Jim Tressel and the God complex

Nothing about the current fiasco at Ohio State should be all that surprising.

Coach gets damaging information about players doing shady things. Coach fails to report said information to administrators. When administrators find out, coach digs hole even deeper by lying about what he knew and whom he told. Administrators impose penalties that are derided as weak, then impose harsher penalties.

The most revealing and perhaps disturbing part of this whole thing, other than Jim Tressel showing strong signs of being a lying scumbag, is the clear illustration of a coach feeling as if he is above all on his campus.

And we'd be quite naive to think this phenomenon is confined to the football office at Ohio State.

Coaches elsewhere might not be dumb enough to proceed as clumsily as Tressel has since April of last year, when he was tipped off about possible NCAA violations involving Terrelle Pryor and another player.

But you'd better believe there are other instances of coaches functioning as the kings of their campuses, with complete disregard for any institutional oversight.

Ohio State's clownish president, Gordon Gee, might have said it best last month at a press conference when asked if he had given any thought to firing Tressel:

"I hope he doesn't fire me," the bowtied one said with a laugh.

Gee was joking, and he later apologized for his comments. But there's no way to discount the immense power enjoyed by the football coach (or basketball coach) on a college campus.

Actually, the concept of a coach firing a president doesn't sound all that outrageous when you think about it.

Unprecedented amounts of money are being made from the televising and sponsorships of college sports. That money is poured into facilities, and it's poured into the pockets of the coaches.

At some point, administrators have to make the decision to get in the game or lurk on the sidelines. Alabama willingly took the plunge when it paid Nick Saban $4 million a year to resuscitate the Crimson Tide's floundering program. Same deal with Kentucky and John Calipari.

It's more than just a financial investment. It's also a granting of absolute power to the head coach, an abdication of internal scrutiny and accountability.

You think Saban gives the time of day to his compliance director in Tuscaloosa? You think other coaches at a few elite, football-mad schools are more concerned about reporting violations than protecting their players and keeping unsavory stuff from getting out?

We shouldn't be surprised that coaches contract the God complex. When winning and winning big is the all-consuming goal, it naturally follows that coaches walk all over anything and everything and everyone -- academics folks, compliance folks, administrative folks -- that could be an impediment to that goal.

These notions of educational values and institutional integrity sound great, and they are still applied at plenty of places, but it's just lip service in a growing number of cases. The commercialism and professionalism escaped from the genie's bottle long ago, and they're not going back in.

The circus at Ohio State seems like an extreme case that, we can hope, will be addressed with extreme measures by the NCAA.

But the reality is that some of Tressel's peers are a lot more like him than we'd like to believe.

It's just the cost of doing big business.

LW