Buckeye Five

It was announced yesterday that the Buckeyes may not be looking like such a shoe in for winning the Big Ten next year due to a rather strange turn of events. Five of the main players for the Ohio State football team will be required to sit out the first five games of the season due to selling jerseys and other Buckeye mementos to a tattoo parlor earlier in the 2010 football season. However, this isn’t even the most noteworthy part of the whole story.

It turns out that their head coach is being punished right along with them and will also be forced to sit out some of the season. In addition to this he will also be forced to pay a $250,000 fine. This is due to the fact that he had prior knowledge of the incident and chose not to report it for almost 9 months prior to the time it was discovered by the NCAA and the university. This sounds like an extremely harsh punishment but for this same offense most coaches can expect to be fired outright since it goes against a NCAA bylaw. The only real surprise here is that he voluntarily extended his university imposed suspension from 2 games to 5. He has stated that he is doing so in an attempt to face his mistakes along with the penalized members of the team.

Their restrictions include clauses that bar them from communicating with anyone in the stadium during the games. The first date they’ll be eligible to play on is October 8^th but until then they’ll be without their starting quarterback, starting tailback, starting left tackle, and one of their most reliable deep threats. With these restrictions, beating out the Big Ten next season is looking grim.

For the players this is the end of the speculations on their punishment and the duration they can no longer play but for head coach Jim Tressel there is still more to come. Another NCAA judgment is forthcoming and it still has the ability to make 5 games seem like nothing at all. It has sufficient proof against the coach to call the whole 2010 season into question and impose at the least a one year ban. The real question to my mind is what SHOULD be done here? And why in the world did he keep silent for so long about something he knew was wrong?

Click here for details of the suspensions