M-Borg vs. THE Flavortown U Thread, Orig. by Buckeye Paul, absconded w/by talent.

[WM Wolverine]

If he were hired somewhere with a 'show cause' (which he likely earned), he wouldn't be allowed to recruit. More or less, 'show cause' is a suspension from coaching from the NCAA.

[Optimus Prime]

Tresel spent over a decade building "buffer zones" in order to ensure plausible deniability....it was merely a stroke of good fortune that he actually got caught.

Don't kid yourself, he is a sinister MOFO....IMO he is of the worst sort.

[Optimus Prime]

To further underscore the OSU hypocrisy, M-Zone awhile back encapsulated the essence of the OSU "Artful Dodger" scam, the truth hurts.

http://michiganzone.blogspot.com/2011/03/mzone-exclusive-edited-first-draft-of.html

[Optimus Prime]

Like this one too, author links Tressel's program to "college football terrorism", it's stretch but why not?

If NCAA won't police self, NFL should
FoxSports

Jen Engel


NFL commish Roger Goodell did the exact right thing by suspending Terrelle Pryor for the first five games of what we now know will be his Raiders career ? at least that was my initial thought.
Roger Goodell is playing morality police with Terrelle Pryor, but he doesn't have a case, Jason Whitlock says.
Media reaction was swift and vicious and not in agreement.
Much like the day in middle school when I wore what I thought were awesome pink glasses, doubt immediately crept in. Maybe this issue needed deep thinking rather than Twitter immediacy.
What I came back to is, Roger killed it. What he needs to do going forward is dig his heels in and consistently apply his genius to all coaches and players.
He did not play enforcer for the NCAA. Nor did he overstep his bounds or act as a capricious holy roller, as many have implied. In this increasingly ugly and infinitely cynical time in college football, he took a stand. Roger sent a clear message that the NFL will no longer be a safe harbor for college football terrorists.
What else can you call the administrators, athletic directors, coaches and players who throw scandal bombs into the college football programs they profess to love and then bolt just ahead of whatever fallout ensues, leaving a bunch of incoming freshmen and bullied compliance officers to wade through the muck of others?
The ugly world of college football has been created brick by brick, greed piled on desperation piled on stupidity until all of college football has been tainted by the actions of a few.
This is not to say Pryor is a bad dude. I am sure he is a fine young man who had no motivation for staying clean. Few get busted. Most who do are already in the NFL making bank.
Whatever your argument against suspending Pryor ? the rules are arcane and hypocritical, athletes should be paid, the NCAA is fraudulent and obsolete ? none justifies his wanton disregard for his teammates and his school or entitles him to walk away without being nicked by a mess of his creation.
Please also stop with the ?he?s a catalyst for change? meme.
Real change begins with a guy willing to sacrifice for a larger principle, the guy standing in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square, not a guy trying to get the Chinese word for ?Buckeye? tattooed onto his bicep for free.
No revolution ever began with ?Free tattoos? as a battle cry. Or ?Show me the money,? as in Reggie Bush?s case, or ?Hey, Nevin, pass me a stripper,? as in the allegations against The Miami 15.
The big people are no better, and in most instances, they?re much, much worse. They act like they have the moral high ground because they pay for their pinot noirs and tattoos and have a higher calling of amateurism and education, turning a blind eye to the ugly realities this system creates. How fun for Pryor that he makes enough tattoo cash for everybody but himself to live on. The moral indignation from Paul Dee, then-chair of the NCAA Committee on Infractions, about violations at Southern Cal and Long Beach State while all of this Nevin Shapiro craziness is alleged to have gone down on his watch at Miami perfectly defines the hypocrisy of the NCAA, a point that Long Beach State president F. King Alexander spelled out rather testily.
?Dee told us, ?You have to put in place the kind of institutional control we have at Miami,?? Alexander told the Long Beach Press-Telegram. ?The hypocrisy of the NCAA makes me sick. To allow institutions like Miami . . . to chair and oversee its infractions committee is like putting foxes in charge of the henhouse.?
Well done, sir.
Although a better analogy might have been ?like putting football coaches and ADs in charge of compliance.?
Because as former Ohio State coach Jim Tressel?s nasty little email trail suggests, coaches often lie to cover their butts or at least turn their heads to allow for plausible deniability. I mean, really, we believe Pete Carroll had no idea that Bush was drowning in cash just because the NCAA failed to link him?
The problem with the NCAA is its punishment model sucks as a deterrent. The risks are minimal, the upside worth it. Look at Miami. ?Death penalty? keeps being tossed around as a possible answer to allegations of blatant and, frankly, impressive in-scope cheating.
Now ask yourself: Whom exactly are they putting to death? The name on the front of the building; a few remaining administrators and compliance guys who, if Miami is like most places, answer to the football coach; incoming freshmen?
While the little terrorists (or those so accused by a very-little, admitted money terrorist, Shapiro) all have cushy landing spots ? at Texas Tech and Missouri and the NFL or, in Dee?s case, at the very place charged with administering justice, from where he slapped Long Beach State around for far fewer and less egregious violations than Shapiro is alleged to have committed undetected (best case) or with a wink and a smile (worst case) on Miami?s campus.
The NCAA would be wise to take a page from Roger Goodell. The punishment needs to be applied to the offender, not only to the location of the offense. This should especially be true in the case of coaches and ADs who do not have the folly of youth or being broke to fall back on as an excuse. A coach needs to take that penalty wherever he goes, or ? in instances where rules were knowingly, willfully and blatantly violated ? the death penalty needs to be applied to the guy with the highest salary and the most power and actual ability to change things: the head coach.
Most programs are as clean as their coach, and this almost assuredly would bleach college football faster than any NCAA mandate. Very little happens at a program without a coach knowing. If the threat of professional death penalty were looming and actually applied, they would make it their business to know everything else. Instead of cheating to survive, survival would be linked to staying clean.
I realize somebody will use this opportunity to note that all signs point to the NCAA readying to levy ?show cause? penalties on former Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl, which basically kills his opportunity to coach at another NCAA school for the length of the ban.
Good start, but it?s useless unless applied with more uniformity, to big names and without an NFL-NBA safe harbor. Players and coaches must be responsible for cleaning up their messes.
And that is why what Roger did is exactly the right thing.

[iam416]

Retarded. For a host of reasons, both factual and with respect to the proposed solution.

But, I liked this bit:

Most programs are as clean as their coach,

I can't decide if the author is painfully ignorant, suffering from dementia or just plain idiotic. Perhaps all 3. But yeah, Miami, e.g., was Randy Shannon problem.

[Optimus Prime]

The characterization of Tressel's latest scandal may be painfully to some but is accurate to the reasonable-minded CFB Fan ....the most important thing here is that the 24/7 negative OSU News cycle is alive and well.

[Optimus Prime]

Cheer up Talent, here this should lift your spirits, a Little Piece of Heaven on Earth.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTKJP7c-aSk&feature=player_embedded"]Michigan Stadium August 2011 - YouTube[/ame]

[Jeff Buchanan]

I'm not prepared to dismiss the premise and the proposed solution contained in that piece quite as fast as your are, talent. I can see why you'd do that though. You're invested in the concept that tressel is a tragic hero ..... and I'm not dismissing the validity of that view either although I'm not there at all for my own set of reasons.

But CFB as a product to be marketed has serious problems with its image. The NCAA, if it is to remain relevant, and College Presidents, if they want to reclaim the high ground they claim to have their universities operating from, must find a way to polish the apple.

A good place to start is with identifying mechanisms to hold someone, and Athletic Directors may be as good of a place as any to start, accountable for the sleaze that has been present for quite a while now and gets exposed much less frequently than it should. If the bright light of day did shine on it more frequently, we'd probably not have the mess we have now.

I reject off hand the idea of compensating college athletes from revenues earned by CFB programs; likewise the notion that it just might be OK to let athletes obtain sponsors or benefactors.

All of this talk detracts from a simple solution that holds individuals accountable to a reasonable set of rules regarding student athlete conduct as well as rules that prohibit friends of CFB programs from enticing athletes to play for their respective teams by paying them to do so. Once the rules are in place, develop a mechanism for enforcement that separates the fox from the hen house and enforce the rules with stiff penalties for breaking them that deter rule breaking instead of making it worth it .... like it is now.

I don't think it is that difficult. What is difficult is changing the momentum of a system that has persisted for decades and having the political will to take action to turn things in a different direction when the old ways involve a lot of money changing hands.

[hack]

``You're invested in the concept that tressel is a tragic hero ..... and I'm not dismissing the validity of that view''

There you go again with that. WTF?

[SeanB]

"I'm not dismissing the validity of that view''

Uh, I am!!

"The tragic hero is a man of noble stature. (NOPE!) He is not an ordinary man, but a man with outstanding quality and greatness about him. (NOPE!) His own destruction is for a greater cause or principle." (DEFINITELY NOPE!) EDIT: Unless that greater cause is a review/revamp of how to deal with rogue programs!

Common characteristics of a tragic hero according to Aristotle:

# Usually of noble birth - Not sure about that one

# Hamartia - a.k.a. the tragic flaw that eventually leads to his downfall. - ok maybe, if that flaw means being a lieing, cheating hypocrite!

# Peripeteia - a reversal of fortune brought about by the hero's tragic flaw - maybe this one, too, but I doubt it.

# His actions result in an increase of self- awareness and self-knowledge - I seriously doubt this based on that little gathering outside his home!

# The audience must feel pity and fear for this character. - NEVER!!

Just having fun, of course. Don't want DSL or talent to take this one too seriously and go back to their grandstanding!

[Jeff Buchanan]

I can tell you there a 100,000 osu fans in ohio and probably a decade worth of players that he coached who feel that tressel, at baseline, was a good man. There is supposition that he was absolutely not a good man let alone any kind of hero but the facts don't fully support that conclusion.

Please note that I don't subscribe to the notion of tressel as a tragic hero. His lieing, about which there is no question, even among the most loyal of his supporters, is sufficient for me to cast him upon the dung heap of dishonest men who have brought a lot of misery because of it that have inhabited the planet over time.

[hack]

I can tell you there a 100,000 osu fans in ohio and probably a decade worth of players that he coached who feel that tressel, at baseline, was a good man.

You don't need to be told that his won-loss record is the largest factor in creating that opinion.




There is supposition that he was absolutely not a good man let alone any kind of hero but the facts don't fully support that conclusion.

I'd put it the opposite way. The facts say he is, as a human being, a low-grade person with very little character and a healthy appetite for unsavory tactics. There are no facts that show he was a good mentor to young kids, but there are suppositions -- testamonials from those who might know, etc.

Ultimately those with no skin in the game are able to recognize that encouraging kids to cheat and lie, as well as ``leading by example'' in those categories, overwhelms whatever personal aid, mentoring and father-figuring he provided, be it for self-promotional reasons or for selfless ones.

[iam416]

And that sort of assinine bullshit is why I should just stay away -- "low-grade person" -- LMMFAO.

Buchanan:

My point in calling the article crap is that it argues for the NFL to step in. I'm more than happy with strict penalties from the NCAA against those who can be deterred -- those with culpable conduct. Coach Tressel, e.g., erred by failing to forward the Cicero tip to compliance (which apparently makes him a "low-grade person"). He should pay a penalty for that. And he will. I'm guessing a multiple year show-cause from the NCAA (in addition to losing his job). I'm 100% for that. In fact, it's what I've been arguing all day long.

But, when the argument extends to the NFL, it becomes vacuous. What interest does the NFL have in NCAA rules? As I've said many times before, these aren't rules based on some moral code. They're arbitrary rules to preserve the notion of amateurism -- frankly, an arbitrary notion for CFB at that. A kid that takes $100 or $1000 or $10,000 from someone giving him that money isn't doing anything morally wrong. He's breaking arbitrary rules, but so what -- we all break morally-neutral rules (most prominentaly, the litany of traffic laws).

So, why on earth should the NFL care if Cam Newton took $180K to play at Auburn or Nevin Shapiro hooked up Jonathan Vilma or if Terrelle Pryor paid for tattoos with his autograph? WHY? There's no basis for it. Period. So I find the suggestion that the NFL ought to enforce NCAA rules to be absolutely ridiculous. And that's the big picture point the article was trying to make.

[Jeff Buchanan]

"My point in calling the article crap is that it argues for the NFL to step in."

I'm not sure that's what it says (not the best piece I've read so, that might be the problem).

I think he is defending Goodell for imposing a suspension equal to that which tp would have received if he had continued to play as an amateur. By doing so, the author concludes, Goodell demonstrates rule breakers won't find a safe haven in the NFL.

Don't know the terms of tp's contract but I'll bet that supension costs him a fair amount.

[hack]

``And that sort of assinine bullshit is why I should just stay away -- "low-grade person" -- LMMFAO.''

You can proffer an explanation of why I'm wrong, as I know you are capable of doing, or you can be lumped in with all the other halfwits for whom discussions of right and wrong happen only in the context of won-loss records.