Breaking: NCAA to punish next year’s seniors with 2012 Bowl Ban

In true Columbus Disptach fashion, they have ignored the requested news embargo and prempted everyone’s coverage of the upcoming report from the NCAA. The news is bad. All around bad:

The NCAA today stunned Ohio State University’s football program by banning it from postseason play after the 2012 season, multiple sources told The Dispatch.

The penalty means Ohio State automatically is out of the running for any bowl, or a Big Ten or national championship next year, just as newly appointed head coach Urban Meyer is wooing recruits to the Buckeyes.

Athletic Director Gene Smith said previously that while Ohio State has been declared a repeat violator that failed to properly monitor its football program, a bowl ban would be out of line with penalties handed to universities with similar violations.

There will be time to opine on the nuances at a later time, but for now we’ll just say that this sucks. Punishing the upcoming seniors like Jake Stoneburner, John Simon and others really stings.

What’s your initial take?

Comments

  1. Don’t understand the bowl ban, but nothing else is surprising. Could actually punish remaining rule-breakers by cancelling this year’s bowl and remaining practices. Instead, they are punishing guys who did nothing wrong.

  2. The lack of precedent is what pisses me off… Never have they, the NCAA, given a bowl ban for the charge of Failure to Monitor.

  3. I hate to be the devils advocate here and dont get me wrong I think what we got is horribly hard to swallow.

    but…..

    The NCAA got this one right. They treated OSU as a repeat offender (Which it was). Based on what we know OSU (tressel) and the players did. What should the NCAA have done to OSU?

    I hate that we are going through this but I assure you in my opinion if OSU took a bowl ban this year the NCAA would have still banned them in 2012. The additional scholly reductions are insignificant. The extra probation doesn’t matter.

    This whole ordeal is over and done with and it is time to move on and past this. I doubt Gene Smith survives this and he will retire after the Bowl game.

    I am just happy it is over and I can stop wondering and reading rumors.

  4. Jimbo Homer says

    The extra probation could bite us in the butt. We really need Urban to run a tight ship (something he didn’t do at FLA) or we could be in bigger truble.
    I think the lack of bowl and ineliglble for the Big Ten Championship for next year sucks@!

  5. @Jimbo- Urban didnt have any NCAA violations at Florida. He could have the entire team arrested for killing babies and it wouldnt be an NCAA violation.

  6. The NCAA just made their own future infinitely more expensive and difficult. They burned a lot of bridges, too.

    Regardless of the mistakes that were made, the actual cooperation of the compliance & athletic departments with the NCAA was unprecedented. OSU self-reported its own violations, and donated thousands of hours to making life as easy as possible for the NCAA to come to a quick ruling.

    In hindsight, all they did was give the NCAA an opportunity to hit them even harder. Transparency served no benefit to OSU.

    Mark my words: all NCAA schools have noticed this, and no school in its right mind will (or should) ever cooperate with them again. Everyone is going to follow the Auburn/Miami route and obfuscate.

  7. @SYR – a notable percentage of cynical folks say that the main reason Urban retired from Fla was to avoid the NCAA microscope. And, as PSU has taught us, participation in coverups of criminal acts are indictments of institutional control and are potential violations… If ESPN was able to easily find 46 Gator players that had been arrested over a three year period in the Meyer era, it does beg the question of “how terrible were the examples that they actually cared enough to hide?”

    I hope that Meyer runs a spitshine program over the next few years. But he has a reputation for not policing his players very well, so we’ll wait nervously…

  8. @Sportsmonkey- stop using obfuscate it is a word I dont understand lol.

    First, Miami is still under investigation and by all things I have seen fully cooperating with the NCAA investigation.

    Second, Auburn didnt not cooperate with the NCAA they just didnt have anything to add. The only thing the NCAA was investigating was the recruitment of Cam at Miss St. There never was anyone at Auburn behind the scenes who was ratting on them for Auburn to defend itself from.

    Third, There is one example of a school who didnt cooperate with the NCAA and who tried to obstruct and that is USC and look at what that got them.

    Lastly, I have never heard any such rumor that Urban left Florida because in any part of the NCAA microscope. No school to this date has ever been investigated because of player arrests. If they did Penn St would already be on super uper duper probation because over a 6 year period in the 2000s they had 46 arrests those 46 players were facing 163 criminal offenses. Which is a ton more then the 30 arrests he had in his 6 years at Florida.

  9. The NCAA is a joke, not for the ruling itself, but for the inexplicable 7-month delay. Tressel was gone in May. Now the 2011 seniors (Posey, Herron, Adams) who committed the violations are playing in a bowl, while the 2012 team is not. Explain how that makes sense.

  10. @Jeff- I like you wish the NCAA would have gave their ruling a month ago. But it feels like they were waiting just so they could make sure we didnt take the bowl ban this year. It is just my opinion but if OSU self imposed a ban this year the NCAA would have given us a 2 year ban. It could have been worse though the Avg. length of time it takes the NCAA to finish a case is 11 months. It took them 1 year for us. It took them 4 years for USC. There was no one left on the USC team who broke rules. OSU will still have a few Jordan Hall and Jordan Whiting and Corey “Pitt” Brown.

  11. I’m with Jeff in that I wish there was a way to directly punish those responsible without punishing so many that had nothing to do with it. I also understand it from the NCAA’s side of things though, basically if you don’t want innocent players to have to sit out bowl games, then make damn sure your coaches/athletes are following the rules. Ours didn’t, so this is what we get. Still, it would be nice if the Sugar vacation and a Gator cancellation could take away next year’s ban. Oh well, at least it’s over.

  12. Jay Roubini says

    @SYR agree with your take, Gene Smith’s bragging regarding what he expected as possible sanctions was very annoying these past months. The NCAA basically called his bluff. Surely the committee was pushed to the point of having to act after this summers incidents of players receiving benefits. This certainly on Gene’s compliance office and well after last years fiasco. Additionally fans are now understanding how negligent things got in letting JT’s ego run unchecked not demanding the program obtain the best of supporting coaches available instead of the cronies and family JT insisted on in those final years.

    The good news is we still have our very own bowl game against the Wolverines and the good fortune to have had this program ironically fall into the hands of an Urban Meyer after fans suffering thru years of the most boring offensive scheming possible. The programs entertainment value has exploded beyond… even “momentarily” sportsmonkey’s comprehension. (respectfully LOL)

  13. It sucks…but it’s ONE year without a post season.

    No one really knows how OSU will be next year and even with Urban Meyer there are no guarentees.

  14. I know they will be 12-0 BOOK IT 🙂

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