As a rabid Ohio State Buckeye loyalist, it pains me to watch the largest university in the country with the biggest athletic budget get charbroiled and fried nationwide. The colossal gridiron empire is crumbling right before my eyes.
I am nevertheless glad at the abrupt termination to Jim Tressel’s wicked reign. And this comes from a man who spent the past decade making people want to “punch me in the throat” in SEC/ACC country, as one co-worker once told me, because I was such an over-the-top, boisterous boaster of O-State’s exploits in high decibels. Even if Tressel says he offered his resignation, Ohio State probably had its wingtip flush against Tressel’s chewed-off backside, pushing him off the gargantuan campus.
He has been exposed as a massive fraud and a blatant exploiter and manipulator of impressionable young men, mostly African American athletes who took the program to multiple Big Ten titles, BSC bowl games, wins over archrival Michigan and, most importantly, a national championship.
I’ve never forgotten nor forgiven how Tressel treated former freshman sensation Maurice Clarett, whose precocious brilliance (despite a very troubled mind) handed Tressel a national championship in 2002.
Check out the damning Sports Illustrated article that just came out that paints Tressel as a hypocrite and double-handed predator at Youngstown State and Ohio State: “One of Tressel’s duties [as an O-State assistant in the 1980s] then was to organize and run the Buckeyes’ summer camp. Most of the young players who attended it would never play college football, but a few were top prospects whom Ohio State was recruiting. At the end of camp, attendees bought tickets to a raffle with prizes such as cleats and a jersey. According to his fellow assistant, Tressel rigged the raffle so that the elite prospects won — a potential violation of NCAA rules. Says the former colleague, who asked not to be identified because he still has ties to the Ohio State community.”
And here’s the kicker, to all you kooky Tressel disciples who foolishly support the man even after he is gone: “In the morning he would read the Bible with another coach. Then, in the afternoon, he would go out and cheat kids who had probably saved up money from mowing lawns to buy those raffle tickets. That’s Jim Tressel.”
Not to mention that Tressel was a horrible big-game coach and a substandard developer of quarterbacks. For years, I told fellow O-State fans that I could tell that we were about about to lose the biggest games before they even started because of his shaky pre-game interviews. He looked like he was about to lose. The Buckeyes subsequently got steamrolled by Florida and LSU in championship games.
Some, like Barbara Smith, president of the Ohio State Alumni Club of Franklin County, where Columbus, Ohio, is located, epitomizes the apex of stupidity when she tries to place the blame on the players. But Tressel failed to report the NCAA violations when he found out about them. That is his fault and his alone. And he didn’t hide the violations because he was protecting the players. He didn’t care about the players’ well-being. He was trying to win at all costs. He loved the benefits of being treated like a god in Ohio.
And now, like Bruce Pearl at Tennessee, Tressel is being buried by an avalanche of indiscretions that illuminate a serial cheater who supposedly read the Bible but didn’t pay much attention to it. And to think that this man wrote two books on integrity. What a joke. And the last laugh will now go to all of Ohio State’s opponents, particularly Michigan, because Buckeye Nation is about to be bludgeoned half to death by the NCAA.
–terry shropshire
