terrelle pryor has emotional problems

BlueReign / The Diaries / Lattimer

Maybe I was asking for it by demanding more diaries last week but 346 characters in the diary tab, and 108 of them you people caps'ed. That includes the " – x days ago" parts which you would have rendered in 18-point bold if you could have. With all the shoutin' these better be good.

This one's good. It's a sports in general diary about the mindset of athletes and how they can be driven to use performance-enhancing drugs by stephnrjking. He doesn't excuse anything; mostly he demonstrates that strong control by the leagues is an imperative. However I disagree with his assertion that benefits…

PEDs can increase strength. They can increase speed. They can increase endurance (cyclists don't use anabolic steroids, but directly alter their blood chemistry to increase their cardiovascular efficiency to astonishing levels). What are sports if not tests for speed, strength, and endurance? PEDs can give a soccer player the endurance to win a corner in the 87th minute, a baseball player the extra length on a fly ball to hit a home run, or a running back the extra kick to make it to the second level. A basketball player gets extra height on their way to the basket, a hockey player recovers quicker for the next playoff game, a swimmer has the extra wattage to win at the wall.

…incentivize steroid use for football players as much as baseball or cycling. A commenter mentioned soccer, where endurance again is a major factor of success. The reason is because the PEDs that don't show up in a test only give you a marginal edge. In cycling that tiny margin makes a huge difference as you expend your endurance to near its absolute maximum. In baseball it makes a difference because hitting or pitching you will accumulate so many trials that even marginal changes will appear in the stats. Remember what Crash Davis said's the difference between hitting .250 in the bushes and playing in Yankee Stadium: one hit a week. We tend to think of juiced up sluggers hitting copious amounts of dingers, but they started catching guys with the spot checks or investigations and a lot of times it was dudes in their mid-'30s trying to quickly come back from an injury.

MLB in particular compounded their problem by purposely turning a blind eye after the lockout. Whether it was because they didn't want to go 20 rounds again with the players union or just got distracted by Mac's dingers, it created a scenario for a lot of guys where you juiced or fell behind guys who did. The numbers of ballplayers at the end of a needle doesn't apply to college football because college football never tacitly allowed it.

In football it's going that extra inch with Al Pacino and whatnot, but the rewards of a little bit extra, if extant, are hard to see. I don't doubt that there are players who use PEDs in college football, but the edge isn't going to show in practice or in stats, making it a dumbass risk to take without the promise of rewards. So then it's go big or don't bother, therefore fewer will bother.

More has gone into educating these guys about the risks of steroids than any generation before them, so I'd imagine they realize the increased risk of injury, which in a contact sport is closer to guaranteeing you'll get injured. I'd be way less surprised if they're taking brain drugs, e.g. Sammy Watkins, because those are widely available on a modern college campus and a full coarse load on top of the amount of study the game requires more concentration than physical endurance.

There's the few guys who go all Steve Lattimer, taking 1,000 to 10,000 times safe amounts of anabolic steroids to turn into starters. Brian Cushing (above, moments after owning Jake Long) had those rumors around him since high school, but only failed a drug test once, after he was in the NFL, and he disputes it. I'm not accusing Cushing—I'm saying if you start growing outside the bounds of the usual athlete growth rate (which is pretty high to begin with) people will notice. Also they test everybody on entry to the NFL. I think the risks for college football outweigh the benefits more than for other sports. I'm sure there's still dumbasses who do it anyway. I don't think you need to hedge your fandom for it.

Two stars. Modder BiSB tried to look at recruiting from the angle of two-stars. The update to this included some rubber hitting road when he showed the draft picks who came from higher stars seemed to have more successful teams than those who came from nowhere, but then Ohio State screws up the 5-star thing by going 7-6 with lots of them. I would guess the reason a 4-star who becomes an NFL player has a better team in college mostly because his team had more 4-stars who'll be future NFL players on it while lots of lower-ranked diamonds share the field with plenty of 2-stars who don't work out.

Etc. Blockhams go green for a week. Not shown: Chalmers (the MSU brother) covering the family home with a spray-painted bedsheet.

Best of the Board

WE NO SHANE A MORRISCANO

Blue had me on the fence on the diary but then add this and it's Diarist of the Week. That became the opening salvo of the Shane Morris Photoshop Thread he started. And did the cropping. Give yourself 200 points sir! The rest of you, click to find Shane joining the ranks of the Photoshop HoF, trolling fascists (and Ohio State, if you see them as not fascists), held aloft the Titanic by Lewan, tempting bulls, flying through space, catlabbing, and doing the Up and Over It hand dance. Hard to believe it's been over a year since he committed.

IN A PINK LOCKER ROOM

Michigan Replay / Inside Michigan Football (dramatization).

About the time you're reading this I'll be off to have breakfast with the guy who made Michigan Replay happen (this is a great gig!). To fill in the blanks and refresh my own memories I enlisted the board's help and the result was a LOT of people with fond tales and uncanny knowledge about the weeks when the hosts were in flux. Also: lots of YouTubes of old episodes. Prepare to lose all productivity to the irresistible combination of '70s funk rock and Bo Schembechler doing UFRs. IMF is not a replacement. I don't know what could be.

HORSE EXHUMATION

A new user stumbled upon the thread where Brian told people not to freak out about recruits every time they lean in one direction and fart another, because the recruit at the time was a certain legacy from Columbus with a snowplow business. This led to exhumations of many a dead thread and prediction. Like the banana dancing about peanut butter because the alternative was hiring the guy from Ball St…oh. This then became the great threads of the past, e.g. "Things you're man (or woman) enough to admit."

I followed some of the links and ended up reminiscing more about some of the commenters of yesteryear. I've long wanted to do an article bringing up some of the great threads from BITD, not just the ones that go in the hall of fame but those with five punting Zoltans, or the Paint of a 24th century Michigan Stadium with maize jerseys and planets for video screens that launched Midnight Maize.

BEAT OHIO IN 2013

A law professor goes over the most recent case of Ohio State and its predilection for lawyerly hypocrisy in defending its interests (as in they act like they're defense attorneys, not that lawyers are all such and what), particularly with how they claim the utter sanctity of student records to fend off investigations but then disclose personal information. I didn't want to delve too deep into the grad student's claims in this is better aired, but there's some good discussion in there about institutional ethics. From a football standpoint, there's a good and evil narrative. From a reality standpoint I wouldn't doubt for a second that Michigan has been two-faced to serve its own needs, if not so obvious about it.

For a case example of how people can justify their actions in their own heads see Terrelle Pryor believing his extra benefits at OSU were the work of divine providence. Emotional problems, remember?

Beating them is the important thing. In college athletics, it's when you lose that people get dissatisfied and everything comes out. Sustained success with sustained ethics only happens if the program uses that as its foundation.

Sam Webb's interview with the 2013 commits who camped at Columbus includes a "Beat Ohio!" cheer.

Image above is umhero getting wwaaaaaaaayy ahead of things.

Your moment of zen:

Piling on. It's bad when Adult Swim is on your case:

Different kinds of one thing. Braves & Birds makes a good point about oversigning:

The teams that have the greatest incentive to oversign are the middle class or lower class programs that struggle to recruit top players and therefore have to make up with quantity what they cannot acquire in quality.  Thus, we would expect that the most successful teams in the conference would not oversign because they don’t have to do so.  Therefore, looking at results and recruiting quantities is a fool’s errand because Pennington is not normalizing for program status.  In other words, if Florida signs 85 players over a four-year period and Ole Miss signs 105, we wouldn’t expect Ole Miss to have a better record because the extra players will not trump all of the other advantages that Florida has over Ole Miss.  

There are two kinds. The first kind (as practiced by Houston Nutt): "maybe if I sign everyone who can play football enough of them will be eligible for me to keep my job." The second: <imperial march> SABAN </imperial march>.

Here's a graph from Brian Fremeau that gives you an indication of just how few kids enroll at Ole Miss relative to the rest of the nation's top 25 recruiters:

Nutt is way down at the bottom with VT, who no one ever talks about; South Carolina, USC(?), and Auburn a bit higher up, then a big band of average followed by places that do not bother with academic issues either because they are morally opposed to skeeze (no one) or don't have to bother (everyone). You'll note LSU and Florida amongst this group. Teams towards the bottom can plausibly argue that their oversigning is less harmful because it consists of signing guys who aren't going to be eligible instead of shoving kids in good standing out the door.

Meanwhile, an SEC partisan is fussin' about Big Ten fans complaining about the competitive advantage provided by oversigning:

Is there some advantage?  Sure.  SEC teams from 2002 through 2010 averaged 3.42 signees per victory.  Big Ten teams average 3.11 signees over the same period.  Hardly the night and day difference one would expect.

But while oversigning isn’t the magic bullet Big Ten fans would want you to believe, things like local talent base, tradition and spending serve as tried and true differentiators.

We at MrSEC.com aren’t fans of oversigning.  As noted above, we would have no problem if every school went to a hard cap at 25.

But the argument that oversigning is the difference between the SEC and the Big Ten?  Well, that doesn’t hold water.  And as you can see above, that argument doesn’t even hold water when you make comparisons within the same conference.

Ole Miss throws that entirely out of whack, as do a number of mid-level strivers that are rooting through any large-ish kid in the south to see if any of them can play football.

Meanwhile, I haven't seen many (or any) Big Ten fans say it is the difference between the SEC and the Big Ten. This whole thing is a red herring, anyway: the institutions most publicly against oversigning are Georgia and Florida. Ability to identify skeeze does not stop at the Mason-Dixon line.

It's an obvious advantage that's built on perverse incentives, which is reason enough to get rid of it, differences between conferences be damned. For an SEC fan to rabble rabble about how it's not that big of an advantage on the field misses the point in stereotype-fulfilling fashion.

Terrelle Pryor's lawyer. Is Jackie Chiles:

"It was probably good for Terrelle to meet persons like myself, African-American lawyers, very successful -- quote, unquote," James said. …

"Irrespective of how harsh and idiotic we think some of the NCAA rules are, they are still on the books," James said. "They had slavery for all those years. Those rules are still on the books, and the courts uphold them."

James then ranted about the NCAA and its enforcement process.
"You've got a captured system here in college football. It's mandated, dictated, the student-athletes have no rights. They have no relief."

That is all.

That is not all. Bombs continue to drop on Pryor from all angles. Random NFL GM:

“We spent a lot of time this year going through Cam Newton(notes) and Ryan Mallett’s(notes) personality,” an NFC general manager said. “I haven’t done all my homework on Pryor yet, but my initial impression is that if you line all three of them up and just talked about trust and reliability, Pryor is dead last. Like not-even-out-of-the-starting-gate last.

“And it’s probably only going to get worse.”

Some guy in an otherwise pretty kind Dispatch story:

"People are terrified," Davis said. "They want to really examine the kid as a person, because the stories you hear on the grapevine are not stories that excite you - stories about his leadership, how his teammates respond to him, how he was handled at Ohio State."

And Thayer Evans wrote a story I linked in the sidebar that says an 18 year old male enjoyed having girls send sexy photos to him. I've been on the Terrelle Pryor-emotional-problems bandwagon so long I remember when it was just me and some nuts from Penn State message boards and even I think Evans went a bit too far:

Pryor’s focus consistently led back to one thing: himself.

And while some may foolishly believe Pryor’s statement Tuesday that his decision to forgo his senior year at scandal-ridden Ohio State was out of “the best interests of my teammates,” the truth is that he did it out of selfishness. He did it only to escape being investigated by the NCAA and to try to salvage what’s left of his bleak future.

Well… yeah… but you write for, like, organizations, man.

(Also, Dispatch lol:

The best part about this is the cooler poopers are doing it to themselves.)

Do not read if you are only going to make a tedious argument that shows you don't understand statistics. Bill Connolly, purveyor of Football Outsiders' other college football ranking system and Football Study Hall author, previews Michigan. There are many numbers and a discussion of just how good Michigan's offense was last year (as per usual, advanced stats == fawning) that people who would like to restrict their sample size to four first-half drives against Wisconsin won't like:

If only Michigan had been able to play defense. Despite a slight fade as the season advanced, the Wolverines' offense was incredibly successful in 2010, posting huge point and yardage totals on a series of stellar defenses. Their Adj. Points tell the tale -- against a strong slate of defenses, the Wolverines produced at an incredibly high level for each of the first nine games of the season before a combination of injuries and fatigue (and, possibly, lack of faith in the defense) set in. Michigan still averaged 28.9 Adj. PPG over their final four games, with only two below-average performances against Purdue and Mississippi State.

I'm not sure where Connolly's getting the idea Michigan blitzed on almost every passing down, however. Even if he has numbers for this I kind of doubt them, since I tracked rushers for the Indiana UFR and came up with a ton of 3 and 4 man rushes. If that's charted I wonder if the 3-3-5 threw someone off.

Anyway, Connolly's takeaway is "I hope they don't turn Denard into Brad Smith that one year they tried to make him a pro-style quarterback": since they don't like Nebraska as much as everyone else and their system looks at recruiting rankings that drastically overrate Michigan (attrition) they're hinting the FO Almanac will have Michigan at or near the top of the division.

WTF? I know we're supposed to be taking the high road and all but seriously, if anyone could be expected to jovially bomb Ohio State in the paper it's Mike Hart. Mike Hart:

"I really think Jim Tressel is a great coach," Hart said. "I hate the school, I hate Ohio, can't stand them, but I think he's a great coach. Whatever happened didn't make him a better coach. The players were doing wrong, and (Tressel) broke the rules, which obviously is wrong, but it's not like he was giving them steroids to give them a competitive advantage."

Guh. Multiple other former players say they "genuinely feel" for the other players caught up in this situation who have nothing to do with it, which seems a little much. We're concerned about Ohio State walk-ons and kickers now?

Etc.: Laurinaitis and the Real Girl. Wetzel hears call to argue why OSU's violations aren't as bad as USC's, argues that OSU's violations are worse than USC's. The Wolverine Blog searches for breakout players.

A standard piece of rivalry whatnot made sublime by the copyright notice in the bottom left corner. The image of Lamarr Woodley hunched over his pirated copy of photoshop using the smudge tool on Tressel's neck is priceless. Don't tell me he just republished it. I don't want to know your lies and terrible mind.

The price of famous. Boy am I glad Burgeoning Wolverine Star was ready to scoff mightily at the latest bit of "but he's really a good guy, seriously" stuff from OSU fans. This one's from Ramzy and details Tressel being really, really nice at a local children's hospital.

Again, that's great and all but the price of being a rich celebrity these days is to do your share of charity work. You can't throw a brick at a former Michigan player or coach without seriously endangering an already-pretty-endangered ten year old in a hospital gown. BWS points out all the large-people-are-nice stuff everywhere:

Rich Rodriguez spent significant time at the U of M Children's hospital, as did a number players from the team. Brock Mealer can nearly walk now because of Rodriguez's generosity. The now-annual Spring Game has become a massive fundraiser for Mott's Children's Hospital.

The NBA has The NBA Cares program. Professional football and hockey players find themselves doing charity work frequently. With stature, money, and influence comes significant responsibilities, one of which is to give back to the community. And given their position as role models--despite what Charles Barkley will have you believe--that means going to hospitals, soup kitchens, and helping the less fortunate. Jim Tressel, in this regard, is not remarkable. He's not unprecedented or special. He's someone doing what he's supposed to do with the influence and money he's earned.

Tressel's not a monster, but he's not any different in this than most rich public figures. Except insofar as other rich public figures don't flaunt the rules of their organizations quite so brazenly.

BWS has evidently Had Enough, as he spent a long time shooting holes in Ramzy's bit. If you're up for some fiskin', recommended.

"He took care of his kids." What do you want, a cookie? Watch this, replacing "black people" with "Buckeyes" and "lawyaz" with "cooler poopers":

Shut up about the damn kids. If the kids learned how to be a man from Tressel, they learned all too well.

Not everywhere. Recruitocosm has an article from a former Texas walk-on describing their practices. Key bit:

If you have a car, the compliance office will have the make, model, and plate number. You have to show how you are making payments or who is making payments. They let you know that if you drive something other than the car you tell them about, it better belong to a family member and if you park it on campus you have to bring it to the attention of the compliance office. God forbid that the UT Parking Nazis give you a parking ticket and it go unpaid before sunset. Got an unpaid ticket? MadDog had a way to remind you to park in your correct spot and that’s AFTER the ticket was paid. If you live off campus, you have to provide your lease at the beginning of each semester and show where the money to pay the rent is coming from.

Every time ANOTHER SEC school gets busted giving cars or cash (or having an agent do it) to a player, they parade the usual suspects (Holtz, Meyer, Saban) onto ESPN where they cry crocodile tears about how HARD it is to keep track of 85 guys and what they do in their off time?

Really?

You have 85 players to go with 8 position coaches, 10 S&C coaches, 5 full time academic support personnel, 5 full time athletic trainers, 15 student assistant trainers, 5 guys on the film staff, 10 equipment managers, a recruiting coordinator, and 5 guys in your compliance office devoted to football. You can do the math on player-to-support personnel ratios, but it’s pretty obvious that if the people in a NCAA football program are paying one lick of attention and actually give a rip about playing by the rules, it is IMPOSSIBLE to have a car (worth driving) that people in the program don’t know about. This “open secret” at Ohio State with cars ranging from free to ultimate sweetheart deals is unforgiveable.

There is a level of ignorance coaches can plausibly claim; Pryor's ever-rotating swanky used car is not one of them, neither is Ohio State's 11-day investigation into the tattoo business that did not turn up sketchy dudes named Ellis.

Thank you Pryor clapclapclap, part IV. Meanwhile, Pryor's license is suspended because he has no proof of insurance. Who wants to bet Pryor's never had any insurance—which is expensive for 20-year-olds driving fancy cars—because he's been driving around Auto Direct vehicles since his arrival? I do. This guy does.

Dohrmann also expanded on Pryor's mad equipment loot on a radio blitz yesterday:

He believes that Pryor traded, “more than 20 items, ­including game-worn shoulder pads, multiple helmets, Nike cleats, jerseys, game pants and more” for tattoos or cash. This, Dohrmann argues, should prove OSU was aware (or should have been aware) of what was going on. How could they not notice how much equipment was going missing?

If true that is another step towards a lack of institutional control charge. Pryor's cars and one SI reporter managing to expand the tattoo business to 28 players when OSU's internal investigation-type substance concluded the six players mentioned in the federal report were the only bad apples take the Buckeyes' issues from a Tressel problem to an OSU problem. Take it from John Cooper:

“Compliance is not doing their job when this kind of stuff happens and they act like they don’t know about it. When I was coaching over there, compliance was around everywhere. It’s almost like they were trying to find us violating a rule.”

That is kind of compliance's purpose.

Is Cooper trying to help there or just so incensed this crap got laid in Tressel's lap when the institution has a responsibility to take care of this stuff before the head coach has an opportunity to "make a mistake*"?

*[This is an Ohio-based idiom that means "continue your decades-long pattern of malfeasance." /themoreyouknow.]

Hat. What does Les Miles think of oversigning?

“I said that there has to be an alligator handler in every class. In fact Troy has got the swamp people. We’ve got to make sure that we keep a quality contingent of free-spirited men around.”

There's some sort of explanation for that, but your life will be a little bit better if you have absolutely no context for that statement.

Truth. Daniel Tosh on Michigan State:

At least those girls got communications PhDs for the video.

Etc.: local woman says she has photos of "shenanigans" going on last December—after the NCAA had suspended various Buckeyes.

One of my favorite hockey bloggers went to England to check out Blackpool's failed attempt to avoid relegation and comes back with a picture of the way English fans see their clubs that contrasts mightily with resigned Americans and their pro leagues. It's a good start if you ever want to explain why college is more important than the pros to you.

Matt Hayes has an interestingly Machiavellian proposal for the BCS: let the Mountain West get an autobid the next two years in near-accordance with their standards (the MWC barely misses on one of the three BCS autobid criteria), then take it away once Utah, BYU, and TCU evaporate.

BWS on the Ray Small trashing. Stop snitching, etc.

latter via @lukezim

Well, that was anticlimactic. One day you're all lawyerin' up with Gene Marsh and the next you're calling up Rich Rodriguez for that sweet CBS College Sports hookup. That's life as a warden: one day the cop cars roll up and there's just one way out.

More anticlimactic yet was Waiting For Dohrmann, the end result of which was one (anonymous) awesome story about Tressel rigging a camp raffle and a few more violation-type things that may or may not end up part of a very long document issued by the NCAA. The Dispatch story about Terrelle Pryor's eternal test drive seems more damaging at the moment. That came with strong rumors that Pryor is done at Ohio State as the result of an honest-to-God investigation; the Dohrmann piece is just talking to a couple of unreliable-seeming dudes who may go Ray Small on us once it becomes clear to them that they're going to have to follow Herbstreit out of town. As far as camel-incapacitating things go this was not the anvil promised by Tressel's sudden resignation. It was barely a straw.

So either there's more coming or Ohio State knows that the cats being loosed willy-nilly all over yonder and back can be sourced better than SI can put together on short notice. That's not a huge leap. At this point we have statements from six OSU athletes—Robert Rose (new in the SI article), Ray Small, Antonio Pittman, Maurice Clarett, Mark Titus, Marco Cooper—that hookups on everything from tats to cars were widespread dating back to 2002. Pryor's had at least a half-dozen loaner cars and drove up to a team meeting yesterday in this baby:

Note the temporary tag on the back. Terrelle Pryor is the biggest dodged bullet in the history of the concept.

The picture painted by sketch tattoo artist, discontented former players, random humor-writing walk-ons, and, you know, evidence collected by a federal investigation and a billion public records requests makes—wait. We've done this already. I've used the phrase "beggars belief," and since then we've had the Titus thing and the Small thing and the Pryor car thing expanded and the car guy says he's talked to OSU compliance more than 50 times and, yes, Dohrmann talked to a couple of sketch guys who indicted another three dozen or so Buckeyes.  We passed the point where it was obvious Ohio State had come to define "lack of institutional control" about a month ago.

All the steady trickle of information that's come out since has done is confirm what Michigan fans knew in the deepest, most deranged bits of their conspiratorial hearts. All that stuff that the goofiest winged-helmet-baseball-cap wearing fanboi said was the rotten core of the Buckeye empire in various all-caps posts on your favorite message board is… like… true. Close enough, anyway. If it's not yet, accurate-to-date Buckeye insider types rumble about "much more."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

But Ohio State's date with the NCAA is months away, possibly longer as they attempt to compile the ever-expanding pile of doom into a coherent narrative. Tressel's done now.

And what is he? Last summer I went on the Bucknuts podcast and grudgingly admitted Tressel was top five coach who had halted the parade of embarrassments OSU suffered under Cooper (Ken-yon Rambo's 0.0 GPA, losses to Michigan, etc). I'd been taken in like everyone other than the tinfoil hat wearers of the internet. He's not that.

He's not a paragon of virtue, either. The most annoying meme in the aftermath is about how Jim Tressel is a saintly man who made a "mistake" and the world is worse off now that he's not a football coach and will not be helping young men from rough and tumble backgrounds meet eligible young boosters:

Jim Tressel’s departure at Ohio State is a sad loss of a man with character. College athletics needs more men like Tressel among its ranks. Sadly, the atmosphere is not conducive for good men lasting too long.

With some notable exceptions, Ohio State fans on the internet have turned into Tammy Faye Baker.

click for slightly big

Tressel did not make "a" "mistake". He has spent the last 15 years of his life cultivating a studied ignorance of obvious NCAA violations. He may be a nice, Christ-fearing dude—not like anyone has flogged the Bible to shield himself from criticism—but he can still do that as a civilian. The fact that he texts psalms to former quarterbacks ("Get yours"—Tressel 3:16*) doesn't mean a series of choices spanning more than a decade is a mistake. He's not even trying to play by the rules everyone else signed up for.

So spare us the hymnal, cooler-poopers. Jim Tressel is was a football coach, not a social worker. As he did this he turned boys into men like every football coach does. This just makes him a football coach. He's also a hypocrite and liar who lived up to the "Senator" nickname in the end, his moral rectitude just a cover.

He got what was coming in the end, and now a comically inept Ohio State administration—TWO GAMES!—is going to get theirs. We have not seen the last of the gun in the desk drawer in Columbus.

The Importance Of The Stuff In The Dohrmann Article

While you'd have to be a Vest true believer to believe the accusations leveled in it are false, without a federal trail of evidence the track record of such things actually resulting in boot to the face is not great.

To me the most important bit about the SI article is the accusation about Pryor—love you, big guy xoxo—raiding the equipment closet for rad epic loot. That's something trackable. Not tracking it: failing to monitor. Tracking it and not being like "hey, Pryor, why do you need sixteen sets of shoulder pads": some other variety of major violation. Complicit equipment managers are a relatively common source of major violations.

Meanwhile, if the NCAA can't get Rose or Small or someone on the record it won't matter how obvious it is the entire Ohio State starting lineup should be suspended since there's no evidence other than "jeez, duh."

A Strong Contender For Animated GIF Of Forever

Via "The Monarch."

Elsewhere

LSUFreek seppuku gifs? LSUFreek seppuku gifs. Also, to re-emphasize: Tressel as Nixon is so go.

Why Tressel had to go, and why it was obvious, in the words of Mike Riley:

"Jim's deal is a lesson," Oregon State head coach Mike Riley said last month. "Anything that comes up, you've just got to give it to compliance right now. In our world today, you think it's not going to be found out eventually?"

Our world today, indeed. Ohio State discovered Tressel's knowledge of the tattoo parlor case in January only by digging up e-mail correspondence from April 2010.

"I tell our players all the time," Riley said. "As soon as you start going down the wrong track and you start doing something wrong, the clock starts ticking until the day you get caught, because it's going to happen."

If he wasn't fired the above would not be true and the entire rickety structure of NCAA compliance—built on self-reporting—would collapse. Ohio State suspending Tressel for two games was an outrageous joke that shows you the stark difference between the way Smith and Gee handled this and how adults would have. They've botched this from the start and will reap the whirlwind for their efforts.

BONUS: Wetzel on the react to the original press conference:

The moment called for solemn acknowledgement of a mistake and the promise to the university that the truth would be gathered. Instead it was a pseudo pep rally. My phone was flooded with calls and texts from administrators at other schools and conferences who couldn’t believe what they’d just witnessed.

Meanwhile, you can't throw a rock without hitting a Buckeye player excommunicating another Buckeye player for outing the program shenanigans. Tyler Moeller is the latest, this time taking shots at Mark Titus for stating the obvious. Can't wait to see the reaction to Robert Rose now. How many ex-Buckeyes have to state that many in the program are on the take before the others give up the ghost?

And, God, Pryor… I maintain an almost total ban on badmouthing specific kids as bad people but it's impossible to talk about Ohio State football without remarking on the fact that Pryor is a sociopath and this was obvious from the start:

Pryor showed that he felt entitled when he met questions from those who attended his collegiate announcement by scoffing, “Whether I was a bad kid or not, you‘re all still here.”

Not even the Touch of Tressel can redeem him. The car! He shows up anywhere in that car! He's not even a well-written villain—it's like he's a foil for Jackie Chan. Twitter search his handle for schadenfreude? Twitter search his handle for schadenfreude.

Former players react as in an ambivalent fashion. Wojo says this opens the door for Michigan, which yeah. It's almost reassuring that you can rely on David Mayo to come up with the stupidest possible take. Mets Maize has a cat + Keanu Reeves picture via serendipitous Google Image Search. Also words. Genuinely Sarcastic has the full dossier of Tressel's funny business, and he posted it Friday(!). BWS was hoping for more.

*[I know this is not a psalm. TIA.]

Disclaimer. You probably don't care about any of this but while we wait for an "embattled" Rodrigez to meet with Dave Brandon today and the 7PM meeting with the players that seems like a likely moment for news to break, here's some other stuff. I've gotten a couple oddly-sourced things claiming that the office of Mark Hollis, Esq., Michigan State athletic director, is now telling people Rich Rodriguez is going to be fired today, not like that would come as a surprise or anything.

Also Harbaugh is now apparently a hot candidate for the Dolphins job, which would be a Michigan owner pirating Michigan's best coaching candidate to coach Chad Henne and Jake Long and would be the ultimate FOAD from God. Seriously, just jump.

Nothing to see here. Terrelle Pryor's college career should be over. He's already suspended for the first five games of next year and three(!) times since he arrived in Columbus he's been pulled over in someone else's car:

Three times in the past three years, Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor was stopped for traffic violations while driving cars that were owned by a car salesman or a Columbus used-car lot where the salesman worked, according to traffic citations obtained by The Dispatch.

Amazingly, Ohio State and Pryor spun out a story about car repairs and a test drive to Pennsylvania even after getting wind of a very familiar scheme…

Ohio State examined the relationship between its athletes and Auto Direct in July after receiving an anonymous letter saying that employees were trading use of cars for autographed memorabilia. Archie concluded that there were no NCAA violations.

…and the NCAA was all like "yeah, that makes total sense to me!"

Unbelievable. Michigan gets a "major violation" for niggling details and Ohio State players are bartering memorabilia for services at every business in Columbus and no NCAA violations are occurring. It's completely irrational to believe that if Terrelle Pryor was a 5'7" chemistry major that he'd get a free test drive of a thousand miles, but the NCAA turns a blind eye because logic is hard. Dan Wetzel's crusading about Pryor exposing the "charade of college athletics" and the NCAA can't even be bothered to suspend him for a measly year. I hate everything.

Chaos not limited. Remember a few weeks ago when I mentioned that Penn State's coaching staff could fall to bits in the near future? Yeah, didn't look like it would happen after Pitt insanely hired Mike Haywood. But then Haywood got in some legal trouble and got O'Leary'd and Maryland bizarrely hired Randy Edsall, leaving two prominent Northeast openings.

Meanwhile, Penn State message boards are filled with rumors that would be lurid insanity (mass chaos in the coaching staff, Paterno declaring his return without consulting anyone, threats of defection) if former players weren't talking trash on facebook and the highly-touted freshman quarterback who spent a big chunk of the year starting didn't watch a walk on throw five interceptions against Florida without getting a single snap himself and then book:

A day after Penn State's loss to Florida in the Outback Bowl, the father of true freshman Rob Bolden told Lions247.com that his son will seek a transfer from the school.

"It's true, he's looking to leave Penn State,"said Robert Bolden, Sr. on Sunday afternoon. "He's notified the coaches, that's as far as it's gone so far. We're waiting on the next step now."

With Kevin Newsome already headed out the door (and clearly more of a tight end than a quarterback by this point anyway) that leaves Penn State with McGloin and redshirt freshman Paul Jones. Jones is highly touted but there's probably a reason Bolden won the job in fall.

There are also rumors that much of the Penn State staff could be headed elsewhere. Tom Bradley missed on the Pitt job last time around but right now he seems to be one of two leading candidates along with Marvin Lewis of the Bengals. Lewis is now expected to "work out" his differences with Cincinnati, however, leaving Pitt with one giant blinking locally respected recruiting-class salvaging guy who seems to want to GTFO and take a big chunk of PSU's staff with him.

BSD has a roundup of the various things being said that includes the ridiculous—Bradley will leave PSU to become Pitt's defensive coordinator—and plausibly unsettling if you're a PSU fan; Slow States says that if Bradley does depart that "could and should" end the Paterno era, or "charade," if you will. Misery loves company.

Cheery reminder. FUN!

Robinson was asked after the game if he will be playing for the Wolverines if Rodriguez is not the coach.

"No response," Robinson said.

When asked how he would feel if Rodriguez does not return, Robinson did not say much more.

"That's my coach, that's who recruited me," Robinson said. "That's it."

If there's a new coach he's going to have a lot of work to do to convince Robinson to stick around.

Etc.: MVictors holding onto the Gordon Lightfoot lyrics. HSR writes an elegy. The women's basketball team could actually be good.

Elsewhere in the thoughts of people who are Dave Brandon. Brandon speaking on the football team's season:

"The team has the opportunity to practice 15 days and prepare for a bowl game, which they've earned the right to," Brandon said. "I have so consistently stated what my process is, how I do this, and what is in the best interest of the program. That's what I do, and that's what I'm going to do. All of this desire for information sooner, all this speculation is fueling curiosity — it doesn't change how I'm doing my job.

"Back when we were 5-0, I said (this would be the evaluation process), along the way, I've said it, after exciting wins I've said it. This is how I'm going to do my job. I have not equivocated on that at all. Just because people out there are stirring the pot, that's not going to deter what I'm going to do."

Since every scenario out there has Michigan in a bowl on New Year's Day or a few days after Christmas (the Insight is the 28th), the final word will have to wait a full month. Stanford is likely headed to the Fiesta Bowl on January first, so a hypothetical transition could take place immediately without putting Harbaugh in the same bind Miles or Kelly was. There's a theory floating out there that letting Rodriguez coach the bowl is tantamount to keeping him for 2011, but given the Harbaugh situation I don't think that's true. It's not an indication either way.

Harbaugh will not be at the Football Bust on Thursday, at which the '85 team will be honored. Tickets are still available, BTW.

Denard Robinson: awesome. Not a quarterback. So Denard Robinson is the Big Ten's offensive player of the year, which is nice and obvious. He's also not even on the coaches' All Big Ten list, which lolwut? I get Scott Tolzien—he may not have to throw much but when he does it's in the chest of his receiver every time—but Dan Persa? He's got the numbers, I guess, but being at the helm of an offense that's actually good at scoring and stuff is kind of important for a QB and the Wildcats are just 51s in total offense, 74th in scoring, and 21st in passer efficiency. That last number sounds good but is only 5th in a QB-heavy Big Ten. Kirk Cousins, Tolzien, Stanzi, and Pryor are all ahead of him with Denard not far behind and with a vast advantage on the ground.

In other All Big Ten QB news, Terrelle Pryor is still as likeable as Stalin.

Steadily more and more likeable. Meanwhile, Tate Forcier explained to his local paper his thought process about staying with the program after the infamous "I'm out" moment that sent Tom scrambling to Papa Forcier to put out the fire. Via MGoShoe:

“It’s hard to go from starting to backing up. A lot of people told me to leave. I wanted to leave. But it was just too hard. I didn’t want to leave the (coaching) staff or these players. I felt I was going to be a part of something great.”

“Two quarterbacks have to play in this offense. It might not happen every game, but you’re going to get your chance. I’m not banking on Denard getting injured. Nothing like that. But in this offense, you never know what can happen.”

“A lot of people would think me and Denard would have something against each other because he starts, but Denard is a good guy. We hang out. And he works hard. What’s hard for me is he’s having so much success and there’s nothing you can do about it except stay ready.”

“I’ve learned to be way more humble. I look back at freshman year, and I was a little cocky. I was getting too caught up in seeing myself on TV every week. I think that would happen to anybody who would go from being a regular kid in high school to a national stage like that. It was crazy.”

I said something early in the year about how Michigan would need Forcier down the stretch, and they did. He finished off the Illinois win and was a third and ten stop away from driving for the tie against Iowa; if he'd actually been "out" Michigan would not have been able to redshirt Gardner and we probably wouldn't be talking about retaining Rodriguez at all.

I also said I'd be meh about Rodriguez leaving, and while that's largely true I think my overwhelming feeling would be sadness that guys like Denard and Forcier and everyone else who signed up for the RR era would not get to finish their careers on the terms they started them.

These uniforms designed for personal fouls. Another reason it's good to get away from Nike:

"The gloves had a black ‘Block O' on the inside when you put your hands together and so that's what (Posey) was trying to do," receiver Dane Sanzenbacher said.

But he didn't celebrate his redemption for long. The referee gave Posey a 15-yard penalty for excessive celebration.

Gesturing to the crowd, even if it's your crowd, gets you a flag. Unless it's this…

…or dozens of other motions like shushing the crowd that go unpunished every week. File under the massive pile of data that suggests the NCAA should just drop excessive celebration penalties for anything short of taunting.

Opinions I Officially Do Not Care About but you might. Opinions on the Rodriguez job thing—you know, that—from Mets Maize:

Having said that, I do support Rich Rodriguez returning for 2011 IF changes are made on the defensive staff. My reasons are pretty consistent listed above, but the one that stands out the most is the offense. It simply makes no sense to fire the only man who can take this offense to the next level next year. People often talk about how "young" our defense is, which sort of implies we have a relatively older offense. If by "older" we mean not true-freshman, then yes, we have a veteran offense. But the fact is we're prime for not only 2011 but also 2012--Denard's senior year. So that leaves the defense to which I ask...

What added benefit does a change in HEAD COACH give to the DEFENSE that a change in DEFENSIVE COORDINATOR wouldn't bring?

Beaford at Maize n Brew:

Rodriguez should get broomed and Harbaugh should be installed here, but if that doesn't happen my reaction will largely be "meh."  In the three years that he has been the head coach, the offense have demonstrably improved, just as we thought it would.  The problem is that the defense has actually regressed each year.  Even before the Woolfolk injury, this defense was set up to be likely the worst in program history.

And Markus at MNB drops references to David Foster Wallace on Federer and Brian Phillips on Pele, which means it gets autolinked. It's long and not really blockquote-friendly but recommended. My mom, by the way, believes Rodriguez is "not a Michigan Man" and would like to see him gone. Road Games also drops Richard Buckner.

Let's say it again, then.

Etc.: Anne Hathaway proposes "Anne Does Ann Arbor." As someone who has viewed the Get Smart remake I heartily endorse this idea. This Week In Schadenfreude is epic this week. Apparently I missed the date on the "Everyone in Iowa Drinks Four Loko" fanpost at Black Heart Gold Pants, but seriously I'm guessing that happened again after they lost to Minnesota. Brabbs surveys the Michigan-vs-cancer matchups going on. AnnArbor.com's take on the Denard Robinson story.