The Cleveland Plain Dealer
http://www.cleveland.com/sports/
May 31, 2011
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The greatest football coach at Ohio State since Woody Hayes, Jim Tressel leaves under the cloud of scandal, just as Hayes did in 1978.
The difference between the two is that Hayes was fired after he lost his temper and threw a punch in the Gator Bowl on national television at a Clemson player named Charlie Bauman. Tressel's wrongdoing was private until Ohio State officials unearthed incriminating emails and phone records in the coach's cover-up of the memorabilia sale scandal. It was deliberate. It was a calculated attempt to evade the rules by playing ineligible players.
Woody Hayes was a genuine educator who was brought down by his emotions. His fall was almost preordained by highly public tantrums in the past.
Tressel's downfall surprised true believers who felt his sins of omission in the monitoring of first Maurice Clarett, then Troy Smith and finally Terrelle Pryor and the rest of the memorabilia hawkers were aberrations, not the norm. Those who knew Tressel were skeptical of this.
His every hair was always in place. His American flag pin was always skewered to a stylish lapel. His organizational skills were formidable. His planning was impeccable. Negligence was not an option in his lifestyle.
But hypocrisy proved to be.
Tressel, too, was an educator. The academic record of the football team improved dramatically after the shambles of his predecessor, John Cooper.
Tressel also wrote books, teaching life lessons. His latest is "The Winner's Manual: For the Game of Life." Released by a Christian publisher, it includes inspirational stories and the "Block O of Life," a Buckeye take on the late UCLA basketball coach John Wooden's "Pyramid of Success." Nowhere in it does Tressel suggest that withholding information on player wrongdoing from superiors, lying to the NCAA in writing, and knowingly playing ineligible players are behaviors worthy to be emulated.
From the start, Tressel promised strict accountability for wrongdoers. "The only excuse for missing a class is a death in the family -- your own," he said in his role as the new sheriff in town on the day he was hired.
The accountability was always overstated for the players, though.
Tressel was in the business of winning football games. The inattention that verged on willful ignorance of Clarett's lavish lifestyle was followed by "Minimum Jim's" absurdly lenient one-game suspension of linebacker Robert Reynolds in 2003 for choking Wisconsin quarterback Jim Sorgi on the bottom of a pile of tacklers. It was a mean, nasty game on both sides of the ball, with players spitting at each other, but that is no excuse for such a dirty play nor is it justification for such a ridiculously light penalty. OSU was still in the hunt to defend its national championship then, and expediency trumped severity in punishment.
For nine months in 2010 and early 2011, Tressel covered up the particulars of the memorabilia sale scandal. He signed a preseason NCAA form, averring that he knew of no rules violations. He emailed and telephoned star quarterback Terrelle Pryor's hometown mentor, as well as the Columbus whistle-blower who alerted him to the scandal. He said he was uncertain whom to contact at Ohio State with the same information, although the compliance office and that of his boss, Athletic Director Gene Smith, were only steps away in the Woody Hayes Athletic Center.
Tressel's alleged motives for the cover-up -- the players' safety, confidentiality for the tipster, chain-of-command uncertainty -- seemed to shift and change with every telling, like the earth above a growling, buckling fault line.
It is hard to ascribe lofty motives to his duplicity. Tressel thought last season that the Buckeyes were going back to the BCS Championship Game, the "little hump" over which Pryor promised to get him. The hump would have looked like the Himalayas without the five players involved in the memorabilia scandal.
Arrogance, not good intentions, finally undid Tressel. He thought he could get away with the cover-up because he had gotten away, untainted, in the other scandals that involved his elite players, both at Ohio State and Youngstown State before that. Powerful men have been tripping over that little hump since the ancient Greek playwrights made "hubris," or pride, the tragic flaw of great men.
Now it has all crumbled. The "death in the family" was the exile of the man who was the face of the flagship program in an iconic conference's flagship sport.
Ohio State's reputation is damaged, after only grudgingly increasing a series of wrist-slap measures to him. The chance is gone for the second national championship that would have put Tressel in a tie with Joe Paterno and other elite coaches, and in far less time than the almost geological scale of the Penn State coach's career.
In flames is Tressel's legacy as a winner with a moral compass and the Big Ten's view of its own exceptionalism in ethical conduct.
On the field, Tressel was indisputably a great coach. He was 9-1 against Michigan. It was a Christmas present record, only to be dreamed of before him, a vision dancing like sugar plums in Ohio State fans' heads.
The Michigan program went through convulsive changes when it committed to the doctrinaire game plan of a spread offense guru named Rich Rodriguez. But Tressel arrived at OSU in the noon-time of coach Lloyd Carr's ascension, on the heels of John Cooper's atrocious 2-10-1 record against Michigan. Tressel soon eclipsed Carr and drove him into retirement.
A conservative man, often criticized for buttoning down his players' flair when he got the lead, Tressel in fact used surprise plays to win some of his biggest games.
In 2002, the only option play Ohio State used all season, originating in a formation inviting Michigan to overshift the wrong way, resulted in Maurice Hall's 2-yard game-winning run with Craig Krenzel's pitchout.
In the epic 2006 Michigan game, pitting No. 1 OSU vs. No. 2 Michigan, on second-and-inches at the Michigan 39 -- from a formation heavy with tight ends, power blockers and thundering running back Beanie Wells -- Troy Smith faked to Wells and threw to a wide-open Ted Ginn Jr., hiding as a tight end, for a critical touchdown. All season, OSU had run Wells up the middle from that formation in short yardage, but this time, on a quick count, Ginn went unobserved by the Wolverines' defense. A season of patiently setting up Michigan for one moment and one play had been rewarded.
A breakneck, hurry-up offense for the entire first half staked the Buckeyes to a halftime lead that barely held up in Tressel's last game, a thrilling Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas.
After Tressel's fall, a lot of northeast Ohioans are hurting. Tressel was one of our own. The son of a coaching father, Lee Tressel, who himself won a Division III national championship at Baldwin-Wallace, Jim Tressel was connected to the fans by shared loyalties to Cleveland teams and a lifelong fascination with Cleveland sports legends. As a boy, Tressel held the ball when no less than Lou "The Toe" Groza, his neighbor in Berea, practiced kicking field goals.
In Ohio, the birthplace of the NFL, the forum for the Buckeyes' 60 years of Big Ten dominance, football is hard-wired into the populace. Jim Tressel was practically part of the game's DNA. He was an underdog, hauled from the old Division I-AA ranks at Youngstown State, in an unheard-of promotion for a school as prominent as Ohio State. His best team, in 2002, won half its 14 games by a touchdown or less, coming from behind time and again, and won the national championship in double overtime over the Miami Hurricanes, the era's dynasty.
It was Tressel who puffed Cleveland fans' chests with pride after all the years of downtrodden teams and disappointed sports hopes. The Impossible Dream had become the art of the possible.
The only evidence in Tressel's defense was not to exculpate, but to mitigate. Tressel has done good work out of the limelight for good causes for years. He has touched many players' lives and made a positive difference to many people outside the white lines as well.
Fiercely patriotic, he has visited the troops in the Middle East. He could summon many character witnesses to his substantial acts of generosity, thoughtfulness and kindness. Tressel took Ohio State to heights unscaled since Hayes was the coach. Of course Tressel, like Hayes, was not without flaws. Neither angel nor demon, Tressel is only a human being. Still, on the question of his active involvement in a major ethics scandal, he is really, most sincerely guilty.
Many coaches in the past probably handled player violations in the same way. But the times have changed, and the mania to say "Gotcha!" in the media has intensified. The time for Tressel's own accountability arrived today.
That such grubby, small violations by his players led to Tressel's resignation saddens those of us who liked and admired him. A good man in many ways, Tressel had to pay with the things he valued most, outside his family and his faith -- his job and his reputation.
On Twitter: @LivyPD
Related:
Sports Illustrated Cover Article: "How Deep it Went" -
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/magazine/05/30/jim.tressel/index.html?eref=sihp&sct=hp_t11_a5
2 comments:
He's only human and everyone makes mistakes. It was the players fault not his. They shouldn't have put him in that position. He shouldn't have had to resign.
That’s a sad story to lose a long time coach but that’s life, you can’t help the changes every time. The thing they must do is to move on and find another better coach. And focus to the team’s goal.
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