Almost OT: The beginning of the end for Tressel?
Maybe you don't have an interest but I surely do. This can't get any more interesting as the wheels are starting to fall off the Tressel bandwagon...unless the great lug nut specailists at the NCAA do what they do best and keep those OSU wheels greased and continue rolling. My bet is that OSU will skate on this and get a light slap on the hand. The NCAA will never find their testicles when it comes to really big issues such as what we have seen at OSU and Auburn.
http://www.daytondailynews.com/dayton-sports/ohio-state-buckeyes/tresse…
http://aol.sportingnews.com/ncaa-football/feed/2010-12/osu-suspensions/…
Not much new news there. But, the longer this continues the better.
I think the NCAA is going to come down hard. This is a case that they have to make zero effort on and there is literally zero doubt that Tressel lied.
They'll take the bait and wait until they actually have to, you know, investigate to look the other way.
It was only a couple more hours when it accumulated over months. I believe the number was fifteen minutes per week, but it might have been per practice, I don't remember off the top of my head.
I think I'll wait for any investigation to be completed. I remember how the press was hypervenillating over Rich Rodriguez.
This is a self-reporting problem. And while it is certainly true that the NCAA takes self-reporting violations very seriously because of the way it operates, this was not a primary violation by Tressel. (It will be a "major" violation.) Tressel didn't take any illegal money, he didn't hand out any illegal money. He didn't get any tattoos. I think that the record will eventually show that Tressel stopped what was going on, with Pryor and the others, but that the one thing he didn't do was to report it all to Compliance.
Also -- you've actually given too much credit to the press in Michigan's case. Saying that,
"...we get in trouble because a few players that ride the pine decide to cry about practicing for more hours...
is something of a stretch. We don't really know who the Free Press talked to. The Freep is playng hide the ball on that. It may not have been anybody on then-current team at all. (Stokes and Hawthorne, two truly monstrous examples of press abuse, excepted. They actually sort of prove the opposite.) We don't know if anybody 'cried about practicing for more hours.' And if anybody cried, it might not have been because they were benched. It may have been because of what questions were asked (nobody knows) and it might have been because the players in question had already quit, and were angry. And more than anything, if players cried about practicing more hours, those players whould have to have been NCAA bylaws experts, because Michigan didn't exceed practice time limits except in some highly technical aspects.
If the press reporting now, concerning Jim Tressel, is as bad as was the Free Press' reporting on Rich Rodriguez (I'm not making that judgment, yet) it may be completely false and misleading.
"If the press reporting now, concerning Jim Tressel, is as bad as was the Free Press' reporting on Rich Rodriguez (I'm not making that judgment, yet) it may be completely false and misleading. "
I realize this was directed at the money handshakes, but Tressel has already admitted a much more serious violation than even the Freep accused RR of.
You're right. What Tressel has already admitted to, will I think get him a 'failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance' major violation. Not only did Rich Rodriguez beat that charge, the NCAA actually withdrew it. The one charge that named Rodriguez personally; withdrawn. (What "the Free Press accused Rodriguez of" is almost incomprehensible.)
Anyway, if I were Gene Smith, I'd want to investigate the hell out of this. I'd want to become the world's expert on everything that happened, so that in the future no reporter could surprise me with anything. And so I'd have a damned good answer to everything. But based on what I'm aware of now, I wouldn't fire Tressel. No way.
I agree that if I'm OSU today, there's no way I would fire him. Going back to the original admission of the violation, I'd be a little more hesitant. Firing him the day he admitted the violations would have distanced OSU from the scandal and offered up some kind of sacrifice. I also think that before spring practice, they could land whichever coach they wanted to go with.
Firing him now accomplishes nothing; even OSU probably can't hire someone they would want in the middle of spring practice. They have also already cast their lot with Tressel, so to speak.
They have indeed "cast their lot" with Tressel...
...and what an interesting ride it will be for them hoping that the next player to spill, the next turn around the corner doesn't equal another investigation, that someone else doesn't corroborate McClover's statements, that Tressel doesn't lie to the NCAA, Compliance and the Media for the 3rd, or 4th or however many times it has been...
Tressel and Ohio State are going to burn before the NCAA because a) he didn't inform compliance and sent the email to a "mentor" as a forward; b) he signed the compliance forms last September; c) he played five potentially ineligible players all season; d) lied again in December; d) politicked with Jim Delaney and the B1G brass to have those players play against Arkansas (the SEC must be happy how this is playing out and at the same time supremely pissed off about that bowl scenario)...I am sure the NCAA enjoys gettting bent over publicly like that...; e) lied again/obfuscated at his press conference.
Ohio State's strategy is an interesting one but these two guys below from USC would like to let Jim Tressel know that just because your program is high profile doesn't mean it necessarily gets off easy...
"d) politicked with Jim Delaney and the B1G brass to have those players play against Arkansas"
That's false, isn't it? Wasn't the original OSU position that they wanted to suspend all five guys for the bowl game? (They were not volunteering five-game suspensions next season, to be sure.) I think it was. Tressel did not beg anybody to let them play in a bowl, as far as I am aware. Even Gene Smith did not do that. The Big Ten, and the Sugar Bowl did that lobbying, with the NCAA.
Smith went on record saying that OSU suspended them, then the NCAA said they were eligible, then they had a meeting with the OSU seniors who decided that they should play.
And it wasn't by Tressel. It WAS by Delany, and it WAS by the Sugar Bowl Committee. Delany and the Sugar Bowl wanted the Tat-5 to play. Tressel wasn't doing that lobbying. Tressel was okay with suspending them for the bowl game.
And in fact, the NCAA was adhering to its own guidelines in allowing players to compete in bowl/championship games while investigations are being initiated. The Tat-5 playing in the Sugar Bowl had nothing to do with any kind of interference/influence by Tressel.
I wasn't arguing that they did, just retelling OSU's position as told by their AD.
I do think the interpretation of the rule allowing them to play was stretched and possibly distorted. The gist of the rule was to allow players who would otherwise be ineligible to remain eligible for a "once in a lifetime" type opportunity. I'd think that in most cases, the seniors would get to play and the juniors would sit.
Delany and the Sugar Bowl Committee desperately looked for a loophole in the NCAA rules so those 5 players could play in the Sugar Bowl, and they found one. (The loophole was a joke...I forget the exact details.)
From there, the NCAA gave the decision on whether to play the players up to OSU. This of course pissed people off. They thought the decision should not be left up to Gene Smith and Tressel because naturally, they would allow them to play.
Tressel then told the players that they would only be allowed to play in the bowl game if they came back the following season and served their 5 game suspension. How convenient that Tressel's solution to the mess allowed the players to play in the bowl game. At the time, it was like killing two birds with one stone. The players get to play and Tressel looks "good" because he "disciplined" the players.
Only now, knowing what he knew the whole time, Tressel looks like an even bigger jacka*s.
The Irony I has hitting at earlier in the thread was that *Tressel knew the whole damn time that the players would have most likely have been ineligible for the entire damn season*. Further, he signed off that he did not have any compliance issues in September.
Boom goes the dynamite.
The nice part is that anything other than the emails and the compliance form is just gravy.
The NCAA could bring huge sanctions just based on three or four pieces of paper that they already have. This might be literally the most black and white case in the history of the NCAA. It certainly has to be the biggest smoking gun in a 10.1 case; even murky 10.1 cases derive show-cause penalties.
RR was not exonerated by the NCAA. He was found guilty of a "failure to monitor" violation.
From the standpoint of evaluating the sum and substance of the charges leveled by the Freep, RR sure as hell was exonerated. What he was eventually found guilty of was a far cry from what Michael Rosenberg & Co. was trying to portray.
Tressel knew the players were ineligible as soon as he received the first e-mail. He covered it up. His explanation is laughable. When it finally did come to light, he lied to the NCAA when asked if he knew about it. Only discovered accidentally through an unrelated investigation.
<br>Tressel is a Liar. It doesn't get worse than this.
Further complicating this is the national media hawking this thing (it's like a DeathStar of 1000 Freep reporters circling Columbus) and it's certainly known that a soft NCAA response post Cam Newton and post Tatgate v. Arkansas won't be well received.
The NCAA loses all remaining credibility, the B1G concedes its moral high ground to the SEC. Neither will happen when they've got a single fall guy, one who made his own bed. I'm a broken record on this. You can't be a Liar.
<br>TSIO knows they can't keep him: they're a national joke now, and winning won't fix it. They're trying to find the best way to have him resign (probably under the martyr narrative), accept penalties, and move on.
How quickly we forget. Does the name Toney Clemons ring a bell?
Clemons, in one of his rare statements, before clamming up forever:
"The allegations are true," Clemons said. "Nothing is fabricated or exaggerated in that story. I was there on Sundays from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. or 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. depending on if guys needed treatment. You were there daylight to nighttime."
Of course, Clemons might have been at Schembechler that long. And I presume that he gave a lengthy statement to NCAA investigators. And after all of that, there were no violations in association with players spending CARA time on Sundays. And it is hard to make any sense out of the rest of what little Clemons said. He did of course say that at Colorado, he regarded 'voluntary' practices as 'mandatory.'
I really hope he doesn't leave, I'd rather not have him leave with a legacy of dominating us.
I honestly wouldn't care, as long as he was given the show-cause penalty.
If the NCAA comes out and says that he doesn't have the necessary ethics to be a coach in college football, I think that mitigates his record, at least enough to get an OSU fan to quiet down a bit. In the meantime, they can hire Dantonio or whoever and we will have more success, basically only because we literally cannot do worse than we have against Tressel.
bitch
The Fab Five's record is essentially mitigated, yet we've been talking about how awesome they were for a month. That was a dominant era of Michigan basketball and we all remember it. You can't win or lose a game after the fact; he has still killed us and the Big Ten for the past decade, and it's time someone knocks them down a notch. It should be us, Bo's boys (or w/e. We have a coach the AD and alumni don't dislike) are all back and it's time we beat Ohio State in full form.
I think a lot of the mitigation with the Fab Five, though, is the controversy about amateurism. If those victories were vacated because Webber was taking steroids, or involved in point shaving or something I think people might look at the era differently.
I too would love to see Pryor and Tressel get beat at full strength in November, and would take satisfaction in beating them at their best. This view completely disregards what Tressel did, though.
People remember the Fab 5 for their cultural contributions to basketball, not because they were winning. They didn't really win anything besides the two regionals. They never won the Big Ten or the National Title.
Who are these "people" you speak of? Yes, they made a cultural change, but they won a ton of games, broke the mold by starting an entire team of freshmen and made it to the finals twice in a row. That's winning plenty. Always good to have the perspective of Coach K in here though.
The documentary had to point that out, because that's the only thing (I'm including the starting freshman thing as a cultural change as well) that differentiated them from countless great teams in the past. Without that aspect there's no documentary, but there's still a great team.
Except that it would be proof that he dominated us by being a cheating son of a bitch. Which he is.
Maybe it's your hypnotic mustache, but I agree completely. His entire tenure at OSU has been tarnished. The evidence we already had before all this made tinfoil hats unnecessary when pointing fingers southward. Now my borderline kooky dirty-OSU conspiracy theories have become downright probable.
Hmmmmm...
How much is Barry Switzer's legacy worth these days?
A National Championship and a Super Bowl ring.
Sure, if you want to boil it down to raw data, but that's like excusing a dictator's actions because he was good enough to get to the top of his country's power structure. Most people think Switzer's an idiot and a prison warden masquerading as a coach.
TWIS
Tressel's ship will eventually capsize. It'll take the entire 2011 season before it fully submerges. Trust me. But the NCAA will eventually "find their testicles", just in time to retrieve the sunken ship for everyone to see. Goodbye 2010 season victories. Goodbye Sugar Bowl win.
It'll be a long, epic movie so grab some popcorn. I never thought I'd say this, but thanks NCAA! Your incompetence makes you great.
will not be vacated.
Of course they will be vacated. There's literally no way to avoid that, and most football people take this as a given. The coach fielded players he knew to be guilty, in order to maintain a competitive advantage. And he repeatedly lied about it. Therefore, the wins must be vacated.
this crap drags on through the recruiting season, with lots of speculation about the future for Tressel and TSIO. Cheaters aren't supposed to win, and as far as I'm concerned, Newton can turn the Heisman back over to the DAC as well.
I'd say, it's just a matter of time...
It seems like I'm in the minority, but I'd rather beat Tressel and the Buckeyes at full strength without all of these distractions. If they've gained an unfair advantage by bribing players to come to Columbus, than that has to stop. But personally I'll be a little bummed out if their program gets blown up, or Tressel is shown the door before we can exact a little revenge.
I hate tOSU, but I love our rivalry and think it is better for everyone when we're both at the top of the Big 10.
and I agree it would feel great to even it up while he's there. That said, don't think for a minute that Buckeyes across the country didn't soak in the news of Michigan's practice-gate woes with wild enthusiasm.
I have full faith in Hoke/Mattison to turn the tide, but If TSIO loses a few recruits to us based on the resulting program instability, that will help level the playing field too. If Tressel is still there (and I think he will be), then perhaps you'll get to see it played out YOUR way sooner than you think.
"That said, don't think for a minute that Buckeyes across the country didn't soak in the news of Michigan's practice-gate woes with wild enthusiasm."
Tressel didn't. Tressel, to the extent he commented on it, said he didn't understand what the complaint against Michigan was.
but of course Tressel wasn't going to pile on, knowing his own house wasn't in order. That's how I read it.
Either way I'm excited about the future, and I think the tide is starting to turn.
Tressel may not be a big enough hypocrite to cast stones. But I still want him around long enough to knock him off his high horse a bit. I mean, Woody Hayes attacked a kid, and he's still a god down there. If Tressel is forced out, he'll write a few mea culpas and a book about overcoming mistakes, and he'll still be a living legend in Ohio for decades to come because he consistently beat us. I want him around for a few years to helm the ruin.
Tressel made sure to note that players put in a lot more hours of their own accord than the 20 hours of CARA per week allowed, because they want to be the best. Tressel and every other D I coach in America were holding their collective breath to see what the NCAA was going to do to Michigan because they all did/do the same that Michigan was accused of, and many had far worse problems with CARA hours than 20 minutes of stretching before practice per week here and there. Most of em were thinking, "But for the grace of God..." and grateful that the NCAA's nose wasn't under their CARA tents.
heard about it was "Holy shit, they're practicing that much over the limit and they still only went 3-9 last season? That's unpossible!" I think most OSU fans figured out that the story was an exaggeration pretty quickly.
Let's split the difference. Since it is clear that Tressel is here for at least one more year, let's beat them on the field and then they can fire him. That might be the best of both worlds - OSU makes it clear that integrity is not something they value, and then we beat them anyway. Hell, then we can make the claim that we showed him the door - that he would have been retained despite his dirty ways, but he just couldn't beat Michigan anymore. Yeah, that's the ticket.