With all the trouble and issues surrounding our beloved the Ohio State University lately, I have been thinking a lot about which is better. I must add this caveat: I firmly believe from the bottom of my broken sports heart that bending the rules or breaking the rules happens at every institution where sports is played from pee wee football to the NFL. In college sports only two schools have never had a major violation against their athletic program. Penn State is one and (I think) Standford is the other. Let’s be honest though: over the last 10 years no school has had more player arrests then PSU in the Big Ten. And if you have ever been to State College, PA you know there is little for those players to do to get caught in and if they are getting cars or cash there is no real media out there to dig deep to find it for the NCAA to investigate. This is neither here nor there really. I am not here to accuse other teams of anything. I am not even here to defend OSU for what they are accused of.

I am curious as to what you, the reader, believes. Would you rather win games no matter what the cost? Would you rather be a mediocre team that plays by the rules as often as possible aka BYU?

The one thing in common for all the winning programs in college football from the beginning of time is the constant of being accused of or proven to be cheaters. You don’t need to look much farther back then the last 5 years to see this to be true. Oregon is under investigation. LSU is under investigation. Auburn is under investigation. Alabama has been under investigation. Florida is lucky the NCAA doesn’t care about players being arrested. Add to that the Miami’s and UNC’s and USC’s and every other winning program and it is clear all of these schools could care less about morals and only care about wins. It is safe to assume the fans of these schools feel the same way or they wouldn’t feed the schools billions of dollars in revenue each year. No matter how much media outlets scream about how they hate the way schools are behaving they still pay them a premium to be able to show their games and criticize them.

So to sum it up I would like to hear from you the fans. Do morals in sports matter to you? Are you less of a fan now knowing what you know about all that is going on at OSU? Would you be willing to give up being a top 10 school annually to a team with a good year every now and then but mostly you are a middle of the pack school with great morals and plays by the rules?

I have said before, I don’t care about morals on my teams and I expect them to bend and break every rule they can to get more wins. I want them to cheat just a little more then the others so they have a better shot at winning NCs. I know this is not something many of you will agree with publicly but in private it is a different story as evidenced by supporting teams that are known to break rules. I will give you all a chance to respond now.

Before everyone goes completely nuts on me because of the title of this particular post please wait until I finish. I love Coach Tressel. I KNOW he is the best coach I will ever see at OSU and he is an even better man. I honestly believe he just made a mistake and one that he didn’t do to win more games. I don’t know what he was thinking when he didn’t forward the emails to the correct people. I won’t pretend to understand how hard it must be to do what he does for a living. I will say this though: I am a father of 2 children and I stress to them every chance I get that if they do something wrong own up to it and admit what they did. Never try to cover it up with a lie and then compound it with more lies. There is nothing that makes me more angry then when I know someone is telling me a blatant lie.

So now as more and more comes out about what actually has happened over the last year it is clear to even the biggest supporter of Coach Tressel that he has lied over and over and over. Even if some of the accusations are circumstantial at best i.e. the FBI special agent he called a few days after hearing the FBI had info on OSU players hardware. Any person with 2 ounces of common sense will put together that Tressel wasn’t calling to get a friend a job. Even if you believe Tressel was acting in the players best interest or even if you believe he was just keeping the lawyers emails confidential. It is clearer now he was doing none of that. He was telling everyone except the people he should have been telling. If he had done so the players would have missed maybe 4 games and had a party with AJ Greene and Marcel Darius and all of the UNC Tarheels team during the pre-season. Instead he made the decision to not do his job. He then made the decision to lie about it in September when he signed the no compliance issues paper. Then he made us all feel he was shocked and disappointed in his players decisions to sell the gear when it became public. Then he led us to believe he was doing the moral thing by making the 5 guys promise to come back next year in order to play in the Sugar Bowl. All the while he tucked his own morals to bed and forgot to wake them up for nearly a year. At the news conference and subsequent pressers since he had me convinced he was who I thought he was: an upstanding honest guy who would do anything for his players and his school. To the point where I actually believed he might be taking one for the team and protecting his bosses and the University.

Now comes today’s news that the NCAA is looking to hammer Tressel and maybe not so much OSU as a whole. Will OSU suffer because of what he did? Of course. Will OSU suffer because of the 5 guys who broke the rules? Of course they will. It would have been so much easier if they would have gone Pro and Tressel would have resigned after the Sugar Bowl. Instead though they stuck around to go through the rough times together with the school and team they love. I commend them for doing this. It is refreshing to know Tressel is no Pete Carroll.

Having said that though there is nothing left for Tressel to do at OSU. He has won everything he possibly could except for the B1G COY award which angers me to no end :). He has his legacy that will always be there for OSU fans and eventually for CFB fans over time. I don’t think anyone thinks Tressel would have coached past 2014 when his contract ends as he has all but stated that was his last season he wanted to coach. So now the NCAA wants Tressel’s head on a platter for every other coach in the NCAA to see. They want to make an example out of him even though they know it wont stop this stuff from happening at every school like it currently is. Jim Tressel is not bigger than OSU and he won’t be able to save face now that the evidence keeps piling up pointing to the multitude of lies on top of lies.

So I say now is the time for him to retire and try and save his reputation and save OSU from harsher penalties then are deserved in this case just so the NCAA can hold up his head as an example to all other coaches. If it were my children who made up this many lies and covered up what they knowingly did wrong I would punish them more harshly then if they just came clean when they got caught to begin with.

This is a sad day for me as I can no longer justify Jim Tressel being the coach of OSU. I want to crawl into my bed and cry myself to sleep tonight as I have done the unthinkable: called for my football hero to step away from the game for the betterment of everyone.

I hope some of you can convince me I am wrong. I just need a really good valid point of view from someone to talk me off this ledge. I have been trying to come up with a reason why he shouldn’t be fired or resign and can’t come up with any that doesn’t sound biased and stupid.

Now you may respond to my thread with the vitriol that normally accompanies my posts.

The Dispatch has the scoop on the 13-page report from the NCAA detailing the allegations against the school and Coach Tressel.  Specific points of interest:

• As suspected, there will be no further punishment against the players.
• There are no “failure to monitor” or “lack of institutional control” allegations which would lead to the most severe penalties.
• While the 2010 regular season is potentially in jeopardy, the Sugar Bowl is not since all players were ruled eligible by the NCAA prior to that contest.
• Ohio State could be treated as a repeat offender due to Troy Smith and Jim O’Brien situations.  This could put things like a post-season ban and scholarship reductions on the table, although I personally think that the university’s cooperation with the investigation will play into those decisions.  The disturbing part here is that the article mentions that this also puts suspension for the “entire coaching staff” on the table.  I don’t really know how that would work, but it scares the hell out of me.
• The NCAA is curious as to the nature of Ohio State’s relationships with Chris Cicero (the former player/lawyer who sent the emails to Tressel) and Ted Sarniak (Pryor’s mentor to whom Tressel forwarded the emails).  They also want to see the letter sent from the Department of Justice in December.
• Ed Rife (the tattoo parlor owner under investigation) was never charged with a crime.  This surprised me.
• The article continues the maddening trend of characterizing Tressel’s violation of Rule 10.1 as one that tends to get coaches fired.  In truth, all of the 10.1-violators who have been fired also violated numerous other rules.  It still appears that Tressel has no other violations.
• The NCAA meeting to address these allegations will be on August 12, so we still have a long wait for ultimate closure on this issue.

For obvious reasons, the bulk of the off-season on-field talk has been about those crucial first five games of the year: Akron, Toledo, @Miami (Fl), Colorado and Michigan State.  Yes, this is a new Bizarro Buckeye world we live in and suddenly there truly is no such thing as a cupcake game.  Most folks will look at that list and still come away with no worse than a 4-1 start, and it would not surprise me if we came out of it unscathed.  But with the mutant Spring “Game” just around the corner and no reports of a clear QB leader or, more importantly, even one reliable receiver for that mystery signal caller, the stage may be set for a colossal collapse.

The biggest hurdle is not simply making it to the Nebraska game with a winning record.  It’s dealing with a necessarily schizophrenic approach to the season.  We all know that the First-5 team will be a run-heavy, defense-oriented squad that will look like the groups that generally close out the last quarter-and-a-half against the likes of, well, Akron and Toledo.  The problem is that now they have to do it for four whole quarters.  Preparing them to do that is going to take a lot of reps away from the Last-7 team.

The schedule doesn’t do us as many favors as it first appears to either.  No, you couldn’t really ask for a better “easing in” period than Akron and Toledo, but even experienced Buckeye teams of late have had their hands full with the in-state little brothers at times.  Getting a shot at what will essentially be a team of backups (on offense, anyway) is the best chance they’ll have of getting that signature victory for a long time.  They’ll be motivated and we’ll make mistakes.  If those turn out to be the dominating wins they ordinarily would be, then we may be able to breathe a little more easily.

But not too easily.  The last three opponents out of this group are all BCS conference teams, including a revenge-minded Miami team that has a lot of questions of its own, but will at least be answering them at home, which means as much as 53% of the crowd will be on their side.  Then comes Colorado, now a member of the Pac-12, who will no doubt be watching this all week.  Then Big Ten play opens with the best team from the state up north, headed up by our old friend Mark Dantonio who, with old friend Tressel nowhere in sight, will have no reason not to unleash the full force of his scowl upon us.

And then the next season begins and the real starters merge with the standouts from the First-5 team and we get back to doing what we do best.  This seems to be the general consensus anyway, as if the post-suspension portion of the season is a gimme.  The Ink Tank’s first game back just happens to be Nebraska’s first Big Ten home game.  You think that crowd isn’t going to be insane?  The Huskers will be coming off a road trip to Madison, which will certainly be a physical affair that could soften them up for us.  But they’ll either be high on a win over one of the conference’s top dogs (and looking for another) or wounded and hungry and looking for a fight.  Neither of those is good for us, considering we’ll have to go through a little bit of early-season growing pains again until the starters knock the rust off.  Then it’s a battle through the usual suspects of Wisconsin, Penn State and a re-re-energized Michigan with another new head coach pretending to “get it.”

Even with a couple of stumbles along the way, this could still be a successful season for a team that doesn’t really know any alternative.  The two biggest threats to win the Leaders division (Penn State and Wisconsin) both have to visit the ‘Shoe, meaning that an appearance in the inaugural Big Ten Championship Game (and with it, a shot at a BCS berth) is still a realistic goal, but getting there is going to be far more challenging than we’re used to.

I will leave it to Thad Matta and the mens Buckeye basketball team to say all the right things after the Buckeyes just won their second straight B1G conference tourney. I am still upset over the lack of hardware the guys brought home from the media and coaches award show. I wonder how Jajuan Johnson and Matt Painter enjoyed being home today polishing those trophys they didnt earn? In the meanwhile the Buckeyes sewed up more trophies for their trophy case that they earned the hard way they played for them. No politics played in these trophies. The best thing about the B1G tournament for me is it gives us the ability to beast scUM and PSU 3 times in one season. There isnt many things better than that. So congrats to the Buckeyes for proving they were the best team in the B1G this year and that they had the best players in the B1G as well as the Best Coach.

On a side note I just saw the East Region Bracket and it looks like it will set up nicely for OSU to make a run to the Final Four. OSU has an early match up against either Texas- San Antonio or Alabama St. who have to play their way into playing OSU. The second round game for OSU is against either George Mason or Villanova both teams are good but easily beatable. In the 3rd round if the 4th seeded team wins their first 2 round game we will face Kentucky which will be tough but doable. Lastly the 2nd seed is North Carolina and the 3rd seed is Syracuse. If those teams win out and OSU does as well then one of them would play OSU in the Elite 8. Lastly in the Final 4 if Duke wins out they would play OSU if both no 1 seeds win out that is.

Overall OSU got the no.1 One Seed and I think got an actual pretty awesome grouping. The first 2 rounds for OSU will be in Cleveland and the next 2 rounds will be in Newark NJ.