career!
“Branding” workstudy could go further too ….imagine hiring the Husky House Painters!
6: Probably need to add a clause that the owners of Huskies Inc can’t move the franchise to a different city.
And now, we
I would get upset, except that I don’t see that much to really get upset about. It’s not like the current scandal involving the Auburn player who was shopped around by his father seeking cash in return for signing a letter of intent. It’s not like the growing scandel of coaches who over-sign players with scholarship offers, only to tell them there was a “mistake”, and there aren’t enough scholarships to go around, and he is going to have to rely upon loans to pay for his education while he plays football – oh, and he can’t transfer to another school without losing a year of eligibility. It’s not like the confessions of the sports agent who said he regularly gave “loans” or “gifts” of thousands of dollars to college football players in the hope that they would make them their agent when the time came to negotiate an NFL deal. It’s not even like Rick Neuheisal betting thousands of dollars on an NCAA pool and then lying about it to NCAA investigators.
Here, you have some players who sought to make a few bucks selling their stuff. It may be a violation of NCAA rules, but on the scale of 1-10, I would probably rate this as a two.
Of course, as Richard Nixon discovered, it’s the cover-up which gets you hammered. In this case the coach SHOULD have called the offending players into his office, suspended them, and reported it all to the compliance officers who would then report it to the NCAA.
But in this case the coach obviously felt like the loss of several (or many?) key players which the NCAA might deem to be ineligible was overkill. So he stuck his head in the sand and pretended he never saw the violations. Then, when caught, he lied about how and when he learned of the violations.