O’Brien may never return to coaching
Coach’s future uncertain; judge in lawsuit against OSU expects to rule by Feb. 15
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Kathy Lynn Gray
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
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Former Ohio State men’s basketball coach Jim O’Brien said he might never coach again because of what he has learned about college sports since being fired last year.
"I have a different view of what’s going on in the college world," O’Brien said after his breach-of-contract trial against the university ended yesterday.
O’Brien said he’s "still in the process" of figuring out whether he wants to coach again.
Judge Joseph T. Clark, who presided over the five-day trial in the Ohio Court of Claims, said he expects to decide the case by Feb. 15.
O’Brien is seeking $9.5 million in the lawsuit, saying Ohio State improperly fired him June 8, 2004, after it learned he’d given the mother of Serbian basketball player Aleksander Radojevic, a potential recruit, a $6,000 loan in 1998.
Radojevic never played for Ohio State. The NCAA ruled in 1999 that he was a professional athlete because he had played under contract in Europe in the mid-1990s.
Ohio State argued that the firing was allowed under O’Brien’s contract.
But during his closing statement, O’Brien’s attorney, Joe Murray, said O’Brien had made the $6,000 loan "because he concluded in his heart of hearts that it was the right thing to do."
O’Brien contends that he knew at the time of the loan that Radojevic was a professional and thus could not be a student-athlete for Ohio State.
Murray said Ohio State has "shamefully" misrepresented O’Brien’s intentions in providing the loan as an inducement to a recruit.
"The university has gone to great lengths to portray coach O’Brien as a cheater," Murray said. "It’s sad that OSU has sought to demonize this man. Coach O’Brien has never and would never knowingly commit an NCAA violation."
William Porter, representing Ohio State, said O’Brien’s contract with the university was "clear and unambiguous" and it allowed the school to fire him.
"You can’t give money to a prospect," Porter said. "Coach O’Brien knew this fundamental rule and he chose to ignore it."
Porter called the loan a "seamy transaction" that O’Brien kept secret for 5½ years because he knew he had violated NCAA rules.
Porter pointed out that O’Brien had continued to work to bring Radojevic to Ohio State even after making the loan.
After the trial ended, O’Brien said the firing and the trial have taken a toll.
"I’m disappointed and sorry that it came to this," he said. "I’m very hopeful that I’ll be able to put all this behind me now."
O’Brien said he remains proud of his seven years as Ohio State’s coach. He was coach at Boston College for 11 years before that.
"I have nothing to be ashamed of. We ran a very, very clean program."
At issue in the trial was whether O’Brien’s contract allowed Ohio State to fire him for an NCAA violation even if the NCAA has not concluded its investigation and found the violation valid.
The trial included testimony by O’Brien, OSU President Karen Holbrook, former athletics director Andy Geiger and three experts on NCAA rules.
Geiger said O’Brien’s loan was a "breach of trust" and accused his former friend of lying to him by not telling him about it until April 24, 2004.
O’Brien testified that he’d given Radojevic’s mother the money because she had just lost her husband and had no income.
He said he would have explained that further to Ohio State had he been asked, but school officials never questioned him about the loan before firing him.
Dan Beebe, senior associate commissioner of the Big 12 Conference, and Jennifer Heppel, a former Big Ten compliance official, testified that there’s no question that O’Brien’s loan was a violation of NCAA rules.
Heppel said that even though Radojevic was a professional at the time of the loan, he also was a recruit. NCAA rules prohibit gifts to recruits.
But David Swank, who was chairman the NCAA Committee on Infractions for seven years in the 1990s, testified that Radojevic’s professional play meant he could not be considered a recruit. Swank concluded that O’Brien’s loan was not a violation of NCAA rules.
O’Brien’s arguments over his loan aren’t over. NCAA investigators have said it was a recruiting violation and will have a hearing on that and eight other allegations against the Ohio State athletic program on Feb. 3-4.
O’Brien said yesterday that he plans to fight those allegations.
"I’m going down swinging," he said. "I don’t agree with a single one of those allegations."
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COMMENTARY
The verdict: O’Brien case shouldn’t have come to this
Sunday, December 18, 2005
BOB HUNTER
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It sure is good to have that whole Jim O’Brien mess cleared up, isn’t it?
Now we know that the former Ohio State men’s basketball coach didn’t think he was doing anything wrong when he gave the impoverished mother of recruit Aleksander Radojevic $6,000 in cash. We know Andy Geiger, the retired OSU athletics director, thought it was a blatant disregard of NCAA rules. We know O’Brien thinks he was fired illegally and is owed about a bazillion dollars from the university. We know that the university thinks it doesn’t owe O’Brien so much as a kick in the rear.
Huh? Oh, yeah. We already knew all that, didn’t we? All we really learned after another week of horrendous publicity for Ohio State was that this was colossally mishandled from the beginning and that Geiger, who was shocked that O’Brien would violate the NCAA rules, might have violated one or two himself.
Otherwise, all we have are a bunch of lawyers on both sides spinning this story so hard that we’re all left feeling a little dizzy but no smarter.
A friend of a friend from Kentucky says everybody in this trial was just "lie-swearing." "That’s where one guy on this side lies and the other guys swears to it; then a guy on the other side lies and another guy swears to it."
It’s a funny way of saying that just about everybody involved will do or say just about anything to protect themselves, and without a window to their souls, we will never know exactly what they were thinking at the time.
Did O’Brien really believe that Radojevic had no chance of playing for Ohio State when he gave him the cash? What was Geiger thinking when he fired O’Brien without asking for details?
There is no way to know. As honorable as these men are, they are no different than the rest of us; their motives aren’t always pure. And once the legal spin-masters get involved, the truth sometimes gets, uh, stretched just a bit.
In the absence of the wild, mudslinging verbal brawl that seemed likely to occur if this ever got to trial, we were left to roll our eyes over relatively insignificant answers like the one O’Brien gave to explain why he used cash to pay Radojevic if he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He said he kept the money in a locked desk drawer, having accumulated the cash over a year from various sources; in other words, he just happened to have $6,000 lying there when the Radojevics needed it. Sure, he did.
As amusing as all this is to those who have nothing to gain or lose by the proceedings, let me ask a question: How do you think current OSU coach Thad Matta feels about all of this? If I’m reading this correctly, the NCAA hearings he hoped would be wrapped up by now were postponed until February because university lawyers wouldn’t provide information that might have helped O’Brien’s lawyers in the trial.
OSU has been walking this tightrope from the beginning, trying to make it sound as if it didn’t suffer from a lack of "institutional control" to the NCAA at the same time it is trying to make O’Brien look like the second coming of Saddam Hussein in the courtroom.
It’s hard for me to believe the NCAA investigation would still be unsettled if Geiger had sat down with O’Brien after he first learned of the "loan," listened to his explanations and then reluctantly asked for his resignation; O’Brien and Geiger were good friends at the time. I’m guessing that O’Brien might have done it and accepted a settlement for less than the $9.5 million he is asking for now.
But that’s old news. Even given Geiger’s sudden firing of O’Brien, wouldn’t it have made sense to settle this out of court before it got this far?
Matta was an assistant coach at Butler when all of this happened — consider that for a second — and he still has stuff hanging over his program. He has a recruiting class in waiting that could bring millions of dollars to the school and take the program to heights it hasn’t reached since the days of Fred Taylor.
But it is a class that can walk away if all this courtroom fighting between two people no longer connected to the program somehow results in more sanctions and longer delays by the NCAA. It is a class whose departure probably would convince Matta to follow them out the door.
Does this fight make sense to you?
It doesn’t to me.
Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch.
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i think that goes without saying, binacardi was instrumental in the whole thing as the associate coach and has been named in nearly every violation.jwinslow said:
