Hail Sparty. And Hail Mark Dantonio.

Kyler Elsworth (#41) soars over the pile to make the clinching play as
Michigan State beats Stanford 24-21 in the 100th Rose Bowl.

Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—Curmie writes about something good that has happened. And so we start the post-Curmie nominations 2014 posts with such a story. It’s about college football, which could certainly use something positive. Of the last four Heisman Trophy winners, for example, one almost certainly demanded a huge (completely verboten) payoff from universities for his services, one violated a handful of NCAA rules with little to no punishment and is one of the most colossal assholes on the planet, and one is quite likely a rapist. Not that the talking heads at ESPN (or any of the other networks, for that matter) ever deviated from the script that anything a jock (well, a sufficiently accomplished jock, at least) might do is perfectly permissible. Similarly, coaches like Chip Kelly (formerly of the University of Oregon, now of the Philadelphia Eagles) and Pete Carroll (formerly of the University of Southern California, now of the Seattle Seahawks) escaped punishment for their recruiting violations simply by fleeing the jurisdiction: taking jobs in the NFL, where NCAA sanctions mean nothing.

So it came as something of a surprise that Mark Dantonio, head coach of the Michigan State Spartans, suspended Max Bullough, the best player on the best defensive team in the country, on Christmas night for an unspecified violation of a team rule. That just doesn’t happen to star players on big-name teams, at least not for games that matter. Sure, there’s occasionally a suspension about now, but it’s for the first game of next year (when the team is playing the Little Sisters of the Poor or some equivalent gridiron powerhouse), not for (shudder) the bowl game.

For confirmation of this assertion, we turn to Ohio State, where defensive end Noah Spence was recently suspended for three games, including this week’s Orange Bowl game. “But wait,” you say, “that’s an even greater penalty than Bullough faced. Doesn’t that prove that Ohio State coach Urban Meyer is the same kind of stand-up guy as Dantonio?” Actually, it proves the exact opposite. As anyone who follows college football at all seriously understands, Ohio State and Coach Meyer have both had win-at-all-costs attitudes for a very long time, and did so long before the Buckeyes hired Meyer a little over two years ago. They’re perfect for each other, in other words.

And Meyer simply doesn’t suspend players who richly deserve it… not if they’re good players, at least. No, it was the Big 10 Conference that suspended Spence. Translation: Spence broke the rules (allegedly for using an unapproved dietary supplement, although the official reason for the suspension has not been announced), and Ohio State, rather than take action of their own, sought rather to keep their player eligible. Meyer’s staff actually helped Spence with the appeal process, and the coach pronounced himself “disappointed” that the player’s appeal hadn’t been approved: “he’s one of my favorite players.” Curmie is tempted to wonder if Meyer would have been quite so helpful had Spence been the #3 punter instead of leading the team in sacks.

Or look at South Carolina. Jadaveon Clowney, the team’s star defensive end, received two speeding tickets in a three-week period prior to the Capitol One Bowl, one of them for going 110 mph, both for exceeding the speed limit by over 25 mph. One of the reports, by the way, specifies that Clowney was driving a Chrysler 300—not the standard transportation for undergraduates. But there were certainly no illegal payoffs while Clowney is still technically an amateur athlete. No, of course not.

Clowney’s recklessness and self-entitlement would once have been cause for concern. Not in Coach Steve Spurrier’s universe. Suspend Clowney, or even bench him for a single series at the beginning of the game? Are you kidding? This is Steve Spurrier we’re talking about, and Clowney is a really good football player, almost certain to be the first defensive player chosen in the upcoming NFL draft, possibly even the first overall pick. Spurrier’s response to Clowney’s escapades, which resulted in the possible loss of his driver’s license and several hundred dollars in fines: “He needs to go to driving school, doesn't he? …. At least he'll have enough money to pay for it a week or so from now.” Cute.

Which brings us back to Mark Dantonio. No, he’s not the only coach who thinks rules matter (Boise State, for example, suspended their starting quarterback before the Hawaii Bowl, supposedly for urinating off the hotel balcony. He indignantly denies the charge, by the way). But he’s certainly in the minority in the ranks of coaches in the best programs in the best conferences.

Of course, the sorry collection of ex-jocks and talking heads that passes for sports journalism these days ululated at length about how Michigan State could possibly survive without the “heart and soul” of their defense. Not a word praising Dantonio for doing the right thing: if a player does something that should lead to a suspension, he should be suspended. Nope. Just veiled criticism implying that the coach had jeopardized his team’s chances of winning the big game.

The thing is that Dantonio actually seems to believe that stuff about sports helping to create better people—those who are willing to work hard toward a goal; who recognize that being a good teammate often demands sacrifice, but the rewards are plentiful and sometimes extraordinary; who truly believe that no one is irreplaceable; who value community, loyalty, and goal-orientation, but who refuse to substitute any of these for ethical behavior. He’s looking long term, in other words.

But it’s also true that there are short-term advantages to such an approach. If I’m in the locker room when the coach tells us that one of our star players has been suspended from a game that matters, I start thinking a little more clearly about the pragmatic as well as ethical advantages to playing by the rules. If bad behavior can get even Max Bullough suspended, maybe when Coach says he expects discipline from us, he means it. Maybe there’s even a life lesson to be learned here… you know, like all the over-produced promotional videos say there is.

And if I’m the guy who’s going to take Max Bullough’s place in the lineup, I’d better be ready. That guy, by the way, is Kyler Elsworth. He’s a fifth-year senior and former walk-on, getting his first and last collegiate start, replacing an All-American in the 100th Rose Bowl game. He draws confidence from his coaches and his teammates. He spends the week between Christmas and New Year’s studying film, going to only required Rose Bowl activities. He notices that when Stanford’s linemen get into a particular stance, the only way to stop what’s coming is “for me to go over the top.”

And so, with his team having trailed early on by 10-0 but now protecting a 4-point lead with a little over a minute and a half left in the game, it’s his job to help stop Stanford’s vaunted rushing attack on a 4th and less than 1. He hurtles over the prostrate bodies of linemen on both teams, arms outstretched, bearing no little resemblance to a condor launching itself from an Andean crag. He meets fullback Ryan Hewitt in the backfield, stopping his forward progress. A couple of Michigan State buddies arrive a moment later, completing the play… and the Spartans win the Rose Bowl for the first time since the Reagan administration. Oh, and Elsworth was named the Defensive Player of the Game.

This is storybook stuff. It may be that Mark Dantonio is as big a jerk as the other guys. But he (and Max Bullough, by the way) handled the announcement and aftermath of the suspension with professionalism. He got his team ready to play. And for one brief moment, as Kyler Elsworth slammed into Ryan Hewitt, we saw a flash of what college football purports to be.

It may have been fleeting. It may even have been illusory. But it happened. Oh, yes, it happened.

This Buckeye Is No Dope

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall had a piece a few weeks ago (sorry to be so slow… I got a story up on the Facebook page even before Jack’s article, but it’s somewhere on the far side of understatement to say that I’m way behind on my writing) about an elderly couple pulled over by the cops for having a decal of a marijuana leaf on their car. Trouble was, it wasn’t: it was a logo for the Ohio State Buckeyes… you know, that university in Columbus, Ohio that usually fields pretty good sports teams?

Jack is right to chide the journalists involved for not pointing out the obvious 1st amendment issue involved, namely that it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been a marijuana leaf, but I think there’s something else at play here. Fact is, although, like Joe Blundo of the Columbus Dispatch (but unlike a lot of the more national coverage: USA Today, for example), I’d have mentioned the obvious unconstitutionality of the stop, I’d have probably led my story with the colossal stupidity of the officers involved.

Maybe it’s because I’m a college sports fan, with a beloved niece at Ohio State. Maybe it’s because I’m of a certain age, and those of my generation are pretty likely to know what does and does not resemble a marijuana leaf. Maybe it’s because I’m the son of a PhD in botany. Maybe it’s that for the stop to have made any sense (completely apart from its illegality), we’d have to believe that drug kingpins are interested in advertising their business: “Hey, over here. I’m running a dope ring!” In other words, that even if that logo were a marijuana leaf, and even if the 1st amendment didn’t exist, the cops would still be idiots.

But I’m troubled by the implications here. We assume that cops—not all of them, of course, but more than a few proverbial “bad apples”—are stupid. There was even that court case a few years back in which New London, CT successfully defended their right to deny employment opportunities to those who score too high on IQ tests. And the string of idiocies perpetrated by the police, especially with respect to pot, extends so far, both quantitatively and qualitatively, into the realm of the wackadoodle that a gaggle of uniformed mouth-breathers in Tennessee just adds to the collection.

One of the commenters on Jack’s essay points us to a Radley Balko article which enumerates some (frighteningly enough, the list, long and horrifying as it is, isn’t comprehensive) of the “oops” moments in the War on Drugs:

The list of things for which police have waged often violent drug raids after mistaking them for marijuana is a long one. It includes (but likely is not limited to) elderberry bushes, tomato plants (several times), yellow bell pepper plants, umbrella leaf, ragweed, okra, hibiscus, kenaf plants, daisies, the scent of moss, the scent of a skunk, and a plastic plant purchased for a pet lizard's planetarium.

By my count, there have also been at least three incidents in which drug cops have mistakenly raided the home of a current or former mayor.

But there remains something strangely comforting about stories about stupid police officers. They allow us to pass the blame to the incompetent few.

Unfortunately, this strategy not only allows but indeed encourages us to ignore the more systemic problems. Obviously, there are many wonderful policemen and –women who really do believe in the whole “serve and protect” mantra. Too many cops, though, are as arrogant as they are stupid: they went into the business because they couldn’t get a better job, and because they get to swagger around town wearing sidearms and a smirk that aptly conveys their bestial pseudo-superiority.

I’m not talking about the one who stops you for speeding and exaggerates the offense. I’m talking about the one who treats you like a criminal for reporting possible evidence of a crime, who ignores obvious violations when committed by like-minded folks but manufactures reasons to harass those who disagree (whose bumper sticker supports the wrong candidate, for example), whose every action seems a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to compensate for an infinitesimal sex organ.

These officers—a noxious admixture of hubris and boneheadedness—have always been with us. The difference is that they, and more specifically their tactics, are increasingly accepted. At the macro level, we get the greatest single assault on civil liberties since the HUAC Committee: the PATRIOT Act, born of over-reaction and continued by craven capitulation.

At the micro level, the absurdities would be laughable except for the real damage to real people. Pick your story: New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy, which de facto defines suspicious activity as being young, male, and either black or Hispanic; the myriad attacks by police on #Occupy protesters; the jackass transportation cop who killed a suspect who was already immobilized; the idiot with a badge who arrested MC Hammer for the apparent crime of sitting in a car while black.

What all this translates into is that cops increasingly think they’re both invincible and unaccountable. Trouble is, this sentiment is slowly but inexorably becoming accurate. And here is where I must diverge from Jack’s analysis. While placing more blame elsewhere, he also chastises the victim of the harassment, Bonnie Jonas-Boggioni, for not being more confrontational with the idiot cops, for not saying,

“It is none of your business, Officer! The First Amendment gives us the right to display any picture, design or message on our car that we choose, and if you want a civil rights law suit that will bring even more embarrassment to your department and community than the fact that you can’t tell an Ohio State decal from a pot-head manifesto, I suggest you keep doing what you’re doing. Otherwise, back off and let us go on our way.”

I’d offer a couple defenses of their conduct, however. First, this is a cop incompetent enough to mistake a buckeye for a marijuana leaf and to think that someone displaying even the latter wouldn’t have the absolute legal right to do so. Such a sorry excuse for an American, let alone a police officer, is likely to be precisely the kind of armed, arrogant and testosto-moronic jerk who would think himself within his rights to beat up a couple of senior citizens who had the audacity to question his absolute authority to be an assclown.

Secondly, the level of brain-melting inanity represented by the traffic stop is indeed flabbergasting, even for a Tennessee cop. The most difficult questions I have to answer as a college professor aren’t the hard ones, the ones which require nuance or which push the boundaries of my own expertise (“I don’t know” is a much under-utilized response in my profession). No, the hard questions are the stupid ones—“Wasn’t Hitler a Communist?” “There were black people in America in the 1770s?” “How long did the Thirty Years War last?” Sometimes these questions are asked by people who don’t belong in college. More often, they’re posed by bright enough students who either aren’t thinking or who took high school history from the assistant football coach. But it takes a second to recover from the idiocy of the question, and I confess to sometimes being flustered by the ludicrousness of it all. Sometimes I consider Kafka a cockeyed optimist.

Thirdly, Ms. Jonas-Boggioni did indeed defy the “advice” of Officer Idiot to remove the decal “permanently”: “I didn’t take it off…. This little old lady is no drug dealer.” The threshold for civil disobedience seems to have lowered a little since I was a lad, and defiance comes a little cheaper. But when you’re when you’re bellied up to the cantina bar, sometimes it’s wiser to leave the droid outside and just marvel at the view.

Hubris? From a millionaire coach? Who'da thunk it?

Jim Tressel resigned (a.k.a. was fired) today as head football coach at [The] Ohio State University. This was about as unexpected as the news that a number of Americans have fired up their grills over Memorial Day weekend. Tressel was allowed to survive as long as he did at Ohio State for one reason and one reason only: he won a lot of football games. That was, of course, what he was paid to do, and even if he didn’t fare as well as fans would have liked in bowl games, his overall record was outstanding: 106-22 (a better winning percentage than Woody Hayes), a national championship, seven league titles and eight BCS appearances in 10 years. Ohio State had more players (66) drafted by the NFL during Tressel’s regime than any other program. Most importantly to Buckeye fans, he was 9-1 against arch-rival Michigan.

Throughout this time, he managed to maintain a reputation for rectitude that the facts didn’t bear out. He wrote books with nauseating titles like The Winner's Manual: For the Game of Life which contained the predictable mix of Biblical quotations and homey aphorisms: “Discipline is what you do when no one else is looking” and similar treacle. As Bill Livingston of the Cleveland Plain Dealer notes, however, “Nowhere in it does Tressel suggest that withholding information on player wrongdoing from superiors, lying to the NCAA in writing, and knowingly playing ineligible players are behaviors worthy to be emulated.” Jim Tressel is a very good football coach. He is also a liar, a cheat, and a hypocrite.

The scandal that brought him down started in December when a half-dozen Buckeye players, including star quarterback Terrell Pryor, were suspended for accepting improper benefits: selling memorabilia in exchange for cash and discounted tattoos (yes, really). This, unfortunately, is the kind of thing that happens all the time. But Tressel, that presumed paragon, covered it up: he didn’t tell the school’s athletic director, compliance officer, or university president. He did tell Pryor’s hometown “mentor.” And, of course, he lied about it to the NCAA. As Sports Illustrated’s Andy Staples notes, “Tressel did… make a poor choice of NCAA rules to break. An accomplished former coach once told me that the NCAA only considers two violations unforgivable: Getting caught buying a player and getting caught lying to the NCAA. Tressel is guilty of the second, and coaches who get caught lying to the NCAA rarely keep their jobs.”

When he was finally busted, Tressel started spinning his misconduct as an attempt to protect his players. Nonsense: it was an attempt to protect his winning percentage: nothing more and nothing less. Notice, also, that the suspensions were for the first few games of this season, against Ohio State’s traditional cupcake non-conference schedule (to be fair, the 2011 schedule is far tougher than usual). Couldn’t keep those players out of a bowl game just for blatantly and completely intentionally breaking NCAA rules, now could we?

But this is just the latest in a string of improprieties in Tressel’s career, as a précis on the website Bleacher Report suggests: there was the Ray Isaac story, in which the star quarterback reportedly received $10,000 in cash and access to multiple cars (this was when Tressel was at Youngstown State); there was the admission by Santonio Holmes that he was receiving money from an agent; there were the cash and loaner cars to Troy Smith and to Maurice Clarett (not to mention the fact that Clarett almost certainly wasn’t academically eligible). Then, of course, there was the single-game suspension of linebacker Robert Reynolds for choking Wisconsin quarterback Jim Sorgi. Tressel tried to make it sound like suspending Reynolds showed how tough he was on players who got out of line; in fact, of course, Reynolds should have been thrown off the team and probably arrested.

And there may be more to come: Sports Illustrated’s George Dohrmann, the last sportswriter to win a Pulitzer Prize, has a new piece due out today. He’s not shy, tweeting, “I'm told it is likely my SI mag story will be posted at SI.com later today/tonight. Timing of Tress dec. will make sense after you read it.” Hoo boy.

Only a couple months ago, Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee responded to a question about whether Tressel would be fired: “I hope he doesn’t fire me.” Gee, of course, is an idiot, but something clearly happened to precipitate the change of direction. Given the administration’s serial gutlessness over the past decade, it’s likely to be damning.

Perhaps the most telling quotation came from Athletic Director Gene Smith: “We look forward to refocusing the football program on doing what we do best—representing this extraordinary university and its values on the field, in the classroom, and in life.” Unfortunately, this may be the one time someone at Ohio State has told the truth in years: yes, I’m afraid the football program and its manifold transgressions do indeed represent the university’s values. More’s the pity.