Golden Bear Thinks Tressel Took One for the Team at BetLM

Golden Bear Thinks Tressel Took One for the Team

In the month or so since it was announced that Jim Tres­sel would hold him­self to the “same stan­dard” as his play­ers and imposed a five-game sus­pen­sion on him­self, there’s been no real hard news regard­ing “the episode”.  And, to be per­fectly blunt, there’s still no real news.

How­ever, when (Warn­ing! Per­sonal opin­ion ahead!) the great­est golfer of all-time who also hap­pens to be a grad­u­ate of Ohio State chimes in on the sit­u­a­tion, we’ll go ahead and make note of it.  Although we get the feel­ing the school’s pres­i­dent and ath­letic direc­tor would pre­fer the Golden Bear’s voice box went into hiber­na­tion for a while.

Speak­ing at a fundrais­ing lun­cheon for his Memo­r­ial Tour­na­ment, Jack Nick­laus was ques­tioned by the assem­bled media on what has tran­spired with Tres­sel over the past cou­ple of months.  While admit­ting he doesn’t “know what really hap­pened”, Nick­laus still advanced his the­ory that there’s no way oth­ers within the uni­ver­sity didn’t know about the infor­ma­tion the coach had, that at least two of his play­ers had likely received imper­mis­si­ble ben­e­fits, and sat on for months.

“I’ll promise you that Tres­sel wasn’t the only one who knew what hap­pened,” Nick­laus was quoted as say­ing by the Colum­bus Dis­patch. “I’m going to bet you the uni­ver­sity, I’m going to bet you (pres­i­dent E. Gor­don) Gee and I’m going to bet you (ath­let­ics direc­tor) Gene (Smith) and every­body else knew, and Tres­sel prob­a­bly took the hit for it. Whether I’m right or whether I’m wrong, I don’t know. …

“I can’t imag­ine the rest of the uni­ver­sity didn’t know what was going on. Jim, who is a ter­rific guy, maybe he decided to take it on his own shoul­ders. I don’t know. That could well be. I’m not privy to that. I just like him a lot.”

That sound you may have just heard was Gee and/or Smith cring­ing mightily.

Of course, Nick­laus’ the­ory flies in the face of what we think we “know” to be the truth behind the case.  Tres­sel received infor­ma­tion via email on April 1 last year that quar­ter­back Ter­relle Pryor and wide receiver DeVier Posey had sold/bartered mer­chan­dise to the owner of a Colum­bus tat­too par­lor.  Accord­ing to the school, he kept the infor­ma­tion to him­self — with the inex­plic­a­ble excep­tion of shar­ing the 411 with Pryor’s long-time han­dler — until an OSU offi­cial stum­bled upon the emails this past Jan­u­ary dur­ing an unre­lated search.

At least, Gee, Smith and the entire ath­letic pro­gram had bet­ter hope that Nick­laus’ the­ory is noth­ing more than the result of black heli­copters hov­er­ing over his head.  If Nick­laus’ the­ory were proven cor­rect and Smith or Gee or any­one else knew of poten­tial vio­la­tions before Jan­u­ary and did not for­ward that infor­ma­tion on to the NCAA, the fall­out for the foot­ball pro­gram would be dev­as­tat­ing.  As would sanc­tions handed down by the NCAA on the foot­ball program.

That said, we find it very hard to believe that Gee or Smith or any­one in a posi­tion of author­ity knew what Tres­sel knew and did what The Vest did by sit­ting on the information.

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