Thanks to the circumstances surrounding Jim Tressel‘s departure from Ohio State in the wake of “Tat-gate”, it was a given that the Buckeyes’ football program would be under the microscope for the foreseeable future.
Thanks to a recruiting dustup earlier this year involving public accusations flung by Wisconsin’s Bret Bielema at new head coach Urban Meyer, said microscope was really a given.
The latest example of the ‘Vest Effect comes courtesy of Doug Lesmerises of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who, following a records request by that paper, revealed a combined 46 secondary violations in all sports had been reported by the school’s compliance department since May 30 of last year. That’s the day, incidentally, Tressel “stepped down” as head football coach.
While a sport-by-sport breakdown wasn’t offered up by the Plain Dealer, it appears that at least eight of the 46 violations were football-related.
Included in that total are multiple examples of how the NCAA’s bureaucracy has blown past sheer lunacy and is hurtling straight toward (a word that has yet to be invented):
- Meyer said “good luck” to a potential recruit prior to a Pennsylvania high school state title game in mid-December. Such game-day contact is forbidden.
- Five OSU players took the same number of recruits on visits out to a movie in mid-December. In part because of a cab ride to the movie, the players were $1 to $5 over the maximum of $60 allowed by the NCAA, so a secondary violation was deemed to have been committed.
- An OSU assistant coach purchased 20 “JT” bracelets for $5 each to honor his former coach last fall. He sold several of the bracelets to players for $15 apiece in order to avoid any type of NCAA issue for giving away freebies; despite the 200-percent markup, it was still considered an NCAA no-no as players were given something not available to the general public.
- Assistant coach Mike Vrabel was gigged for dipping chew on the sidelines during games last year.
- We’ll let Lesmerises take this bit of asinine heavy-handedness: “On Aug. 20, assistant coach Dick Tressel responded to a text message from the parents of recruit Warren Ball asking which gate to use to enter Ohio Stadium for a scrimmage. Texting the parents of a recruit was a violation.”
The biggest takeaway from Lesmerisis’ work? The NCAA is completely and totally out of control when it comes to recruiting/compliance bylaws, and is in dire need of paring down its rulebook — which supposedly is in the works — sooner rather than later.
As ACC commissioner John Swofford deftly put it last August, it’s time for the NCAA to begin “addressing the felons… as opposed to the jaywalkers, and get ourselves out of this maze of rules that are unenforceable.”
OSU’s version of jaywalking is Exhibit A that the NCAA needs to continue on that trajectory out of its petty maze.
