March 10, 2006
By Dennis Dodd
CBS SportsLine.com Senior Writer
Tell Dennis your opinion!
INDIANAPOLIS -- There was something very close to celebration by Ohio State at Conseco Fieldhouse on Friday afternoon. It had little -- very little -- to do with actual basketball.
The Buckeyes left the building with their school on the hook for what could be more than $10 million in restitution to the NCAA and its former basketball coach.
A year after removing itself from the NCAA Tournament, the school was sweating out a second-consecutive NCAA-imposed ban Friday that could have wrecked a recruiting class and perhaps driven its coach to Indiana.
"A blatant violation," said NCAA infractions committee vice chair Josephine Potuto, summarizing the school's long, arduous extra benefits case involving two international recruits.
"Especially troubling," she added.
Celebration? The NCAA announced an hour before game time at the Big Ten Tournament that Ohio State had escaped major sanctions. After the Bucks' quarterfinal victory over Penn State, a savvy broker could have scalped confetti.
Reality was hidden in a corner. The school that is tied for the fifth-most major infractions in NCAA history -- same as Alabama, one more than Notre Dame -- got Big Haircut No. 4.
Except the NCAA stowed the guillotine this time. Oh, there's plenty of dirt -- a massive 64 pages of it in the infractions report -- but Ohio State got to keep its head.
For those of you Bucknuts who didn't have the time or interest in sifting through it all, let's summarize: Your Big Ten champs are free to go to the NCAA Tournament, possibly as a No. 1 seed, while looking forward to perhaps the best recruiting class since Michigan's Fab Five.
You get to keep second-year coach Thad Matta, who made rumblings about bolting for his dream job at Indiana if the NCAA dropped the hammer.
That's all that really matters, right?
Why, though, does this keep happening to Ohio State? This makes two major basketball cases in 12 years. This latest one features $6,000 paid to a foreign recruit by former coach Jim O'Brien. Answer - because of bozos like Dodd
But the report also includes the $500 quarterback Troy Smith took from a booster. There's almost $14,000 in free or discounted orthodontic care for five women's basketball players. The obvious conclusion: Ohio State had better teeth than institutional control.
We haven't even mentioned the stain left by tailback/robbery suspect Maurice Clarett.
"This is not a systemic problem," athletic director Gene Smith said.
Yeah, Gene, it kind of is. And we're not blaming you one bit. Having been at the school barely a year, you inherited this mess. But it helped drive your predecessor, Andy Geiger, to retirement.
And there is a pattern. Presidents and ADs change, the mentality doesn't.
All you need is good legal counsel, which Ohio State apparently has. To stay ahead of the NCAA police, Ohio State removed a 20-12 team last year from tournament consideration. Then hoped that was good enough.
Smith put the probability of playing on at more than 90 percent, "but you never can be sure. I was a little concerned about that."
"If they weren't going to let these guys go," Matta said after the Penn State game, "there were going to be 66 teams in the NCAA Tournament this year. We were going to play somebody.
"It would have been a devastating blow."
Devastation is relative when you consider how the school got to this point. O'Brien's name is mud right now on the Columbus campus. He put the school through a hell way beyond the burning fires stoked by Clarett. If O'Brien ever works at the NCAA level again, it will be at least five years from now after he got the dreaded show-cause penalty.
You'll be reading about Paul Biancardi's firing any day now. O'Brien's former assistant, now the coach at Wright State, was dealt a unique penalty Friday. The NCAA said Biancardi can't recruit for the next 19 months after what he did at Ohio State.
How does a school continue to employ a head coach who can't recruit?
Last month, a supposedly sober judge ruled that Ohio State couldn't fire O'Brien for paying the recruit. O'Brien had sued the university for $3.5 million. If a judge with more sense isn't found, the school could be on the hook for a reported $9 million with interest and penalties.
Strike what we said about good legal counsel.
Here's the ultimate irony: Matta is trying to match the accomplishments of one of the most reviled figures in school history.
In the middle of the mess, O'Brien took the Bucks to the 1999 Final Four.
Love the banner, hate the coach? Can't even do that. As part of the penalties, Ohio State must remove the 1999-2002 tournament appearances from a banner in Value City Arena. That, and pay back the NCAA $800,000 earned from those appearances.
"The one thing I've learned through this whole process is how cutthroat some people can be in this business," Matta said.
O'Brien and Biancardi stonewalled. They argued that the NCAA's statute of limitations had run out on the violations. But the misconduct was so heinous that the NCAA revoked the statute, saying it was a "pattern of continuing conduct."
However, the throat cuts both ways. What does it say about a coach who might have been ready to bail -- recruiting class in tow -- if Ohio State got another postseason ban?
Matta sent his recruits letters allowing them out of their letters of intent if that happened.
That is the value of the "Thad Five" that includes local Lawrence North High teammates Greg Oden and Mike Conley.
The preseason perception was that this was a transition year with the monster recruits coming in. The reality was four glossed-over seniors leading the Bucks to an outright conference title.
"Once he signed this mega-class, people kind of overlooked us," said senior Terence Dials, the Big Ten Player of the Year. "We want to go out there and prove a lot of people wrong.
"You have the No. 1 player in the nation coming in (Oden). The class should get its due, but not right now. Wait until the summer before you start talking about the class."
In that way, Ohio State's fans are no different than any other school's. They're always looking ahead, to the horizon for the next big thing, be it Maurice Clarett, Jim O'Brien or a break from the NCAA.
One out of three ain't bad.
