Ohio State Online

Found at ESPN:

Terrelle Pryor is trying to put his past behind him and become a successful NFL quarterback. But he’s not finished talking about what happened at Ohio State.

Pryor, now with the Oakland Raiders, received a five-game suspension in his final season with the Buckeyes for selling memorabilia. Nearly a full year later, Pryor, in an interview with Sports Illustrated, opened up about the decisions he made and the reasons why he made them.

Terrelle Pryor is not a villain. But Brian Bennett hopes the current Oakland Raider has learned some important lessons in the last year.

“It was humbling,” Pryor told Sports Illustrated. “A mistake I made when I was a freshman by selling my pants for $3,000 just took away everything from me. I was just driven into the ground. I was the worst person in the world. My face popped up on the screen, and it seemed like I was the only one who did anything. I was the only one who was getting attacked.

“At that point last year, I’m 21 and it just felt like everything was against me, like I can’t do anything right. I did something to help somebody else out, and I end up getting into trouble. I understand. I shouldn’t have sold the stuff and taken $3,000. But I was kind of in a place where I didn’t understand why this is happening to me — especially for the reason that I did it.”

Pryor was suspended for the first five games of last season and then decided to enter the NFL supplemental draft, where he was chosen by the Raiders. He was later banned from associating with Ohio State for five years.

Pryor said he chose to take money in exchange for memorabilia to help his family.

“The reason why I did it was to pay my mother’s gas bill and some of her rent,” Pryor told Sports Illustrated. “She was four months behind in rent, and the (landlord) was so nice because he was an Ohio State fan. He gave her the benefit of the doubt and she said, ‘My son will pay you back sometime if you just let me pay you back during my work sessions.’ She ended up losing her job, and she and my sister lived there.

“Let me remind you it was freezing cold in November, December and she’s using the oven as heat. That’s what I did as a kid. I was telling the NCAA, ‘Please, anything that you can do. I gave my mother this so my sister wouldn’t be cold, so my mother wouldn’t be cold.’ They didn’t have any sympathy for me.”

Pryor also said he has documentation in the form of a receipt, proving the money went toward his family’s bills and not personal use.

“Whenever I write my book, the proof will be in there, the receipt that the money I gave my mother was to pay the electric and heat bill,” Pryor told Sports Illustrated. “The truth is going to come out one day when the time is right. I don’t think I deserved (being punished) in that way, because of the reason I was doing it. I felt like I was doing God’s work in a way, and I was getting driven into the ground.”

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Found at ESPN:

FFS!

A bunch of New Yorkers got together Tuesday night and decided to ban college football. Sorry about that. You’ll just have to find another passion. Perhaps croquet?

College football is too dangerous. College football subtracts from the academic mission of a university. It’s hopelessly corrupt. There’s too much money involved. And it’s a travesty that the players aren’t getting a fair share of the loot.

“Friday Night Lights” author Buzz Bissinger led the charge against college football Tuesday.
Those were the winning points put forward by writers Buzz Bissinger — yes, Mr. “Friday Night Lights” hates college football — and Malcolm Gladwell in an Intelligence Squared debate at New York University over whether college football should be banned. They bested sports columnist Jason Whitlock and author and former NFL/college player Tim Green.

It was an entertaining and interesting debate. These are smart men. The room was full of smart, engaged people.

Best line of the night? Said Bissinger, “A great country changes.”

That is true. Great countries work to solve social ills, particularly issues of inequality. Great countries work to create access to opportunity. Great countries aspire to create an ethical, ambitious, caring and intellectually active populace.

And great countries debate issues. That this debate will have less staying power in our culture than an average tweet from Lady Gaga — there is zero momentum behind the notion of banning college football — is not our present issue. Our present issue is whether you, fair college football fan, should feel a twinge of guilt over not caring why some intellectual types might think college football should be banned.

Yes, you should. So step out of the warm glow of your fandom for a moment.

Gladwell focused almost exclusively on head injuries suffered by players who were college students — officially amateurs — and not paid professionals. That should concern us all. Head injuries in football are serious business. The good news is that, after media pressure, the NCAA and NFL are taking head injuries seriously. There is reason to be optimistic that football can be made safer.

Bissinger, who at times channeled comedian Lewis Black with his sputtering passion, said football — and sports in general — had no place at universities that should be exclusively about higher learning. Of football, he said, “It sucks all the air out of the room.” Not unreasonably, he pointed out that in a highly competitive world economy, education will become even more important, and U.S. universities that spend millions on football, football facilities and football coaches while cutting computer science departments are failing in their primary mission.

Everybody in the room lamented that college players are not paid.

Green and Whitlock countered with the positives of football, including providing scholarships to young men who otherwise couldn’t afford college, building character, promoting diversity and building a sense of community at a university and even within an entire state. Or, in the case of the SEC, an entire region.

And both, not unreasonably, pointed out that once you start banning things, you step onto a slippery slope. Said Whitlock of living with freedom, “You can’t have the free without the dumb.”

Perhaps it’s a facile point, but we could make American better by banning a lot of popular things: cigarettes, booze, fast food, sugar and reality TV. Without those, we’d be healthier and smarter. We could go further with our Utopian vision and make a law that politicians must go to jail for a week every time they willfully mislead the public with a false statement about themselves or their opponents. We could require all Americans to go to the theater weekly and read all of Jonathan Franzen’s novels.

Of course, then we wouldn’t be America. Freedom and capitalism and the messiness they sometimes create inexorably spiral through the circulatory system of our nation. It is often for better and sometimes for worse, but it’s who we are. “Football has to be tolerated, just like Ronald McDonald,” Whitlock opined.

There was some garbling of facts on the ban football side. Talking about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma, can scare an audience. Yet it’s also critical to note that concussions and anecdotal evidence about debilitated former football players have not been causally connected by scientific research, as Gladwell repeatedly implied. We know a concussion is bad and multiple concussions are worse, but it’s irresponsible to point to Junior Seau’s suicide and say, “See!” (No one specifically did that Tuesday night, by the way.)

Now I’ll make note of a quibble that is also the basis for my position. Neither Bissinger nor Gladwell know much about college football. It’s not just that they haven’t played, it’s that they aren’t educated on the subject. That is where most critics of college football come from: the ignorant. I’ve been around college football much of my life, and professionally since 1997. My take on the sport, and the take of most folks who have been around the sport for a good deal of time, is that the good far outweighs the bad. If the sport is far from pure, it’s also far from impure. And I’d be glad to debate that point with anyone. They’d lose.

Finally, let’s gently take note of this debate’s process. The winning position was declared by what percentage of people in the audience changed their minds. Before the debate, only 16 percent of the folks in the room said they believed college football should be banned. Afterwards, 53 percent thought so.

Now, I’m not going to accuse folks of manipulating the system, but let’s just say lots of people in the room knew how the voting process worked. Bissinger and Gladwell scored some nice points, but their rhetoric wasn’t worthy of a 37 percent swing. And they certainly wouldn’t have gotten one in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or Columbus, Ohio, or Austin, Texas, or Eugene, Ore.

College football has been all about change in recent years, and one potential rerouting noted by Bissinger doesn’t seem implausible: a minor league with teams aligned with universities merely as licensed affiliates. With Title IX issues making it almost impossible to truly “pay” football players, that might become a defensible course as the revenue in college football continues to grow exponentially.

Heck, just a few years ago, playoff talk was viewed as implausible. Now, it’s almost a reality.

Speaking of which, don’t you guys think an eight-team playoff would be better? And how good is that LSU defense going to be? Matt Barkley? Well, he’s good but …

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Found at ESPN:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Like most coaches, Ohio State’s Luke Fickell has neither the time nor the desire to look backward.

Fickell isn’t going to publish his memoirs about his 182-day term as Ohio State’s head coach last year, when he guided his alma mater through an adversity-filled season that produced subpar results on the field. After Ohio State named Urban Meyer as its head coach on Nov. 28, Fickell’s life didn’t exactly slow down. He coached the Buckeyes through their bowl game, interviewing for Pitt’s head-coaching vacancy during the span, before opting to remain with Ohio State as defensive coordinator. When Meyer introduced his staff at a Jan. 15 Ohio State men’s basketball game, Fickell received the loudest ovation.

Since then, Fickell has spent most of his time recruiting, with some coaching sprinkled in this spring.

Luke Fickell says he learned a lot during his brief stint as Ohio State’s head coach.”From the day after the [bowl] game, I pretty much started moving on into the next page,” Fickell told ESPN.com. “Since then, we’ve had spring break off, so that was probably about the only time you may have had to reflect, but you were so far into everything else. … Then again, I’m not a person that is going to dwell upon the past.”

He might not dwell on what happened, but he hasn’t forgotten, either. The unique situation provided lessons for a young coach.

“There’s things you take from every experience, but especially that one,” Fickell said. “Not just about being a head coach, but being in the midst of adversity. It’s everything from how you react and respond to how others around you react and respond to how an 18-year-old reacts and responds, to a 22-year-old. There was an incredible amount of things learned, not just about what things would I do different, but more emotionally.”

Fickell is back in the familiar role of assistant coach, a position he held at Ohio State from 2002 until Jim Tressel’s resignation on Memorial Day of 2011. The 38-year-old shares coordinator duties with coaching veteran Everett Withers, and he’ll also coach the linebackers, as he did from 2005-2010.

Fickell shared defensive coordinator duties with Jim Heacock before taking over the head-coaching duties, but Heacock was regarded as the unit’s leader. The 2012 season marks the first where Fickell moves into the primary play-calling role, although he downplays the idea that he’ll have more ownership with the defense.

“In 2002, it wasn’t Mark Dantonio’s defense,” Fickell said. “It was Ohio State’s silver bullet defense. In ’05, when Jim Heacock and myself were doing our thing, it wasn’t our defense. It was every bit [former assistant] Paul Haynes’ defense and [former assistant] Tim Beckman’s defense.”

Withers has been a defensive coordinator at three FBS programs (North Carolina, Minnesota and Louisville) and boasts NFL experience with the Tennessee Titans and New Orleans Saints. He also shares a kinship with Fickell after serving as North Carolina’s interim head coach last season.

While Fickell stepped into a tough situation on Memorial Day, Withers’ promotion came even later, as he took over July 28 for the fired Butch Davis. Although they occasionally joke around about their experiences, Withers, like Fickell, hasn’t had much time to look back.

“When Coach Withers and I had some opportunities to sit down and spend some time together, there were no egos involved,” Fickell said. “That’s Coach Meyer’s biggest thing. He said, ‘The most important thing is I want an alignment with the staff.’ … That’s why we’ve been successful here and been good, not just at Ohio State but on defense as well.”

Fickell inherits a defense that returns nine starters, including All-America defensive end John Simon, but backslid at times last season. Although Fickell spent most of his time with the defense last fall, he’s no longer burdened by head-coaching duties.

“He’s awesome,” Simon said. “With the passion and fire he brings every day, especially with his knowledge of defense, it’s great to have him back.”

The scheme will remain more or less the same — “Nothing that anybody would notice unless you were really studying us,” linebacker Etienne Sabino said — and so are the demands.

“We always talk about, ‘Be on the same page,’” Sabino said. “We can both look at a play and he’ll ask me, ‘Is that good or not?’ And if I say no, he’s probably thinking the same thing. We’re on the same page. He would never let you get complacent.

“He’s still pushing me just as hard as when I first walked in here. That’s great.”

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