Cargate

In the last week I’ve heard many fans say something to the effect that, “We should fire Tressel and get this over with”. They are ignoring the fact that the car situation has very little to do with Jim Tressel and this is totally the compliance department’s responsibility. Ohio State has proudly stated in the past that they have one of the biggest compliance departments in the country. One of compliance’s biggest responsibilities is to look into vehicle purchases to make sure they are legitimate. That’s one of the great things about coaching at a large school like Ohio State because having resources like this means you can focus on coaching and your only responsibility is to forward things to them if you get information that things look out of line (like getting an email about selling gold pants for $$$).

The reason this is so big is that throughout the TAT5 situation, compliance has been portrayed as the model the NCAA wants every school to use as they’ve promptly reported issues. That means all violations were due to the actions of one man and therefore the penalties more than likely would be limited to him. If compliance is found to have not done their job in the “Cargate” situation then we are looking at the dreaded “lack of institutional control” penalty and can expect scholarship reductions and bowl bans similar to what USC received.

I still have hope that there is reasonable explanations for all of this. For instance, the school receives the bill of sale and not the title information so if those numbers are different that really is out of the school’s area of responsibility and not an NCAA violation. I do imagine the players, the dealers, and the salesmen will be hearing from the State of Ohio on this very soon as committing fraud on property value is a serious offense. The signed memorabilia at the dealership isn’t proof of anything either as most businesses in Central Ohio have similar items and even if the players signed for things while buying the car it proves nothing . The keys are were 1) the cars sold for fair value? (which is very subjective) and 2) was the salesmen given tickets/memorabilia by the players to get some service in return? These are all very gray areas and one that Doug Archie must have been concerned about since he eventually banned the salesman from getting tickets. The scary thing for me is when the story first surfaced that Pryor had gotten tickets 3 times and had a loaner car each time it didn’t feel right. Ohio State’s compliance department looked into this and quickly determined that no wrongdoing occurred. At the time it seemed odd to me that Pryor would only have gotten loaners just on those occasions that he got traffic tickets and even odder that the compliance department would be able to rule that quickly that no wrongdoing occurred. It leads many to believe that there is a lot more to this story than we’ve heard so far. The bottom line is while I have hope that this is much ado about nothing I do fear that compliance is acting as little more than a coverup agency and if that is true then the Buckeyes deserve everything they get and a long dark winter is approaching for Ohio State athletics.