In discussing Jim Tressel's legacy, it is best to start at the beginning, with his famous guarantee delivered on January 22, 2001, at the halftime of an Ohio State-Michigan basketball game: "I can assure you that you'll be proud of our young people in the classroom, in the community, and especially in 310 days in Ann Arbor." Now under normal circumstances, the head football coach of The Ohio State University would not have to specifically mention the importance of The Game, but Tressel's predecessor, John Cooper, had just been fired in large part because he compiled a miserable 2-10-1 record against Michigan. Tressel knew from day one that his most important job duty was to beat That Team Up North, and he used his first public appearance as the head of the Ohio State football program to feed some red meat to rabid Buckeye fans.
Of course Tressel never explicitly stated that he would lead the Buckeyes to victory against the hated Wolverines on November 24, 2001, but it's pretty clear that is exactly what he meant to say. And we all know he made good on his promise, as Ohio State, the heavy underdog struggling for respectability, upset the mighty University of Michigan, 26-20. Tressel would go on to win eight more times in the rivalry against just one loss. The only complaint in this regard, and it's a minor one by comparison, is that one loss (during the 2003 season) probably cost the Buckeyes a shot at a national title game, and it certainly cost them a spot in the Rose Bowl. But a 9-1 record against Michigan is unprecedented, and regardless of whatever else you might want to say about Tressel's legacy, that statistic has to figure prominently in the discussion.
Tressel's dominance over Michigan was not an isolated series of events, as he posted an overall record of 106-22 (.828 winning percentage) while at Ohio State, with a 6-4 record in bowl games (5-3 in BCS bowls). Of course, twelve of those wins were subsequently vacated (including the 2011 Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas), and another twenty were against non-BCS teams. However, even if we subtract the vacated wins and the gimmes, this still leaves Tressel with a record of 74-22 (.771 winning percentage) versus the big boys of college football. By way of comparison, Tressel's winning percentage against BCS competition is significantly better than the legendary Joe Paterno's overall winning percentage (.747, and that includes numerous wins against a legion of patsies over his forty-five year career at Penn State). It is also far better than the overall winning percentage of media superstar Kirk Ferentz (89-60 record at Iowa, for a .560 winning percentage). Ferentz's record against BCS competition is only 68-58, for a .540 winning percentage. And yes, that means Kirk lost two games to non-BCS teams - MAC stalwart Western Michigan on both occasions.
I am sure that, in reflecting upon his career, we will all remember some of Tressel's most shocking failures - Florida 2006, LSU 2007, USC 2008 - as well as some of the most gut-wrenching losses - Texas 2005 and 2008, Penn State in those same seasons. But those low points, few and far between, are overwhelmed by the high points - the five BCS bowl victories (especially the drubbing of Notre Dame in the 2006 Fiesta Bowl), the nine triumphs against Michigan (the upset of 2004, the comeback of 2005, and the clash of titans in 2006 to name a few), and the entire 2002 national championship run. From the very beginning, Tressel guaranteed success on the gridiron and he certainly kept that promise.
The second part of Tressel's guarantee concerned the performance of the players in the classroom. Under John Cooper, academics had been de-emphasized to a tragicomic level: Sports Illustrated, in their 1998 preseason issue, proclaimed the Buckeyes #1* (*if Andy Katzenmoyer makes the grade); Reggie Germany's Blutarskonian 0.00 GPA; and graduation rates so low (especially amongst black players) that it would continue to haunt the program well into the Tressel regime. Under John Cooper, Ohio State had become the proverbial "football factory", albeit a factory that generally went on strike at the end of November.
So in January of 2001, Tressel inherited a team that didn't go to class and couldn't beat Michigan. Correcting just one of those negative trends was a daunting task, and to correct both simultaneously would be a tall order indeed. But Tressel was up to the challenge, and his success in the classroom was just as dramatic as his success on the football field. In just a few short years, Ohio State went from an academic laughingstock to one of the most respected programs in the nation. For example, from 2004 to 2010, Ohio State placed 164 football players on the Academic All Big Ten team (23.5 per year), while the Harvard of Washtenaw County managed only 70 members (10 per year) during the same period. And the Buckeyes who made that squad weren't just a bunch of third-stringers and walk-ons, but included several starters (Browning, Chekwa, Cordle, Datish, Denlinger, Fox, Freeman, Hartline, Homan, Larimore, Robiskie, Russell, Salley, Sanzenbacher, Antonio Smith, Spitler, Sweat, White, Wilson) and quite a few legitimate superstars (Ginn, Gonzalez, Laurinaitis, Mangold, Pryor, Beanie Wells). During that same time, Tressel raised the team's APR from a dangerously low 925 to a stellar 985 for its multiyear score[1]. According to the current APR ratings supplied by the NCAA, Ohio State ranks fifth amongst the 120 FBS teams, behind only Northwestern (993), Rutgers (988), Northern Illinois (987), and Duke (986). Ohio State's APR is well above the FBS average of 949, and far ahead of Michigan, whose pathetic 928 score places them squarely at the bottom of the Big Ten Conference; the Buckeyes also beat out the real Harvard, who managed a multiyear APR score of only 983.
The third part of Tressel's guarantee dealt with the players' conduct in the community, and that is where the problems arose. The first major incident was Steve Bellisari's late-season DUI in 2001. Then came Maurice Clarett and his never-ending litany of off-the-field problems. Next in line was Lydell Ross and his funny sexy money. And then it was Alex Boone's forty-beer nights on High Street, and Troy Smith's five-hundred-dollar handshakes. But Bellisari was a Cooper recruit, and Clarett was just a bad apple, and Ross was the victim of a genuine mistake, and alcoholism is a disease, and boys will be boys, and they do that kind of stuff everywhere, and it's a lot worse down in the SEC, and we still run a clean program. Or so we said to ourselves.
And then TatGate hit. Sure, it was just a few players legally selling their own legally-acquired property, but in the eyes of the NCAA it was still wrong. Not because it was illegal, or illicit, or immoral, or unethical, but because it was un-amateurish, and for some strange reason being an amateur is still supposed to mean something in the multi-billion-dollar world of college athletics. So the NCAA has ruled that the players whose talents make billions of dollars for everybody else can't use those same talents to make a few bucks for themselves. It's a nice arrangement, just like slavery used to be. But (you say) the college athletes, they get a free education! That's got to be worth something! Well, that's kind of like saying that the slaves got free room and board, and free passage from Africa.
But I digress - the unsustainability of the NCAA's delusions is not really the point of this article. I mention it merely to accentuate the fact that college football players (and basketball players, too) aren't in any meaningful sense of the word "amateurs" because they make a ton of money for somebody, and artificially forcing them into that role is the fiction that will eventually bring down the NCAA (and the sooner the better, in my most humble opinion). In any event, the Tat-Five (or Six, or Eight, or whatever the final number will be) knew or should have known that they were violating the outmoded, unenforceable, completely-out-of-touch-with-reality NCAA rules by taking their own memorabilia - rightfully earned and legally owned - and trading them for tattoos or selling them for cash. Again, boys will be boys, everybody does it, you should check out Auburn, etc.
And then the shocking revelations - Tressel KNEW about it all! At least as far back as April of 2010! And he LIED about it! And he CHEATED to win games!
Or rather, Tressel received an informal email from a rather dubious source about the involvement of two players, and he failed to disclose his email communications with that source to the proper authorities, and he used potentially ineligible players who may or may not have helped the Buckeyes to win some (but certainly not all) of their games in 2010. Of course, the dull reality is not nearly as exciting as the media hyperbole, so reporters, columnists, bloggers, talking heads, and other miscellaneous no-nothings (Bruce Hooley) around the college football world emphasized the lying and cheating angles (when there really were none[2]), and waged an all-out assault on James Patrick Tressel, the new public enemy number one.
So the question remains, why did the media do this? There are several theories, which if parsed into their essential elements and reassembled into a coherent whole may well combine to answer the question accurately. The first theory, the one favored by most Buckeye fans, is that Ohio State is one of the few truly elite teams in college football (along with Michigan, Notre Dame, Southern Cal, Oklahoma, Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas), and thus that any scandal involving Ohio State is going to be big news for everybody everywhere. There is certainly some merit to that argument - no one really cares if Purdue or Clemson or Colorado State gets into trouble, and even parvenus like Auburn and Oregon have a limited audience - but it doesn't explain why recent scandals at elite programs like Southern Cal and Notre Dame have received almost no media attention.
The second theory involves a conspiracy, namely that ESPN, the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports, was unloading both barrels on Ohio State as a way to gain a measure of revenge against the Big Ten Conference. Now at first glance this proposition might seem ludicrous, but with a little context it starts to make some sense. In 2004, ESPN and the Big Ten entered negotiations for an extension of their television contract. The ESPN delegation was led by executive vice president of programming and production Mark Shapiro, a "cutthroat negotiator" who had previously made enemies with David Stern and Gary Bettman, the heads of the NBA and the NHL, respectively. ESPN, apparently considering itself to be the only viable player in the college football market, made a "lowball" offer to Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany. In a subsequent interview with the Chicago Tribune, Delany said, "The shortest [negotiation] I ever had. [Shapiro] lowballed us and said: 'Take it or leave it. If you don't take our offer, you are rolling the dice.' I said: 'Consider them rolled.'" And so Delany created the Big Ten Network: "If Mark had presented a fair offer, we would have signed it. And there would not be a Big Ten Network." Based on the foregoing, one could imagine ESPN, in true Corleone fashion, going after the Big Ten for refusing the offer that couldn't be refused; and Ohio State, being the marquee program of the Big Ten, found the horse's head in its bed. But like all conspiracy theories, this one has some holes in it. For one thing, why would ESPN damage its own product? If ESPN is trying to sell college football, then why would it want to bring down one of the most prominent college football programs, and one of the biggest television draws? Despite the presence of the Big Ten Network, ESPN will still be televising at least four Ohio State games this season, and probably several more after the full television schedule has been announced. And even if ESPN is waging a vendetta against the Big Ten, then why have so many other media personalities railed against Ohio State throughout this process?
The first two theories don't explain why the media had such a personal animus toward Coach Tressel. If you have ever seen an interview or press conference with Jim Tressel, you know that he is not the most media-friendly person, and his incessant coachspeak, interspersed with an occasional barbed response to a particularly stupid question, naturally rubbed some of the press corps the wrong way. More importantly, however, Tressel always claimed to be a good man - a devout Christian who practiced family values both on and off the field - and he actively promoted that image in public, most notably through his two books, The Winners Manual: For the Game of Life and Life Promises for Success: Promises from God on Achieving Your Best. Anyone who writes from a Christian perspective about his "Big Ten fundamentals for success" - attitude, discipline, faith, handling adversity and success, excellence, love, toughness, responsibility, team, hope - is setting himself up for a fall, and there are countless members of the media waiting in the weeds, ready to pounce at the first sign of hypocrisy from such a person. And let's face it, Tressel handed the media a huge helping of hypocrisy on a silver platter. As soon as the Chris Cicero emails became public, Tressel was revealed not simply as a liar and a cheat - common enough in the highly-competitive big business of college football - but also as a fake, a phony, a fraud, a man leading a false life, hiding his sins behind his veneer of Christianity. And fair or not, that characterization - the wolf in sheep's clothing - heightened the hysteria and sweetened the scandal, and so the witch hunters in the media wrote and rewrote the history of Jim Tressel to fit that template.
The media love nothing better than to destroy a good man, to bury him in his own hypocrisy. But was Jim Tressel really such a good man after all? There has always been some question about Tressel's ethics, at least in his capacity as a college football coach. Controversy and scandal have often followed in Tressel's wake, going all the way back to 1991 with the Ray Isaac incident at Youngstown State, and continuing with the various Maurice Clarett allegations in 2002-2003, Troy Smith taking improper benefits in 2004, and finally culminating in TatGate in 2010-2011. In reading the media accounts, you get the sense that many members of the press believed that Tressel has always been a bit of a shady character, but that in the past the teflon-coated coach had been able to escape punishment through a combination of connections, plausible deniability, and sheer luck. So when TatGate hit, with obvious evidence of guilt in the form of incriminating emails, the media wasn't going to let yet another opportunity slip through their fingers - this time Tressel would burn, and there would be no room for excuses or justifications.
And another question remains: Why did Jim Tressel cover up TatGate? Well if you believe the media, then he did it because he was a win-at-all-costs coach who needed his star quarterback in order to have a successful season. But remember, this is the same media that constantly derided and belittled Ohio State for playing such a soft schedule in 2010, and repeatedly told us that Terrelle Pryor was better suited to play tight end. And does anybody really believe that Tressel needed Terrelle Pryor or DeVier Posey or Jordan Whiting to beat the likes of Marshall and Ohio and Eastern Michigan?
If you listen to Tressel, then he did it to protect his players from dangerous gangsters who were the subject of a federal criminal investigation. But Tressel has never identified any specific threat to his players, or even a vague one, and he has certainly not been able to show how such a threat might have been triggered if he had passed on his information to the Ohio State compliance office.
If you are a conspiracy theorist, then you probably think that Tressel wanted to cover up TatGate because the scandal goes a lot deeper, and involves Terrelle Pryor selling everything from his Big Ten championship rings to his shoelaces for untold millions of dollars. And while Pryor has indeed been the central figure in this mess along with Tressel, that is largely because he is the big name and the average media type has never heard of Mike Adams or Solomon Thomas or Ray Small. So Pryor's role becomes magnified - he becomes the kingpin, the ringleader, the svengali who orchestrated the whole plot - despite the fact that there is no real evidence to support such allegations.
As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Jim Tressel is a successful college football coach and as such he is by nature a Machiavellian, regardless of what he might say in his books. If Tressel believed that he could successfully bury his involvement in TatGate (and he would have done so but for an unlucky break), then he would take that risk because in the end it is all about winning, and player suspensions decrease the odds of doing that. But we must also give Tressel some credit for being a good man, as he is by all objective accounts. I can easily believe that Tressel was trying to protect his players, not necessarily from being kneecapped in the middle of the night, but rather from being dragged through the media mud for associating with an alleged drug dealer like Ed Rife. But I also believe that Tressel often looked the other way when a star player began to stray, and that his leniency with Ray Isaac, Maurice Clarett, Troy Smith, and Terrelle Pryor ultimately led to his downfall. So the TatGate cover-up could be seen as the action of a coach who wanted to win a bit too much, who wanted to protect his players a bit too closely, or who was just a bit too permissive with his superstars. More likely, it was the action of a coach who was all three.
So what will Tressel's legacy be? Will it be 9-1? Or will it be TatGate? Probably both. When we think about Woody Hayes, we fondly remember the five national championships, but we also cannot forget about The Punch. Jim Tressel will go down in history as one of the greatest college football coaches ever, as the person who restored academic integrity to the Ohio State football program, and as a man whose own flaws were his downfall. Well, two out of three ain't bad.
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[1] The current multiyear APR score compiles data from the 2006-2007, 2007-2008, 2008-2009, and 2009-2010 academic years.
[2] Whether Tressel lied probably falls into a grey area, but what the players did does not constitute cheating in any conventional sense of the word, as they did not gain any competitive advantage from their actions.
Of course Tressel never explicitly stated that he would lead the Buckeyes to victory against the hated Wolverines on November 24, 2001, but it's pretty clear that is exactly what he meant to say. And we all know he made good on his promise, as Ohio State, the heavy underdog struggling for respectability, upset the mighty University of Michigan, 26-20. Tressel would go on to win eight more times in the rivalry against just one loss. The only complaint in this regard, and it's a minor one by comparison, is that one loss (during the 2003 season) probably cost the Buckeyes a shot at a national title game, and it certainly cost them a spot in the Rose Bowl. But a 9-1 record against Michigan is unprecedented, and regardless of whatever else you might want to say about Tressel's legacy, that statistic has to figure prominently in the discussion.
Tressel's dominance over Michigan was not an isolated series of events, as he posted an overall record of 106-22 (.828 winning percentage) while at Ohio State, with a 6-4 record in bowl games (5-3 in BCS bowls). Of course, twelve of those wins were subsequently vacated (including the 2011 Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas), and another twenty were against non-BCS teams. However, even if we subtract the vacated wins and the gimmes, this still leaves Tressel with a record of 74-22 (.771 winning percentage) versus the big boys of college football. By way of comparison, Tressel's winning percentage against BCS competition is significantly better than the legendary Joe Paterno's overall winning percentage (.747, and that includes numerous wins against a legion of patsies over his forty-five year career at Penn State). It is also far better than the overall winning percentage of media superstar Kirk Ferentz (89-60 record at Iowa, for a .560 winning percentage). Ferentz's record against BCS competition is only 68-58, for a .540 winning percentage. And yes, that means Kirk lost two games to non-BCS teams - MAC stalwart Western Michigan on both occasions.
I am sure that, in reflecting upon his career, we will all remember some of Tressel's most shocking failures - Florida 2006, LSU 2007, USC 2008 - as well as some of the most gut-wrenching losses - Texas 2005 and 2008, Penn State in those same seasons. But those low points, few and far between, are overwhelmed by the high points - the five BCS bowl victories (especially the drubbing of Notre Dame in the 2006 Fiesta Bowl), the nine triumphs against Michigan (the upset of 2004, the comeback of 2005, and the clash of titans in 2006 to name a few), and the entire 2002 national championship run. From the very beginning, Tressel guaranteed success on the gridiron and he certainly kept that promise.
The second part of Tressel's guarantee concerned the performance of the players in the classroom. Under John Cooper, academics had been de-emphasized to a tragicomic level: Sports Illustrated, in their 1998 preseason issue, proclaimed the Buckeyes #1* (*if Andy Katzenmoyer makes the grade); Reggie Germany's Blutarskonian 0.00 GPA; and graduation rates so low (especially amongst black players) that it would continue to haunt the program well into the Tressel regime. Under John Cooper, Ohio State had become the proverbial "football factory", albeit a factory that generally went on strike at the end of November.
So in January of 2001, Tressel inherited a team that didn't go to class and couldn't beat Michigan. Correcting just one of those negative trends was a daunting task, and to correct both simultaneously would be a tall order indeed. But Tressel was up to the challenge, and his success in the classroom was just as dramatic as his success on the football field. In just a few short years, Ohio State went from an academic laughingstock to one of the most respected programs in the nation. For example, from 2004 to 2010, Ohio State placed 164 football players on the Academic All Big Ten team (23.5 per year), while the Harvard of Washtenaw County managed only 70 members (10 per year) during the same period. And the Buckeyes who made that squad weren't just a bunch of third-stringers and walk-ons, but included several starters (Browning, Chekwa, Cordle, Datish, Denlinger, Fox, Freeman, Hartline, Homan, Larimore, Robiskie, Russell, Salley, Sanzenbacher, Antonio Smith, Spitler, Sweat, White, Wilson) and quite a few legitimate superstars (Ginn, Gonzalez, Laurinaitis, Mangold, Pryor, Beanie Wells). During that same time, Tressel raised the team's APR from a dangerously low 925 to a stellar 985 for its multiyear score[1]. According to the current APR ratings supplied by the NCAA, Ohio State ranks fifth amongst the 120 FBS teams, behind only Northwestern (993), Rutgers (988), Northern Illinois (987), and Duke (986). Ohio State's APR is well above the FBS average of 949, and far ahead of Michigan, whose pathetic 928 score places them squarely at the bottom of the Big Ten Conference; the Buckeyes also beat out the real Harvard, who managed a multiyear APR score of only 983.
The third part of Tressel's guarantee dealt with the players' conduct in the community, and that is where the problems arose. The first major incident was Steve Bellisari's late-season DUI in 2001. Then came Maurice Clarett and his never-ending litany of off-the-field problems. Next in line was Lydell Ross and his funny sexy money. And then it was Alex Boone's forty-beer nights on High Street, and Troy Smith's five-hundred-dollar handshakes. But Bellisari was a Cooper recruit, and Clarett was just a bad apple, and Ross was the victim of a genuine mistake, and alcoholism is a disease, and boys will be boys, and they do that kind of stuff everywhere, and it's a lot worse down in the SEC, and we still run a clean program. Or so we said to ourselves.
And then TatGate hit. Sure, it was just a few players legally selling their own legally-acquired property, but in the eyes of the NCAA it was still wrong. Not because it was illegal, or illicit, or immoral, or unethical, but because it was un-amateurish, and for some strange reason being an amateur is still supposed to mean something in the multi-billion-dollar world of college athletics. So the NCAA has ruled that the players whose talents make billions of dollars for everybody else can't use those same talents to make a few bucks for themselves. It's a nice arrangement, just like slavery used to be. But (you say) the college athletes, they get a free education! That's got to be worth something! Well, that's kind of like saying that the slaves got free room and board, and free passage from Africa.
But I digress - the unsustainability of the NCAA's delusions is not really the point of this article. I mention it merely to accentuate the fact that college football players (and basketball players, too) aren't in any meaningful sense of the word "amateurs" because they make a ton of money for somebody, and artificially forcing them into that role is the fiction that will eventually bring down the NCAA (and the sooner the better, in my most humble opinion). In any event, the Tat-Five (or Six, or Eight, or whatever the final number will be) knew or should have known that they were violating the outmoded, unenforceable, completely-out-of-touch-with-reality NCAA rules by taking their own memorabilia - rightfully earned and legally owned - and trading them for tattoos or selling them for cash. Again, boys will be boys, everybody does it, you should check out Auburn, etc.
And then the shocking revelations - Tressel KNEW about it all! At least as far back as April of 2010! And he LIED about it! And he CHEATED to win games!
Or rather, Tressel received an informal email from a rather dubious source about the involvement of two players, and he failed to disclose his email communications with that source to the proper authorities, and he used potentially ineligible players who may or may not have helped the Buckeyes to win some (but certainly not all) of their games in 2010. Of course, the dull reality is not nearly as exciting as the media hyperbole, so reporters, columnists, bloggers, talking heads, and other miscellaneous no-nothings (Bruce Hooley) around the college football world emphasized the lying and cheating angles (when there really were none[2]), and waged an all-out assault on James Patrick Tressel, the new public enemy number one.
So the question remains, why did the media do this? There are several theories, which if parsed into their essential elements and reassembled into a coherent whole may well combine to answer the question accurately. The first theory, the one favored by most Buckeye fans, is that Ohio State is one of the few truly elite teams in college football (along with Michigan, Notre Dame, Southern Cal, Oklahoma, Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas), and thus that any scandal involving Ohio State is going to be big news for everybody everywhere. There is certainly some merit to that argument - no one really cares if Purdue or Clemson or Colorado State gets into trouble, and even parvenus like Auburn and Oregon have a limited audience - but it doesn't explain why recent scandals at elite programs like Southern Cal and Notre Dame have received almost no media attention.
The second theory involves a conspiracy, namely that ESPN, the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports, was unloading both barrels on Ohio State as a way to gain a measure of revenge against the Big Ten Conference. Now at first glance this proposition might seem ludicrous, but with a little context it starts to make some sense. In 2004, ESPN and the Big Ten entered negotiations for an extension of their television contract. The ESPN delegation was led by executive vice president of programming and production Mark Shapiro, a "cutthroat negotiator" who had previously made enemies with David Stern and Gary Bettman, the heads of the NBA and the NHL, respectively. ESPN, apparently considering itself to be the only viable player in the college football market, made a "lowball" offer to Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany. In a subsequent interview with the Chicago Tribune, Delany said, "The shortest [negotiation] I ever had. [Shapiro] lowballed us and said: 'Take it or leave it. If you don't take our offer, you are rolling the dice.' I said: 'Consider them rolled.'" And so Delany created the Big Ten Network: "If Mark had presented a fair offer, we would have signed it. And there would not be a Big Ten Network." Based on the foregoing, one could imagine ESPN, in true Corleone fashion, going after the Big Ten for refusing the offer that couldn't be refused; and Ohio State, being the marquee program of the Big Ten, found the horse's head in its bed. But like all conspiracy theories, this one has some holes in it. For one thing, why would ESPN damage its own product? If ESPN is trying to sell college football, then why would it want to bring down one of the most prominent college football programs, and one of the biggest television draws? Despite the presence of the Big Ten Network, ESPN will still be televising at least four Ohio State games this season, and probably several more after the full television schedule has been announced. And even if ESPN is waging a vendetta against the Big Ten, then why have so many other media personalities railed against Ohio State throughout this process?
The first two theories don't explain why the media had such a personal animus toward Coach Tressel. If you have ever seen an interview or press conference with Jim Tressel, you know that he is not the most media-friendly person, and his incessant coachspeak, interspersed with an occasional barbed response to a particularly stupid question, naturally rubbed some of the press corps the wrong way. More importantly, however, Tressel always claimed to be a good man - a devout Christian who practiced family values both on and off the field - and he actively promoted that image in public, most notably through his two books, The Winners Manual: For the Game of Life and Life Promises for Success: Promises from God on Achieving Your Best. Anyone who writes from a Christian perspective about his "Big Ten fundamentals for success" - attitude, discipline, faith, handling adversity and success, excellence, love, toughness, responsibility, team, hope - is setting himself up for a fall, and there are countless members of the media waiting in the weeds, ready to pounce at the first sign of hypocrisy from such a person. And let's face it, Tressel handed the media a huge helping of hypocrisy on a silver platter. As soon as the Chris Cicero emails became public, Tressel was revealed not simply as a liar and a cheat - common enough in the highly-competitive big business of college football - but also as a fake, a phony, a fraud, a man leading a false life, hiding his sins behind his veneer of Christianity. And fair or not, that characterization - the wolf in sheep's clothing - heightened the hysteria and sweetened the scandal, and so the witch hunters in the media wrote and rewrote the history of Jim Tressel to fit that template.
The media love nothing better than to destroy a good man, to bury him in his own hypocrisy. But was Jim Tressel really such a good man after all? There has always been some question about Tressel's ethics, at least in his capacity as a college football coach. Controversy and scandal have often followed in Tressel's wake, going all the way back to 1991 with the Ray Isaac incident at Youngstown State, and continuing with the various Maurice Clarett allegations in 2002-2003, Troy Smith taking improper benefits in 2004, and finally culminating in TatGate in 2010-2011. In reading the media accounts, you get the sense that many members of the press believed that Tressel has always been a bit of a shady character, but that in the past the teflon-coated coach had been able to escape punishment through a combination of connections, plausible deniability, and sheer luck. So when TatGate hit, with obvious evidence of guilt in the form of incriminating emails, the media wasn't going to let yet another opportunity slip through their fingers - this time Tressel would burn, and there would be no room for excuses or justifications.
And another question remains: Why did Jim Tressel cover up TatGate? Well if you believe the media, then he did it because he was a win-at-all-costs coach who needed his star quarterback in order to have a successful season. But remember, this is the same media that constantly derided and belittled Ohio State for playing such a soft schedule in 2010, and repeatedly told us that Terrelle Pryor was better suited to play tight end. And does anybody really believe that Tressel needed Terrelle Pryor or DeVier Posey or Jordan Whiting to beat the likes of Marshall and Ohio and Eastern Michigan?
If you listen to Tressel, then he did it to protect his players from dangerous gangsters who were the subject of a federal criminal investigation. But Tressel has never identified any specific threat to his players, or even a vague one, and he has certainly not been able to show how such a threat might have been triggered if he had passed on his information to the Ohio State compliance office.
If you are a conspiracy theorist, then you probably think that Tressel wanted to cover up TatGate because the scandal goes a lot deeper, and involves Terrelle Pryor selling everything from his Big Ten championship rings to his shoelaces for untold millions of dollars. And while Pryor has indeed been the central figure in this mess along with Tressel, that is largely because he is the big name and the average media type has never heard of Mike Adams or Solomon Thomas or Ray Small. So Pryor's role becomes magnified - he becomes the kingpin, the ringleader, the svengali who orchestrated the whole plot - despite the fact that there is no real evidence to support such allegations.
As usual, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Jim Tressel is a successful college football coach and as such he is by nature a Machiavellian, regardless of what he might say in his books. If Tressel believed that he could successfully bury his involvement in TatGate (and he would have done so but for an unlucky break), then he would take that risk because in the end it is all about winning, and player suspensions decrease the odds of doing that. But we must also give Tressel some credit for being a good man, as he is by all objective accounts. I can easily believe that Tressel was trying to protect his players, not necessarily from being kneecapped in the middle of the night, but rather from being dragged through the media mud for associating with an alleged drug dealer like Ed Rife. But I also believe that Tressel often looked the other way when a star player began to stray, and that his leniency with Ray Isaac, Maurice Clarett, Troy Smith, and Terrelle Pryor ultimately led to his downfall. So the TatGate cover-up could be seen as the action of a coach who wanted to win a bit too much, who wanted to protect his players a bit too closely, or who was just a bit too permissive with his superstars. More likely, it was the action of a coach who was all three.
So what will Tressel's legacy be? Will it be 9-1? Or will it be TatGate? Probably both. When we think about Woody Hayes, we fondly remember the five national championships, but we also cannot forget about The Punch. Jim Tressel will go down in history as one of the greatest college football coaches ever, as the person who restored academic integrity to the Ohio State football program, and as a man whose own flaws were his downfall. Well, two out of three ain't bad.
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[1] The current multiyear APR score compiles data from the 2006-2007, 2007-2008, 2008-2009, and 2009-2010 academic years.
[2] Whether Tressel lied probably falls into a grey area, but what the players did does not constitute cheating in any conventional sense of the word, as they did not gain any competitive advantage from their actions.
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