Should Ohio State at some point move to fire [Urban] Meyer with cause, he would almost certainly then sue the school for breach of contract. Meyer would stress, among other points, that [Zach] Smith was not convicted of any crimes. In addition, Meyer would argue that he was under no legal obligation to fire Smith and that none of Meyer’s superiors instructed him to fire Smith. Meyer might also express or imply that other university officials, such as the athletic director, general counsel and dean-level administrators, had multiple opportunities to learn of, and respond appropriately to, the allegations against Smith. To the extent Meyer could implicate other university officials in any wrongdoing, the school might seek to avert a lawsuit and negotiate a settlement with him.
Yes, let’s hop forward to how much the taxpayers of Ohio will be out to get rid of Urban Meyer. Lawyers, years of legal wrangling, pr firms, replacement of all the university administrators outed and implicated, and then the settlement, will cost the suckers MILLIONS. And millions.
And of course OSU is looking at scads more expensive lawsuits arising out of both the Meyer/Smith and the Dr. Richard Strauss scandals.
But then Ohio is such a rich state.
The coach explains his no weapons policy for University of Florida football players.
“It’s a no-weapons policy in certain situations of how to be educated to not have (issues)…No weapons, that’s easy to remember. If I write out all the different (scenarios)—no weapons in these situations or have a weapon for a hunting situation, if I’m doing this, I store it at this location, I keep it here, I have gun safety rules and knowledge—that’s not a quick catch to them to register in their mind. Does that make sense?”
Which neatly explains why one of his players, found to have a loaded AR-15 in his car, will suffer no punishment.
As a Deadspin columnist rather querulously notes, ‘If a “no-weapon” policy isn’t designed to keep players from carrying assault weapons for the purposes of shooting people during altercations, there really is no point at all in having any weapons policy.’
Maybe it applies to nuclear weapons.
We shouldn’t forget, amid the current wrestling sex scandal and football domestic abuse scandal, significant alumni of that biggest of big-time sports universities. These are people whose words and actions speak the sorts of truths normally buried at places like OSU.
First let’s recall truth-bearer Cardale Jones, a football player who in 2012 tweeted:
Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.
Ol’ Cardale counts as a wise man at a place like Ohio State, that rare person willing to just come out with it. Got all kinds of heat for it, too — but looks like he’s getting a bit of his own back these days. His tweet about the domestic violence scandal is short and sweet and attracting a lot of attention:
Funny how life works.
It’s clearly a dig at the coach at the center of the scandal – Urban Meyer – who like Rick Pitino is a big fat hypocrite and no doubt gave Cardale hell for telling the truth way back when. Pretty nice karma, ain’t it, Cardale?
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And do not forget Kosta Karageorge, a mightily-concussed OSU wrestler/football player who one night dressed all in black, crawled into a dumpster, and shot his brains out. Reminiscent of Tyler Hilinski and quite a few other high-profile, macho, campus suicides, Karageorge’s mysterious gun-inflicted demise seems to carry important meanings about one form of young, heroic, American manhood.
Maybe he can get the Ohio State wrestlers who are ready to testify that while a coach there Rep. Jordan did nothing in response to their telling him about their being sexually abused over a long period of time by the team doctor … maybe he can get them to reverse their position and say haha just kidding…!
ONLY AN IDIOT WOULD
BELIEVE URBAN MEYER
Dan Bernstein:
No reasonable person can now conclude that Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer did anything but lie through his teeth about not knowing that a Buckeyes assistant coach brutally attacked his wife in 2015.
… [Urban’s wife] Shelley Meyer [who knew about the abuse] is also an instructor at the Ohio State school of nursing and would have been bound by Title IX regulation to report such abuse — and is required similarly as a registered nurse. Her husband is also mandated to report.
… The only people who could possibly believe Urban Meyer’s version of events at this point are the willfully ignorant and the irretrievably stupid. Officials running a massive public university aren’t as likely to be the latter, but they wouldn’t be the first or last to have money and power turn them into the latest, shameful version of the former.
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Specializing in whipped toppings!
… as Simkin the lawyer says to Moses Herzog, and today’s just been a long long day of university sports corruption, topped off by the just-released big story about Ohio State’s Urban Meyer (what a beaut of a program he ran at Florida before he went to Ohio! OSU really knew what it was after when it hired him; and it got it.) probably having known about his assistant’s frequent domestic violence against the assistant’s then-wife…
Ohio State gives Urban Meyer more than seven million dollars a year to run a dirty program – even dirtier than that of his predecessor, the disgraced Jim Tressel – and everything works beautifully – the team wins games – but what are you going to do about ex-wives who give interviews blowing the lid off of everything?
OSU must be good at multitasking: there’s the sex scandal in the wrestling program too, with the lads routinely diddled by the long-serving team doctor…
University football, UD always says, is a class act. Students at Missouri State University spend a lot of money to give the AD there his couple hundred thousand a year plus country club memberships etc etc etc, and he by way of thanks attacks them publicly for being too smart to waste their time going to football games.
Stadium capacity: 17,500. Average attendance: 8,000 or so. Not a good look.
MSU even brought in liquor this year! The stadium is even named PLASTER. Could we make it any clearer? Get out here and get fucking plastered and I’ll get a salary increase cuz my salary is tied to game attendance, ya little shitskies.
When a liar writes a tell-all, what gets told?
When a salesman writes a memoir, what gets sold?
Dirty university, dirty coach:
A story that never gets old.
It’s been a long time since this blog has featured that genre of sports journalism in which the university football coach is cast as a pietà, an icon of purity and innocence suddenly and shockingly beset by evil.
UD thinks this piece, written by a Bowling Green football fan, qualifies as Coacha Inconsolata writing.
You tend to get CI when a football team is so vile – a complete loser on the field, with a heavy emphasis on criminality – that the choice for booster/journalists becomes very stark: Either contempt or sympathy. Either you allow yourself to acknowledge – and even express – the disgust that the sickening reality of the local team makes you feel, or you cast about for some way to redeem an unredeemable spectacle. You rifle (riffle?) the mythic-familiar and conjure a fallen world whose gratuitous malignity brutalizes Our Mother of the Gridiron, the coach.
Title:
Heat Rising on Bowling Green’s [Coach] Jinks as Arrests Pile Up
Not that Jinks recruited the heat; the heat just satanically piled up from Hades.
The team, the writer notes, is at “the bottom of the standings,” but “No. 1 in the country in offseason arrests.”
Off-season, mind you; there are almost always far more crimes committed during the season.
The writer pithily sums things up:
Six wins in two years.
Five arrests in six months.
Can we say the obvious? Can we say that this is the result you get with a really really shitty coach and program?
No, no. The writer goes on to praise the coach for dismissing the naughty players (what a saint: most coaches would keep dangerous people on campus), and for spouting the most amazing stream of sports cliches in his own defense that UD has ever seen — more even than that scene in Bull Durham. The writer actually quotes the coach’s entire statement in the piece.
The coach, he concludes, is “a good guy,” tasked with the “inherent challenges of monitoring more than 100 college kids.” Problem is, his “inexperienced staff” (another cross he has to bear) “is recruiting too many marginal characters out of self-preservation.” They’re doing it out of self-preservation, after all! Nobody else wants these dudes, but Bowling Green has to take them because … no one else will …
Students there know and respect athletic traditions. Even off-season, in the dead of summer, they gather to remind the world what has for so long made the school famous.
We can only wonder what they have in store for us once the season begins in late August. The excitement is building! Pity Aaron Hernandez can’t be there.
… to tell us what you really think.
“I am a UT graduate, and my offices have helped many students, professors and even sports teams in many ways over the years,” [Rep. John J.] Duncan wrote in [his] newsletter. “I have nothing personally against any coach and hope the new UT coach does well. But I am disgusted by [its coach] buyouts. We just finished paying one former coach $100,000 a month, not to coach, and now we’ll be paying over $8 million to the latest ex-coach.”
But let’s start with an April ceremony at another school: the University of Miami. There much fuss was made about the stellar, the great and the good Morris Esformes, who endowed a chair in medicine at UM.
At one point in the write-up, mention is made of another Morris Esformes chair in medicine, this one at the University of Chicago. But when Esformes’ son and nursing home business partner, Philip, was arrested for having run the largest health-related fraud in US history (he’s still in jail two years later, awaiting trial), the U of C seems to have decided it didn’t want a chair with the name Esformes on it anymore. Maybe the irony of sucking up all that money for medicine when said money came from generations of abused and neglected old people was a little too much for them.
The most recent holder of the University of Chicago medical school’s Esformes chair was suddenly and without comment renamed Louis Block.
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Incidental among the many crimes sonny is alleged to have committed was the bribery of a high-profile basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania. The bribery was on behalf of sonny’s own little whippersnapper, Morris the Second, who, according to a report, got into Penn on said coach’s recommendation – the kid was a great basketball player, see, and it had nothing to do with the $74,000 in payments Philip made to the coach on the kid’s behalf.
Did the kid ever play on Penn’s team? Nooooo you silly reader…..
Admissions fraud, Medicare fraud, Medicaid fraud, NCAA fraud… This one’s got it all.
It’s too good a last name for a murder mystery writer to pass up, and one Kennedy Killingsworth stars in a series by Betsy Brannon Green.
Meanwhile UD‘s buddy Mark Killingsworth, an entirely actual econ professor at Rutgers, continues his real world, who-did-in-Rutgers-University, investigation in a series of opinion pieces in the NJ Star-Ledger.
Here, though, the mystery merely lies in the numbers — as in, how does Rutgers lie about the athletics deficits that are doing it in? — not in the reason the numbers have added up over the years to a current $47.4 million.
You can of course list particular things that have happened at the school. A commenter on Mark’s piece nicely describes one part of the deal in this way:
[It’s the old] wash/rinse/repeat cycle. Hire expensive coaches. Give them extensions which are not warranted. Coaches under perform, teams are terrible, fire/buy them out and then repeat.
Or, in Mark’s words:
[A]thletics deficit spending makes bigger deficits and lots of embarrassments, including personnel decisions that led to four athletics directors in nine years, three football coaches in seven years and over $9 million in severance pay.
But as to the larger mystery: No mystery at all. Put a bunch of unsupervised guys together, give them funny money, and WHEEEEEEE…
There’s no surreal like big-time athletics surreal, but Ohio State University moves well past surreal all the way to dada. Its posthumously famous team doctor, Richard Strauss, has displaced the composer of Salome on Google’s search page now that there’s a big class-action suit from OSU wrestlers and others against the school that employed him for twenty years.
Despite plenty of evidence, apparently, that their players’ private parts provoked Strauss’s Merry Pranks, coaches and administrators at OSU took no action to stop the music. And because one of the people the players claim did nothing is now a congressman, the story’s getting a lot of play.