NCAA formally charges Jim Tressel with lies, coverup of OSU violationsInitially, before coach Jim Tressel was outed for essentially lying to his bosses and the NCAA, it looked like Ohio State was getting off kind of easy. In exchange for OSU's cooperation, the NCAA was willing to play good cop. It could have suspended five ineligible players who allegedly sold and/or bartered memorabilia to a local tattoo shop for the Sugar Bowl, but it didn't. It could have declared all five players retroactively ineligible and stricken all eleven Buckeye wins in 2010 from the books, along with their share of the Big Ten title, but it didn't. It could have gone after Ohio State the way it went after USC, in search of bowl bans and significant scholarship losses, but it didn't. In the wake of the sledgehammer that fell on the Trojans last summer, the punishment for Ohio State — a straightforward five-game suspension for four of the offending players to start the 2011 season, games the Buckeyes are likely to win, anyway — seemed minimal, perfunctory. Which is one of the reasons it made so many people so angry, or confused, or both.
That, of course, was before Tressel's long-running, deliberate coverup of the violations saw the light of day, and before it became clear that the NCAA — and possibly the higher-ups at Ohio State themselves — had been misled by one of the most respected men in the profession. What cooperation will buy you in leniency, deception will buy in retribution, and the NCAA began to extract its pound of flesh Friday with an official notice of allegations to the university.
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