ESPN on Tressel's reputation
Wow, that is a scathing indictment of Tressel and OSU. Schlabech let's him have it for real. He takes a blatant shot at the SEC and RR, as well.
Schlabach sucks.
In the video they pointed out that Tressel said "he didn't know where to go with this information" (not an exact quote), that is complete bullshit. He knew exaclty where he needed to go, but didn't. That has to be one of the worst excuses I've ever heard.
It's not like they had a hard time finding out how to report the 375 OTHER violations over the last decade...
I think someone said in another thread: A player got murdered once, a player fell into drug culture, but an anonymous tip email and he didn't even think to seek confidential, university legal counsel? He's the HEAD FOOTBALL COACH AT OHIO STATE. Man ALIVE, I hope the NCAA throws the book at them for this.
murders once. everybody falls into the drug culture..
+1 for the tp reference. That made my morning.
Is that who the reference was to? I wasn't sure.
March 13th, 2011 at 10:30 AM ^
Sure was. Glad he didn't sign with us more and more everyday.
Blood in the water, everyone's gotta cash in. The more sensationalistic, the better! (Is sensationalistic a word? It sounds ok, but it just feels like one too many suffixes.)
The video and the article are both good. Thanks for sharing. I'm looking forward to many happy months of drinking in the fear and anxiety of Ohio State fans everywhere.
They were great until they said something about a cheating coach. I'd like them to point out where in 130+ years Michigan has employed a cheating coach.
They are saying that RR was the cheat.
Overall I think this article was pretty spot on, his book he has extolls his lofty virtue but as soon as it is put to the test he fails.
No I got what they were trying to take a swipe at. I'm just not sure where filling out forms incorrectly while not gaining an advantage constitutes cheating.
OK sorry, I am being a bit slow this morning.
Well, technically we did cheat since the extra practice time/coaches were a (minor) competitve advantage. I think the detailed investigation made it pretty clear our motive wasn't cheating and we got some just rewards for our mistake. I think the compariosn exists only because we are rivals, since our rule infractures were substantially different in both kind and severity.
Stretching the Truth
2 games
Just a little extra stretching
3 years
touche
As fun as it is to revel in the pain and anquish of OSU fans, this article is pretty much Schlabach being a douche. He is an SEC homer who smells Big Ten blood in the water.
An SEC homer who says that "Tressel even learned to cheat as well as" SEC schools? He's being fair here....
No, he was not being fair when he said that "Michigan fired their cheating coach." He knows, as everyone knows, and as the NCAA virtually admitted, that Rich Rod got smeared over nick-nack violations. Even though he knows that, he still calls Rich Rod a "cheater". That is a hack job.
In the past, I always thought these things were a little stereotypical small-town coppish: the NCAA running around making a big deal about stupid minor things just to show how important and powerful they are. But after the Michigan mess - started by a newspaper, followed-through with by the NCAA, all revealing essentially zero meaningful misconduct, yet months of bad press and relatively serious sanctions - I now want every other school hammered for every little thing. 2 years ago I would have argued that Tressel get a meaningless slap on the wrist - so what if some players sold trinkets and the coach didn't tattle? Now, though, I want games forfeited and people fired. If UM's petty "crimes" were worth what they got stuck with, stuff like this should be a full-blown college football ethics crisis. UM went way out of its way to cooperate and self-report. Yet everyone in the Cam Newton thing and OSU players thing last year just said "we have no idea what's going on" and that somehow relieved them of all responsibility. Now that it looks like it may just have been a cover-up, UM's sanctions had better look like nothing compared to what OSU gets. I don't care that it's OSU; actually, I wish it weren't a Big Ten team. But I'm about as bitter as how the UM "scandal" went down as I was about the stadium halo.
Your post would have been really cool with some white space. If you don't have a feel for paragraphs yet, read your posts aloud at a normal talking rate, and start a new paragraph every time you take a breath. Please, though, don't try this if you have COPD.
Or if this happens to be the ghost of Emily Dickenson. I always hated her damn dashes that (at least I pictured) got put in whenever she took a breath.
Maybe COPD explains the way Mitch Album writes.
It is a blog post. Some people here need to stop reading Strunk and White like it is Playboy.
http://www.lincoln.edu/mhs/owl/paragraph.html
Although I can't claim that anything I write would be of sufficient quality or complexity to be considered "academic", I wouldn't expect someone's first reaction to seeing a paragraph of ten sentences to be, "It's overwhelming! Make it stop!"
I realize the previous sentence was probably too long for a blog.
I apologize.
If you don't have a feel for anything but paragraphs in blogs, start with something easy, and then work up to "business" paragraphs.
I always thought that a new paragraph was for a new idea, not just because the visible page width is more narrow than a person is used to.
Actually, all this white space is making me lose my train of thought.
So thanks for the genuinely tactful suggestion.
But I don't spend enough time on blogs to make frequent paragraph breaks seem appropriate.
Or maybe I've just written too many EPRs.
Go
Blu
e
March 13th, 2011 at 10:47 AM ^
Some would say you have CJDB. :)
He wasn't make a reasoned argument though, he acknowledged he was making an impassioned rant. When I rant out loud, I don't rant in paragraphs, especially when I rant about the BS of practice-gate.
Just had to throw UM under the bus at the end, didn't he?
It must be the Family Values that Ohio State Has.
After nine straight losses, the Buckeyes finally beat an SEC school. Apparently, Tressel even learned to cheat as well as they do.Schlabach can suck sometimes, and did in the last line of the article, but I think the above line should get him a free pass here for awhile. He found a way to hammer two of mgoblog's three favorite objects of derision in one sentence, and he did it on a national platform. It's another great day in Ann Arbor.
Except that it was a smarmy cheap shot. For all my marrow-deep loathing of Ohio State, I still hate a cheap shot artist who mascarades as a journalist. The same with the comment that Tressel can't win a big game, though Schlabach later casually notes that he has won a national championship. Look, I want Tressel to go down. But I want it to be a maize and blue spear in the chest, not a knife in the back from scuzzball writers like this guy. I want to see Brady Hoke arriving at the post-game conference holding a bloody sweater vest, screaming, "Tremendous!"
But the relevant point here is that there is a federal investigation going on, investigating Ed Rife. (Ed, hmmm? See a pattern?) The Fab 5 would never have resulted in such a targeted investigation by the NCAA if the Feds weren't looking at someone who'd been giving (some of) them money. There was subpoena power; and it was utilized.
The NCAA had to stay ahead of the federal investigation in that case. The same is true here. At least Michigan's head coach didn't know there were major infractions occuring.
G. Gee and his bowtie can't do a damn thing to stop what's about to (read: six months from now) happen to tsio.
OSU should be forced to vacate all of the wins in the 2010 season, because they clearly used inelligble players.
While it isn't in the interests of justice and all of that, I really hope someone on the drug trafficing investigation is a Wolverine who makes sure the supoena power is used to drag lots of incriminating documents into the public record.
Taking pleasure in the troubles of your rival is normal, and I understand why everyone is getting so worked up about Tressel's violation and penalties.
But as for:
It's another great day in Ann Arbor.
It will be a great day in Ann Arbor when Michigan beats Ohio State on the football field.
When they're playing on an even field, and their players from Clarrett to Smith to Pryor aren't getting extra benefits to go there.
That is what we need more of to force the NCAA to act strongly in this case.
And thaks to your heads up, I skipped the last 3 BS lines!
Some of it not very. Besides the cheap shot at Rodriguez, there is this gem:
"As bad as Tressel looks in college football's latest scandal, Ohio State looks even worse. The school that has long prided itself on academic and athletic excellence looks no different than the football factories it has long looked down its nose at."
That's along the lines of Massey Coal priding itself on environmental stewardship and worker safety.
It seems that, for all the glaring faults with the Freep investigation, national sports writers have largely closed ranks around their colleagues at the Freep and refer broadly to their intended conclusion (that RR was a cheat) rather than to the actual content of the violations or the outcome of the NCAA investigation. I don't know that this is a signal of a dearth of journalistic integrity in general or of sports writers specifically, but it's either.
If his reputation is that he's a terrible liar who'll open any email, then he's fine. His reputation has been set in cement.
Even the last line, it was inaccurate in many ways. But accurate in that the Head Coach at Michigan probably would be fired for what Tressel did.
I'm glad to see Schlabach take tOSU to task for their pathetic whitewash attempt, but the last line about "Michigan firing their cheater" underscores that this guy is a hack. Love him or hate him, RichRod got fired for losing to good teams and fielding a terrible defense. And to call him a "cheater" is stretching the definition of "cheater" beyond reason.
What I love about this situation is how it underscores the institutional differences between Michigan and tOSU. Our school took allegations of football NCAA violations extremely seriously, even if the underlying "scandal" was the spawn of reprehensible journalism and there really wasn't much there. We brought out the spotlights, did a thorough investigation, and walked arm-in-arm with NCAA. Michigan also took the whole Ed Martin situation very seriously by the time it percolated to the upper reaches of the administration. Fisher's conduct there may be questionable (we'll learn more on the 30 for 30 I suppose), but the rest of the administration dispatched itself admirably.
For tOSU, however, NCAA violations and a subsequent cover-up is just another day at the office. (Can you imagine MSC saying "I hope our coach doesn't fire me!"?) The comparison in institutional reaction makes me proud to be a Wolverine. Now if we can just start beating them again on the gridiron and the basketball court.
Does anyone think that this makes Tressel look particularly hypocritical for requiring the Tat Five to agree to come back for the 2011 season as a quid pro quo for having their suspensions delayed? He did that to both rationalize the delay and to make himself look like a tough minded crime fighter, when he had known of this for nine months and done nothing except hope it would never see the light of day.
it's too bad that schlabach wrote the editorial piece on tressel. he has no credibility. there's so much for any writer to say here. it could've been schad, feldman, even forde. but schlabach is the worst.
March 13th, 2011 at 10:50 AM ^
"The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one hour."
Ohio State coach Jim Tressel included that Japanese proverb on Page 193 of his book, "The Winners Manual For The Game of Life."
Eight pages later, there's this nugget from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "It takes less time to do the right thing than to explain why you did it wrong."
Obviously, Treacherous Tressel didn't pay attention to what his ghost writer wrote. If only the media would continue to ask him why he didn't follow his own advice?