A Metaphorical Iceberg of Cheating

As a baseball fan, I normally spend the college football offseason focusing on the national pastime, going on long-winded tirades about batting stats and such. I typically eschew recruiting talk (see here), and I'm of the opinion that offseason workouts and spring games are about as applicable to real football as playing Red Baron on an Apple II is to flying a fully loaded passenger jet. Sure, like any good fan I read the preseason magazines and listen to the predictions about how the season's going to go (non-sarcastic hat tip to Kirk Herbstreit for his Auburn prediction last season. I thought it was stupid. I was really wrong.). But the bottom line is this: normally, the offseason is just a bunch of hypotheticals and intangibles, with only a marginal bearing on the events of the field.

You know, I'm kinda missing the days of the boring prediction-based offseason.

For those of you who have been under a rock for the past six or seven months, college football is facing an avalanche of scandals. So many that I'm not even sure where this started, though I'll be focusing on what is almost inarguably the biggest one: the Ohio State player tattoo scandal. You know, the one that was solved way back in December with the decision that the players would serve a largely meaningless suspension to start the 2011 season? Yeah, in the meantime that's morphed into the coach getting suspended for 2 games, then volunteering to serve a five game suspension after some backlash from the first suspension, then that same coach being outed for having had prior knowledge of his players' illicit dealings, and finally in that coach resigning from his position in the face of mounting pressure from people outside Ohio State, because Lord knows the university wasn't going to do anything. That was followed by the team's star quarterback withdrawing from the university to serve as that most unheralded of NFL heroes: Guardian of the Water Cooler.

Ohio State fans spent the majority of December and January whining and moaning, pulling out every lame excuse in the book to defend their beleaguered Buckeyes and Coach Jim Tressel. For the most part, these complaints have boiled down to a three-headed monster:

1. It wasn't that big of a deal! They were selling things that were theirs! (See below)
2. It was the players! Jim Tressel knew nothing and is a saint who only had the interests of the players in mind and he will wash your car, pat your back and give you twenty bucks even though you have accused him of such criminal acts you terrible person, you. (Wrong. Nothing further.)
3. The NCAA is picking on Ohio State either out of a desire to make them an example or to avenge some sort of personal vendetta that a committee member somewhere has against the Buckeyes. (Believing this requires ignoring February-July, plus a level of devotion to a team that can best be described as "stupid" or "cult-like." Also, see below.)

Complaint number one is the only one of the three that makes all that much sense. I agree that, unlike a steroid violation, no competitive advantage was conferred by the OSU tattoo scandal. There wasn't a crime being committed and no one was hurt, so what's the big deal? Well, they broke the rules. It doesn't matter how minor the violation is, the bottom line is that being an athlete is a privilege, and the complex and sometimes ludicrous set of NCAA regulations are the rules which must be obeyed to keep that privilege. If I drive down an empty highway with a 55 mph speed limit at 120 mph and don't hurt anyone, I've still broken the law and I will likely lose the privilege of driving if a police officer catches me. If the officer decides to wink and grin and say, "Oh, it's OK.", then he's violated his code of conduct and could lose his badge. He didn't break the law. He didn't hurt anyone. He just broke the rules associated with his job. And that's enough to fire him and it dang sure should be enough to get rid of someone who gets a free education to play a game. So, in short, I understand the complaint about the lack of a crime, but the rules are different in the weird alternate universe of college football, and if you choose to live in that universe, you have to live by the rules.

As for the "we're being picked on" argument, the best response I can offer there is simply this: hogwash. Ohio State has suffered the loss of some star players and a coach. Damaging, to be sure, but it's about the equivalent of having a lot of players graduate and a coach departure. The Buckeyes won't be as good this year as they were last season, but there will be no lasting damage done to anything but the program's image. It seems that complaint #1 (no crime, no competitive advantage, etc.) was valid enough that the NCAA decided some semi-meaningless punishment would be appropriate. Who cares about vacated victories? I saw the Sugar Bowl last year. Even if Ohio State "didn't win," Arkansas still lost. The Buckeyes aren't losing any scholarships and they're not prohibited from going bowling at the end of the season. At worst, they'll suffer a single down season and be back in the hunt for the Big 10 + 2 title during the 2012 season. Southern Cal, meanwhile, is going to be living with the consequences of the Pete Carroll/Reggie Bush era for at least another season, and probably many more to follow that. Now I hate (hate) Southern Cal, but you have to admit that, compared to the Buckeyes, they got hit much harder. Yes, there were actual competitive advantages from USC's violations, but the punishment for those violations was doled out, what, 5 or 6 years after the player in question was gone? That'd be like a teacher punishing my younger brother for what I did in high school.

Back on the Ohio State topic of being "picked on," though I don't have much else to add other than to say that it's laughably wrong. Schools around the country are starting to feel the hammer of the NCAA's wrath. On July 27, UNC fired Butch Davis in the midst of a major recruiting scandal. As a North Carolinian, it's my duty to report just how unsurprising this is: the guy took a team that had been utterly, laughably bad for years and started pulling in top 25 and top 10 recruiting classes year after year. OF COURSE HE WAS COMMITTING RECRUITING VIOLATIONS! I'd venture to say that in the ACC, either the worst or second-worst AQ conference around, there are probably two programs with no violations of any sort: Duke and Wake Forest. You may recognize them as two of the worst teams in the league and in the country. As I've said before, college football is a dirty, dirty business. And we should all relieve ourselves of the notion that it's just become that way recently. The SMU scandal of the 1980s was just the pinnacle of a filthy decade in college football. Lou Holtz almost certainly won his national title with ill-gotten players (still love ya, Lou!). Miami recruited big, strong players throughout the 80s and 90s who might or might not have been able to spell their own names correctly. I'm not saying we should accept cheating as a fact, but schools realize that big-name football is a money maker, and they want to have the best team around. If they have to bend the rules to get the best players...well that's a chance most AD's are willing to take.

In closing, the scariest part of this summer is the knowledge that we're looking at the tip of the cheating iceberg. It seems like a new suspension or firing appears in the headlines every day. This offseason alone we've seen Tennessee, LSU, UNC, Ohio State, Boise State, and West Virginia come under NCAA scrutiny. Methinks the season will provide us with a break from all this, but look for these investigations to continue the second the confetti's done dropping at the National Championship game.

OK, that's all for now. My next post won't be as depressing, unless you're a former coach. That's right, it's almost time for the not-at-all-anticipated 2011 edition of the coaching carousel!