Ohio State football players don’t know just how nice they have it.
Not only do they enjoy incredible practice and workout facilities, a tradition-rich program and prominent national exposure on a weekly basis, but they don’t even get locked in a shed, verbally humiliated or punched in the face when they screw up.
That’s a perk worth more than all the training tables, stipends and bowl gifts put together.
In a college football environment that has seen Mark Mangino of Kansas fired for physically and verbally abusing his players (allegedly), Texas Tech’s Mike Leach canned for locking receiver Adam James in a darkened tool shed (allegedly) and the dismissal of South Florida’s Jim Leavitt for grabbing a player by the throat and striking him (allegedly) for a miscue on special teams, these Buckeyes should be counting their lucky stars to have a coach like Jim Tressel.
Just ask Ray Small.
If anyone on this past season’s OSU team could have benefited from a good lock-down or face smacking, it was him. If Tressel’s policy on missed classes, bobbled punts and smoking weed (allegedly) included such humiliations, Small would have looked like Rocky Balboa after 12 rounds with Clubber Lang.
My prediction for Small’s career had he played for coaches Mangino or Leavitt?
Pain.
Probably a better case for comparison would be freshman Duron Carter’s treatment. His case is a little more salient because, like Adam James, he is the son of a former pro football player who now has the national platform provided by being a television football analyst.
In light of his academic failures (allegedly), Carter was merely suspended by Tressel before the Rose Bowl rather than locked away in a janitor’s closet at the RPAC.
Tressel has had his fair share of malcontents and miscreants to deal with. Early in his career at OSU, Tressel was forced to decide the fate of senior quarterback Steve Bellisari for driving under the influence. The following season, Louis Irizarry and Ira Guilford were arrested for attempted robbery.
Each time, Tressel had a hard decision to make. In Bellisari’s case, it meant benching his starting quarterback for the game against arch-rival Michigan. For Irizarry and Guilford, he had to make the difficult choice to sever their ties with the program. For a man of coach Tressel’s integrity and compassion, that was certainly a difficult decision to make.
To be fair, OSU is not unfamiliar to the tactics of a harsh disciplinarian. Some of our campus roads and buildings are named after one of the most aggressive coaches ever to stalk the sidelines of a college football game: Woody Hayes.
Just ask Charlie Bauman. He was the Clemson nose guard who had the audacity to intercept a pass in the Gator Bowl and was then on the receiving end of a throat punch delivered by Hayes on the sideline.
At that point, OSU officials’ hands were tied and they had no other choice then to let the venerable Hayes go. Just as the athletic directors at Kansas, Texas Tech and South Florida had no choice.
Gone are the days of mothers and fathers sending their sons off to task-masters such as Hayes or former Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight to be forged into men in a crucible of fire.
In their place are parents like Ken Small and Craig James who are laboring under the illusion that just because their sons lit up the scoreboards for their respective high schools they are somehow entitled to being handled with kid gloves on the collegiate level.
Given this level of coddling, once these student-athletes are outside of their insulated, athletic bubbles, they can hardly be blamed for thinking that the world revolves around them.
Tressel can’t save every soul that comes under his tutelage. Some are beyond redemption before they ever set foot on campus (See: Maurice Clarett). But his track record is better than most, and for that, Buckeye fans should be proud.
So three of the more brutish coaches in the ranks of college football are looking for work and the athletes left behind know that they are the ones holding the trump cards if their new coaches tick them off.
Allegedly.
