The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (23 page)

A
chilling northwest wind sliced across the campus of Ohio State University on the final Saturday in November. It was The Game day—the 108th revival of the border war between the Buckeyes and their neighbor to the north.

By 8:45 the four cash registers at College Traditions were humming a pricey little tune. It was near freezing outside (thirty-three degrees), so the scarlet-and-gray hooded sweatshirts and fleece blankets flew off the shelves. With every purchase buyers received a commemorative
BEAT MICHIGAN
button. One fanatic bought fifty.

Up in Section 39A at the south end of the Horseshoe, twenty-one-year-old Cayla Hellwarth passed a box of Donatos pizza around. She and about three hundred of her fellow students had been inside since 8:00 a.m., setting color-coded flash cards on every seat in the section. On the back of one card were directions explaining exactly how they were to be used for a series of stunts during the game. “Every week, since we’re here so early, we get free pizza for everyone that’s on setup,” Hellwarth explained. “I mean we’re here for eight hours if you include game time, so we offer some incentive to sign up and help out.”

Hellwarth was vice president of Block O—the largest student organization on campus and one of the finest student-run sports organizations in the country. Founded in 1938 by the former head cheerleader Clancy A. Isaac Jr. in support of the team, today Block O numbers nearly twenty-six hundred students. The group is funded largely by a $20 surcharge on twenty-one hundred first-come, first-served season tickets that sell online faster than seats to a Taylor Swift concert.

Block O was far from some “hey, dude, let’s hang out” operation. It organized viewing parties for away games and pep rallies, where head coaches spoke, bands played and actual cheers and songs were learned.
There was something called Blockie points for attending games and meetings. Earn enough and you could score a seat on a special bus trip to Ann Arbor or Madison. And it wasn’t just football. Block O supported all sports, with directors of operations for volleyball, soccer, baseball and many other teams. Elections were no beauty contests; if they were, odds were that Hellwarth, a stunning senior blond marketing and international business major, would have won, as she was, well, an actual beauty queen. The reigning Miss Miami Valley 2013, she came to Ohio State as a legacy; there was no other choice.

“I’m actually the sixth person in our family to attend Ohio State,” she said a few days before The Game. “My mom was the only one that didn’t go. She didn’t go to college either, so we kind of already included her as a Buckeye. It was a tradition to go; I didn’t even bother to visit here. I just knew it was the place for me to go.”

Hellwarth fell in love with Block O her sophomore year after she “painted up” for the first time. “I think we won 65–0, and I think it was the best game I’ve ever been to as a home game,” she said. “The experience is just so different.”

So, it appeared, was the experience behind Section 39A. That’s where sophomore Trevor McCue and a bunch of his Block O buddies were getting their game faces on. College girls with sponges—always a good thing—were busy painting a variety of
O
s and
H
s and
S
s, in gray and scarlet, on the chests and backs of shirtless boys. Hard to believe, but McCue and his buds actually had to
sign up
for this kind of work. McCue has done it every home game the last two years, even on frigid days like this. Normally, McCue said, he was a
U
. Today he settled for an
S
.

“You just have to stay active and move around,” said our boy McCue. “Plus, the adrenaline from the game helps.”

Ah, The Game.

The first one was played on October 17, 1897, a 34–0 Michigan victory. The Wolverines led the overall series 58-44-6 on the morning of November 24, 2012. By that night, it was 58-
45
-6, thanks to a gritty 26–21 comeback win by OSU that would have made Woody Hayes proud.

But as joyous as the score was, the game would long be remembered not for the fourth-down stop by the Buckeyes or the four Michigan turnovers, but rather for the celebration of the 2002 national championship team between the first and second quarter.

Ten years earlier in the Arizona desert, Ohio State had knocked off heavily favored Miami 31–24 in double overtime in the most memorable
title game of the BCS era. And here they were again. Cheers rang out as the team was introduced. Maurice Clarett was among them.

As a freshman, the talented but troubled running back had carried the Buckeyes to the 2002 crown. A year later he was a pariah to the program. A year after that Clarett extracted a shocking form of revenge. He buried Ohio State in a carpet-bombing story written by Tom Friend in
ESPN the Magazine
. In chapter and verse Clarett revealed what Friend described as a system full of “free rides, free cash [and] free grades” for the star running back. A place where eligibility problems magically disappeared, tutors wrote research papers, and Clarett lived the life of a rap star.

“I had the money I wanted, the car I wanted. I literally, literally, had everything,” Clarett told Friend.

And then, suddenly, it was gone.

In the week leading up to the win over Miami, Clarett said he was led to believe he would be able to travel back to Ohio to attend the funeral of a childhood friend. But then OSU said no, citing a paperwork problem. Clarett was angry and called out school officials.

In the
ESPN
article, Clarett said it was head coach Jim Tressel who set up the buffet table of mouthwatering perks—“thousands” in cash from boosters, free loaners from car dealers, phony jobs, no-show classes, whatever he needed. In the spring of 2003, the NCAA got wind of the cars and cash. Questioned that summer, Clarett kept answering, “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember” or “I magically got them.” Protecting his head coach, he said. By the fall of his sophomore year, however, he was done, suspended for the season. And Tressel, he said, had stopped taking his calls.

“I think he knows in his heart he sold me out,” Clarett told Friend. “He sold me out to keep his integrity … Coach Tressel, he made everything easy … until he wanted to make it hard.”

Crisp in tone, polished in nature, a stickler for detail, Tressel had earned the nickname The Senator. He had guided Ohio State to three BCS title games and won 81 percent of his games in ten years. He had won or shared six straight Big Ten titles and sent the Wolverines home with their tails between their legs nine times.

Tressel’s epic fall from grace was quick and painful just eighteen months after it was discovered that the coach lied to the NCAA and Ohio State on several occasions while being questioned about the “tattoo-gate” scandal in which more than twenty players, including star quarterback Terrelle Pryor, received free tattoos in exchange for memorabilia. But inside the Horseshoe, in the Church of the Scarlet and Gray, all seemed forgiven on game
day. The 2002 team received a special blessing. Cheers rolled out of the stands. Chants of “Tress-el! Tress-el!” and “We love Tress-el!” thundered across the stadium.

Ohio State fans had plenty to cheer about on this afternoon. After new savior Urban Meyer led Ohio State past Michigan the Buckeyes had reached perfection again, this time finishing 12-0. But it ended there. No Big Ten title game. No bowl. No possibility of another national championship. Among the NCAA penalties for Tressel’s lies and “tattoo-gate” was a postseason ban.

“I wasn’t actually affected all [that] much that there was no postseason for us,” said Ohio State senior Tim Collins, president of Block O. “Probably because I’ve had a year to process this and fully expected it. The perfect season probably won’t hit me until I’m telling nostalgic stories to friends or children, that I was at Ohio State during one of its most tumultuous yet simultaneously terrific times in our athletic history.”

From the headlines it appeared that the Ohio State football scandal had broken new ground. Not so. On paper it looked pretty familiar—free stuff for athletes, some memorabilia sales, a little cash courtesy of a deep-pocketed booster, the failure to properly monitor his activities. The suspected criminal drug connection of the tattoo parlor owner was the wild card.

In its Infractions Report dated December 20, 2011, the NCAA laid out the allegations:

To soften the coming blow, Ohio State did what every school does these days: it self-reported. The school launched an internal investigation, then proposed a series of penalties—harsh but not too harsh—in hopes of appeasing the NCAA’s powerful Committee on Infractions. During its self-report investigation OSU never discovered that its upstanding head football coach knew about the memorabilia-for-tattoo problem as far back as April 2010. OSU penalized itself with two years’ probation, the loss of five football scholarships over three years, vacating all wins associated with its tainted 2010 season and the forfeiture of more than $388,000 in revenue from the 2011 Sugar Bowl. It also took the preventive step of disassociating the booster involved, Robert “Bobby D.” DiGeronimo, from the athletics program for ten years.

The Infractions Committee was not moved. It focused on the “failure to monitor” DiGeronimo and the fact that several Buckeyes linked to the violations, particularly Pryor, had played in the Sugar Bowl with Tressel’s full knowledge of their transgressions. In December 2011 the committee came down hard on Ohio State.

It hit the Buckeyes with three years’ probation beginning in December 2011 (not two) and the loss of nine scholarships (not five) while vacating the wins and forfeiting the bowl revenue. Most significantly, the committee banned the team from a bowl game in 2012 and expressed particular displeasure with The Senator, slapping a “show cause” penalty on Tressel, essentially removing him from major college coaching for five years.

Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith described the university as “surprised and disappointed” at the ruling.