A Pirate's Life for Me...

Sometimes I hear things...


College Football

Just when it seemed as though I was on some sort of self-imposed hiatus, along comes who else but the Miami Hurricanes to give us something really, really interesting to talk about. If you've not heard by now, Nevin Shapiro, former Miami booster who is currently incarcerated for a Ponzi scheme has blown the whistle on all of his actions that involved "taking care" of Miami players in such unscrupulous ways as paying for lavish dinners, expensive pieces of jewelry, booze-fueled yacht trips and high-rise hotel sex parties. Shapiro essentially gave Miami players anything they wanted spanning the spectrum from financial help for their mothers to loose women. Shapiro's most egregious transactions involved paying $10,000 to secure the signing of a basketball recruit and paying for a prostitute to abort a baby conceived with a Miami player who had solicited her from Shapiro. On the latter Shapiro commented, "I did it to help him, the idiot might have wanted to keep the baby".

Miami is in real, program killing
trouble.

And there's more, like hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to current NFL players for various reasons, several coaches who not only knew about the actions but participated and more and more and more, far more than I feel like recanting. The Yahoo! Sports report about this mess is 16 pages long. It took almost a year to compile and involved their team sifting through 200,000 pages of evidence. Kudos to them on an amazing job. 


I have two things to say about this. The first is going to make me sound like a homer, but I don't care. Tuesday, when this story was exploding on ESPN I saw, heard and read tweets and e-mails saying things like, "well, we don't know what happened", "let them investigate", "whatever happened to guilty until proven innocent?" Homer time. Where was all of that when Ohio State was doing being accused of violations a few months ago? (Violations, that while still wrong and still punishable, now look like cutting in line at a movie theater compared to Miami). I've been wondering about this over the past couple of days in the back of my head. I've wondered not so much because I love Ohio State that much that I want to defend them, but rather I want to know why Miami, a sunny place for shady people as it's been called, got the initial benefit of the doubt whilst Ohio State was instantly thrown on the flames? 

Jim Tressel once was the standard,
he's now unemployed.

I think there is one easy answer to that question that took on two forms in Columbus. The easy answer is jealousy, of course. Jealousy against Terrell Pryor because we all knew that in reality he wasn't that good, yet he was treated like a superstar. People get jealous of celebrities and superstars easily and they get even more jealous when they perceive that superstar isn't all that talented in actuality (unless that celebrity is named Justin Bieber or is part of the Jersey Shore cast, apparently). Going in the other direction, there was also jealous against Jim Tressel, who, if you want to admit it or not, was the standard by which all college coaches were judged. Tressel was the untouchable, squeaky-clean coach that was above suspicion or reproach. 


So why did Ohio State get immediately tossed in the fire by the court of public opinion so that the masses could watch them burn? Because if there's one thing we as a society love to do, it's bring down watch a famous person who we don't think is all that talented fail. In fact, the only thing we like more is watching someone who presented themselves as the standard-bearer fail and be exposed as a fraud. At Ohio State, it was a two-for-one deal. Think I'm wrong? Still think I'm a homer? Okay, I'll prove it. Name the four other players who were caught and suspended with Pryor. Go ahead. All five. Terrell Prior and...who...? You might know one, maybe two, but unless you live in Columbus (and then its still doubtful) you don't know them all because you don't care about the other four, who were DeVier Posey, Dan Herron, Solomon Thomas and Mike Adams (don't worry, I had to look it up too). What you care about are the superstars that you could watch burn...or could blindly defend because that's the other thing we like to do when punishments rain on our parades.

Terrell Pryor was declared eligible for
the NFL supplemental draft on Aug 22
but will still have to serve a five game
suspension, NFL commissioner Roger Godell
announced Thursday.

To be honest, I don't really know what I'm getting at here, because I don't want to be an Ohio State homer who wants to vindicate the school. They don't deserve to be vindicated. They broke the rules, they lied about it, they deserve to be punished; that's the right thing. It doesn't matter if it was a stupid rule (and it was/is), it was a rule, you break the rules, you suffer the consequences, as Miami is about to learn. In the end, this is simply a troubling observation I've made about us culturally, especially in sports. I have to think, as Doug Gottlieb alluded to yesterday on the Scott Van Pelt show, that we the public have to take a least a little of the blame for the current state of college athletics when this how serious we take a sport that is supposed to be amateurs playing for fun in front of their classmates; so serious that we want to see people fail, their careers tarnished or ended and people brought down to "our level", even though they were only above "our level" in our minds and perhaps tax brackets at all. 

SMU are the most famous recipients
of the NCAA's "Death Penalty"

There's more to say though, because Miami is the story at hand here. Now I just told you, I do not like to see people fail and careers ended, but I do like to see actions punished justly. That's what's happening to Ohio State, as it should. Some are suggesting that only way to do this to Miami is to bring out their most powerful resource, the dreaded "Death Penalty". For those of you unaware, the NCAA Death Penalty involves the offending program (in any NCAA sport) being totally shut down for at least one complete year, the stripping of athletic aid (scholarships) for two years and the stripping of the right for a program to vote in NCAA conventions for four years. The penalty has only been administered five times in NCAA history, most notably against the SMU football team in 1987 and 1988, a blow which set the program back so far that it has just now, in 2010-11, began to recover from it in the slightest.  

Convicted Ponzi Schemer Nevin Shapiro
got Miami players, whatever they wanted;
with other people's money.

Now, as many are suggesting this death-blow is about to be brought out for a sixth time and (this is where my homer jealousy rears up a little), in the light of Ohio State being given no-quarter by that furious court of public opinion in their NCAA violations, yesterday Miami sports personality Dan Le Batard took to the airwaves where he proclaimed that the death penalty was far too harsh for Miami and wasn't a viable option. "Get out of here with that..." he said with a laugh.  Let me ask this in response, just because it's been swimming around in my head for three days. Hundreds of thousands of dollars rolled out merely on request. prostitutes and sex parties arranged with frequency, a private yacht always available for private use and more sex parties, paying for High School player commitments, paying for an abortion, coaches and college officials involved, between 72 and 100 players implicated, several now in the NFL and all of this linked to a convicted Ponzi schemer, meaning he was providing all of it with other people's money. 

Former USC, Saints and current Dolphins
running back Reggie Busch forfeited his
Heisman trophy for NCAA violations.

If you don't hand out the death penalty for this, what in all of God's green goodness do you hand it out for!? Do the stripper poles need to be on the field!? Players and coaches doing narcotics on the 50-yard line!? Seriously!? Reggie Busch had to give back the Heisman Trophy and USC was put on two years probation for an agent buying his mother a house. Terrell Prior and the other four Buckeyes were suspended five games and eventually had to leave school for trading their personal property for tattoos. Jim Tressel lost his job for lying about it (which is still far worse then the actual infraction). Anything but the death penalty to Miami is an insult to USC, Lane Kiffin, Reggie Bush, Ohio State, Jim Tressel, Terrell Pryor and the other four. It would be an insult to anyone who has been hit with NCAA violations in the last few years, particularly USC, who's harsh probation was passed down by a man named Paul Dee, who happened to be Miami's athletic director during the height of the now revealed Miami infractions. 

Is this really worth the monster
that's being created (or revealed)
 in college sports?

It only remains to be seen if justice is served. What needs to be clear in this situation is not that Ohio State didn't really do anything wrong or that Miami is a collection of evil people. It needs to be clear that there is corruption on an incomprehensible level in collegiate athletics that must be dealt with immediately. It must also be clear that we tend to reinforce this behavior with our amazing dependence and concern for the sports. No one is more passionate about sports than I am, you should hear me shout at my fictitious teams on my Xbox sometimes. But when our love for a sport provides a mask for corruption at this level, we need to take a step back and demand transparency and honesty from the people we pay to watch.


Of course we don't demand this of our elected leaders, so I won't hold my breath for our college football teams. 


I apologize for making so many observations about society in this entry, I'll try to keep those uncomfortable things at a minimum.


Now that my rant is over, I'm going to have a shower and watch a nice cleanly run sport...like European Association Football... 


Links:
The Yahoo! Sports article about Miami
NCAA "Death Penalty" in NCAA Glossary of Terms
NCAA Death Penalty on Wikipedia (including all five uses)
What is a Ponzi Scheme?

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