Catching up is as curious as Gene Chizik

Auburn isn't entirely free and clear: When the NCAA conveniently declared Cam Newton eligible (and therefore everything at Auburn on the up-and-up) just before the SEC title game, I think the assumption everywhere was that the NCAA enforcement people were just giving up on finding any meaningful evidence of wrongdoing.

That might not be the case:

An NCAA official told Auburn coach Gene Chizik that it is not done investigating the Tigers' football program and the recruitment of Cam Newton, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Chizik asked NCAA vice president for enforcement Julie Roe Lach several questions, including why the NCAA had not announced that the Newton investigation was finished, during a presentation at the Southeastern Conference meetings in Destin, Fla., last month.

"You'll know when we're finished," Roe Lach told Chizik, according to several coaches who were at the meeting, the Times reported. "And we're not finished."

This seems potentially significant. If the NCAA hadn't found anything worthwhile in the last eight months, it seems likely that they would have just closed up shop and moved on (it's not like the NCAA is lacking for things to do or places to send its investigators).

On the flipside, if they have found anything significant, how has it not been leaked? Everything gets leaked to somebody, usually Yahoo since their guys are on NCAA violations like white on rice. And we're talking about a $200,000 payment (allegedly, of course), which isn't exactly a $100 handshake -- if there's evidence, it'll be radioactive.

I'll be skeptical until something actually happens, but the fact that the NCAA is still nosing around at least provides some hope of finding the truth behind the super-hard-to-believe cover story that the Newtons (Cecil, at least) just stopped looking for money out of the goodness of their hearts after getting shot down by Mississippi State and conveniently decided to enroll Cam at one of the dirtiest schools in the country.

Michael McAdoo loses in thoroughly unsurprising fashion: In the fastest court case in the history of the legal system, Michael McAdoo lost his lawsuit (the one he filed last week) against North Carolina and the NCAA on Wednesday.

A judge denied a request Wednesday by a former North Carolina football player to be reinstated to the team after being declared permanently ineligible for academic misconduct by the NCAA.

Durham County Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson denied a petition by Michael McAdoo seeking to compel the university to reinstate him while preventing the NCAA from interfering in that process or punishing the school if he returned.

As I've mentioned a few times now, the events of the last year have established that fairness is pretty much irrelevant; the guys at the NCAA do what they want (whateva!). And besides, the players who sign up to be a part of this bass-ackwards system via the NLOI are also signing up to live by the accompanying rules and enforcement. The courts aren't stepping in.

This is becoming a problem: Arizona State lost another starter (kind of) Wednesday, this time senior defensive end James Brooks, who left the program for undisclosed personal reasons. Brooks was one of three nominal starters at end alongside Pac-10 Freshman of the Year Junior Onyeali and Jamaar Jarrett, and he actually had the fewest sacks of the three -- Brooks had four, Jarrett 4.5 and Onyeali 6.5.

But I'm officially getting (a little) concerned about ASU's defense, which was pretty disappointing last year -- 57th in yards allowed and 55th in scoring -- and has now lost uber-corner/legitimate first-team All-America candidate Omar Bolden (torn ACL), defensive tackle Lawrence Guy (left early to be a seventh-round pick) and Brooks. For a team with astronomical hopes and a Rose Bowl twinkle in its collective eye, those are some serious holes.

Brooks' loss won't be super significant if Onyeali and Jarrett can stay healthy, but depth isn't a meaningless thing on the defensive line, and losing a guy who's a senior and two-year starter is a negative no matter which way you cut it.

On the bright side, we'll always have the Arizona game:


Mike Vrabel hired as Ohio State's linebackers coach: You already know about this since it happened like four days ago. A few thoughts:

1. It's a good hire in "name" terms by Luke Fickell, who was the linebackers coach before his way-up-the-ladder promotion and was actually Vrabel's roommate back in the day.
   
2. Mike Vrabel was a pretty damn good linebacker, but nobody has any idea whether he'll be a good coach -- he has zero experience whatsoever, and outside of saying "I'm Mike Vrabel, here's a Super Bowl ring so come to Ohio State," he doesn't bring any known coaching-specific qualities to the table.
   
3. It's an interesting move picking recognition over experience, especially for a guy who grew up at the feet of Jim Tressel. Cheatypants McSweatervest (as he heretofore shall forever be known) made a career out of finding and developing irritatingly good defensive positional coaches and coordinators.
   

A rough week for West Virginia: Spectacularly named West Virginia linebacker Branko Busick -- a backup last season -- got himself kicked off the team with an arrest for armed robbery (!) on Monday, and the news didn't get any better Wednesday:

West Virginia left guard Josh Jenkins will miss this season after undergoing surgery on his left knee.

Ouch. Jenkins is a senior who started almost every game the past two years (he did miss two games last season after knee surgery) -- Jeff Braun is now expected to slide over from right tackle to start in his place at guard.

For a team some people are plugging as a darkhorse national title contender out of the pathetic Big East, losing one of the best and most experienced players on the O-line in the summer before his senior season -- and then shuffling to make up for it in fall camp -- seems like a not-so-good start.

Caleb King enters supplemental draft: This was pretty much a given since his career ended last week with the academic-ineligibility ruling. King has some talent -- that's the only thing he consistently displayed at Georgia -- but given his lack of overall production, inability to hold the starting job and off-the-field (ahem) issues, he's probably a seventh-round flyer or undrafted free agent.

Catching up is brief due to All-Star obligations

The perfect comparison: I'm not sure my post Friday properly summarized my incredulity at Ohio State's self-imposed "punishment." Blaming everything on Tressel and then refusing to punish him in any way, shape or form (apparently because he looks so sad) is something I just can't reconcile. Trying to understand it makes my head asplode.

Fortunately for me, MGoBlog reader WolvinLA came up with the most perfect analogy in the history of analogies:

What if I did that to myself when I got in trouble - no punishment for the future, but only past punishment:

"Honey, I know you just caught me sexting my ex-gfs, so I'll punish myself. Instead of you denying me sex for the next year, I'll no longer take credit for any of the sex we've had for the last year."

That's the equivalent to how OSU punished themselves.

I have nothing to add here.

Caleb King's relatively disappointing career comes to an end: Three years ago, Caleb King was the next big thing at Georgia, ready to take over and be Knowshon Moreno (or something of similar quality). That never happened, and after three uninspiring seasons, King was ruled academically ineligible on Friday, effectively ending his career. He shuffles off the college coil with all of 1,241 rushing yards and 10 touchdowns.

King ended up getting stuck behind Washaun Ealey the last two years and was more or less the change-of-pace guy, so his departure wouldn't be a huge concern ... except for the part about Ealey getting kicked out of school (or "leaving," depending on whom you believe) in May. Having zero experienced running backs is a problem, yes?

When Mark Richt says there's an opportunity "for others to step up," he's looking squarely at one 18-year-old kid: Isaiah Crowell, last year's top-rated running back recruit in the country. Crowell has yet to play a game but has already been anointed (a) the presumptive starter and (b) The Absolute Most Important Player in the History of Georgia Football (this year, anyway).

If he's not Herschel Walker, some people will be massively disappointed. And even if he is, unless he has Lance Armstrong-esque endurance (insert EPO joke here) and is made of Teflon, the complete lack of depth at running back will be an issue.

No pressure, kid.

LSU and Cal join the party: We already knew this from the Yahoo investigation, so I'm not sure why it's coming out as "news" again, but LSU and Cal each paid Willie Lyles around $5,000 for some sort of 2010 recruiting package that may or may not have included anything legitimate.

Whether or not they did anything wrong is up to the NCAA to find out, but their level of culpability doesn't approach Oregon's for the following reasons:

1. There's no record or accusation of the coach signing off on massive payments for nothing in particular.
2. Lyles said those schools -- unlike Oregon, obviously -- kept careful inventory of exactly what was being provided, either to actually have a record of the information (if there was any) or to cover their asses in the event of an Oregon-style disaster. Either way, consider their asses covered.
3. Those $5,000 payments are far more in line with legitimate recruiting services, so it's at least plausible that they were getting fair value, whereas Oregon was either blatantly cheating or just getting bent over.

The most interesting thing in ESPN's update was the last freakin' line of the story (something I must have missed earlier):

Lyles also told Yahoo! Sports he was interviewed by the NCAA for six hours last month.

If he sang to the NCAA like he sang to Yahoo, it might not be as long as we thought until a notice of allegations comes out and Chip Kelly's collar gets a little lot tighter.

Work-related site note: As you may have noticed, the postings have gotten a little less frequent. This is not due to a lack of effort on my part; blame the Diamondbacks for hosting the All-Star Game (the one nobody wants to play in), which has piled endless amounts of work on me this week. I'll be basically out of commission through Tuesday, so unless Ohio State explodes off the face of the Earth or Nick Saban signs a billion-dollar contract with (insert NFL team here), don't expect anything more on the site until Wednesday. But definitely come back then.

Ohio State will not respect your authoritah

The downside of having a job is that it consumes my all-important blogging time and demands that I prioritize my daily activities, with "things that make money" coming in first on the list. Hence my late reaction to this:

Ohio State is vacating its wins from the 2010 football season, including its share of the Big Ten championship and the Buckeyes' victory over Arkansas in the 2011 Allstate Sugar Bowl.

Responding to the NCAA's investigation of a memorabilia-for-cash scandal that cost former coach Jim Tressel his job and led to star quarterback Terrelle Pryor leaving school, the university also said Friday it is waiving a $250,000 fine imposed on Tressel and changing his resignation to a retirement. The move contradicts a comment university president Gordon Gee made last month when he said Tressel "will pay the fine."

Calling this a slap on the wrist would be an insult to the concept of a slap on the wrist, which at least causes some non-zero level of pain. We've known for months now that OSU/Tressel knowingly played ineligible players -- any games those guys participated in last year were going to be vacated, and that was basically the starting point for punishment. In other words, this was literally the least Ohio State could do.

This is not surprising in the slightest. Throughout the entire process, the laughably incompetent Ohio State administration (led by Orville Redenbacher) has been saying things like "this is an isolated event" and "I just hope the coach doesn't dismiss ME" and blah blah blah, and they've been sweeping things under the rug only to have them come flying back out directly into their collective face. Their goal has been to admit nothing, do nothing of relevance and just hope the NCAA won't find enough proof or motivation to hammer them.

I didn't expect them to change their strategy now.

Here's the complete sum of self-imposed "penalties":

• Loss of all 2010 wins (a given from the beginning)
• Two years of probation

Amazing. They also managed to remove some of the original punishment, saying "don't worry about the fine, Jimmy -- happy Easter to you." So yeah ... the coach who covered up years of extensive NCAA violations is off into his cushy, parade-honored "retirement" with no official punishment whatsoever. I mean ... whaa??? This would be flat-out unbelievable if it weren't coming from the same school that originally thought a two-game suspension would be fair punishment.

It's one thing to snub your nose at the NCAA; it's another to laugh directly in its face.

A not-insignificant notation goes here: This announcement is in response ONLY to the NCAA's original notice of allegations, the one that came out a few months ago following the original TatGate investigation and coverup. This was before all the car stuff, before the Sports Illustrated reports, before the Dennis Talbott allegations. And with all that craziness not yet included, OSU had little motivation -- other than appeasing the NCAA, which isn't a bad idea but has been off their radar so far -- to do much of anything now that Tressel is gone.

The message: Tressel was a naughty boy who has been badly punished via retirement (?), and nobody left behind should have to suffer for his silly misdeeds (which of course should be considered meaningless next to his near-biblical acts of greatness).

That argument worked so well for USC, yes?

OSU is past the point of covering up and is now publicly challenging the NCAA: Punish us. Prove that "the cost of violating the rules costs more than not violating them," as NCAA prez Mark Emmert claims.

The ball's in your court, Emmert. Authoritah FTW on August 12.


NOTE: No, Michigan doesn't get credit for a win, and the OSU win streak isn't over. The 2010 game just gets erased from the record books, which doesn't change the horrifically depressing fact that Michigan hasn't beaten OSU since (gulp) 2003.

Catching up shakes its head at Ohio

Janzen Jackson re-enrolls at Tennessee: After leaving school in the the spring to deal with "personal problems" that (to my knowledge) never became public, safety Janzen Jackson re-enrolled at Tennessee for summer classes on Wednesday and is "expected to be a full participant when training camp begins." This is pretty fantastic news for Derek Dooley on two levels:

1. Jackson is good (duh) -- probably the best player on the team, actually. He was named second-team All-SEC last year as a sophomore after finishing with five picks and 69 tackles.
2. UT has zero depth. I'm not sure exactly what the count is currently, but when Dooley took over before last season, the Vols had something like 72 (or some similarly terrifying number) of scholarship players. A big part of that was the seemingly loaded '09 recruiting class, which had two five-stars -- Jackson and the legendary Bryce Brown -- and a bunch of other talent but has now been reduced to less than half its original size just two years later.

Assuming Jackson's "personal problems" haven't robbed him of some amount of on-field ability, he returns as probably the second-best safety in the SEC (Mark Barron at Alabama being the best) and represents a massive chip in Tennessee's bid for a second straight uninspiring bowl game that won't mean anything other than big-picture progress.

We celebrate our country's independence and our cheating coaches:

I find this both sad and not at all surprising. Just beat Michigan and we will honor you by dressing our children in your ridiculous attire despite your absurdly hypocritical lack of morality.

Ohio!

Michael McAdoo is pissed, yo: Former North Carolina defensive end Michael McAdoo -- who was stripped of his remaining eligibility as part of the UNC academic shenanigans -- is suing the NCAA and the school because he claims "inaccurate information" was used in the decision to end his career.

The argument:

McAdoo's lawyers argue that the school's Honor Court found him guilty of only one infraction: representing another's work as his own after Wiley had formatted in-text citations and the "works cited" page for websites used to prepare his research paper.

The school's Honor Court decided to suspend him from school for the spring semester but allow him to re-enroll in the summer and then return to the football team this fall. It cleared him in a second case and the student attorney general decided there was insufficient evidence to pursue a third against him.

He had also received $110 in improper benefits. Most of that was connected to a trip to the Washington, D.C., area with teammates Marvin Austin and Greg Little, prompting the school to hold him out for the first three games of last season.

So the $110 in benefits (gasp) was the basis for the three-game suspension last year, and the school decided to suspend him from spring football this year after the "citation" issue (which does seem a little shady based on Jennifer Wiley's alleged let-me-help-you-with-that involvement with the rest of the team).

But if that's really all there was to it -- and the school Honor Court is probably as good a source as any when we're talking about academic misconduct -- it does seem a little ridiculous that he permanently lost his eligibility due to basically one allegation of cheating that the school basically wrote off as "meh, not that bad" and was officially determined to be an extra benefit worth $11 (srsly).

That said, I don't understand why the school is named in the lawsuit when it obviously wasn't UNC's decision to revoke his eligibility, and the NCAA is a third party specifically authorized by member schools to write and implement rules, so good luck in court -- especially when this is the goal:

The lawsuit seeks to compel chancellor Holden Thorp to reinstate McAdoo while also preventing the NCAA from interfering in the process or punishing the school if McAdoo returns.

Yeah ... probably not. Important disclaimer: I'm no law-talkin' guy.

Dee Hart's freshman season ends before it began: Ahhh, Demetrius Hart. The one-time gem of Rich Rodriguez's 2011 recruiting class who bolted for Alabama when it became pretty obvious that RichRod was dangling in the wind at Michigan, Hart tore it up in spring ball and seemed to be in line for some serious playing time behind Trent Richardson this year.

And then this happened:

Alabama running back Demetrius Hart will miss the 2011 season after the freshman injured his knee Tuesday night, sources confirmed Wednesday.

Hart, who enrolled early and was impressive in spring practice, is scheduled to undergo surgery later this week after suffering the injury during voluntary workouts, according to the sources.

Ouch. Given the typical impact of an ACL tear and Alabama's absurd talent pool, this probably means a lot more to Hart than it does to Bama. He'll take his redshirt year to rehab and presumably be in the mix for the starting job next year after Richardson leaves for first-round gold in the NFL draft.

Purdue running back Sean Matti found dead: The headline says it all. Matti was apparently at some sort of party on or around Lake Freeman (which isn't far from West Lafayette) when he was reported missing, and he was found dead in the water the next day.

Matti was a senior walk-on who had never touched the ball or done anything of note (other than probably bust his ass for a spot on the team), but that doesn't make it any less sad. He was 22.

America Day

It's a fine day to celebrate our country, despite it being roughly 6 million degrees outside right now. So whether your thing is a spectacular J Leman-esque tie or an impromptu speech following a typically nonsensical Chris Myers question on national TV, do it in style.

Sometimes nonsense is awesome

This video is equal parts weird, confusing (srsly WTF) and hilariously awesome:


I'm not sure if my favorite part was "the instructor is an adult male who contains 40 years" or "the boys of cow must increase their speed." So full of win.

Still, this is far from the strangest quasi-college-football-related video I've ever come across. That title will (probably) forever belong to whatever this thing is.

Will Lyles throws Oregon under the bus

The cover has been blown off the weird "here's some money for some recruits" relationship between Oregon and wannabe agent Will Lyles, as Yahoo's Dan Wetzel and Charles Robinson -- who are on a freakin' roll with their various investigative reports this year -- published an in-depth interview Friday in which Lyles sings like a canary with all kinds of delicious details.

The takeaway: Oregon worked with Lyles exclusively for his "access" to Texas kids (specifically Lache Seastrunk) and agreed to pay $25,000 to help him start up a recruiting service that would provide them with nothing of substance, and when Chip Kelly realized that this was (a) stupid and (b) going to come out publicly, he asked Lyles to put together a bunch of recruiting information retroactively so he'd have something to show the NCAA.

A couple of particularly crushing excerpts:

"I look back at it now and they paid for what they saw as my access and influence with recruits," Lyles told Yahoo! Sports. "The service I provided went beyond what a scouting service should. I made a mistake and I'm big enough of a man to admit I was wrong." ...

Lyles said Oregon never asked him for written profiles of any players from March 2010 until February 2011. When the request came, Lyles said, he believed it was because Oregon wanted to establish that he had provided legitimate scouting services. ...

Lyles’ intimate involvement with Seastrunk’s letter of intent came just weeks after Kelly and Oregon agreed to be Complete Scouting Service’s first client. It also was after Lyles filed the founding documents of his company. That places him under the jurisdiction of the NCAA as an active recruiting service provider.

So ... that all sounds pretty bad.

It's not as bad as it could be -- Lyles is pretty adamant that he did NOT pay any recruits (why share, amirite?), which would be the nuclear explosion we've all been waiting for -- but it's pretty bad.

The problem is the same as when everything first came out: Either Lyles wasn't running a recruiting service and was getting paid for his (ahem) persuasive abilities or he was a recruiting service and was getting paid for his persuasive abilities. He's readily admitted that he provided nothing of real value other than his creepy knowledge of how to connect with his naive and malleable high school buddies -- the rest is just semantics. The emails, phone records and various notes are all pretty benign and don't add any exciting dirt to the pile, but they don't need to.

The funny thing (not in a "haha" sense) is that my first reaction to Oregon's involvement was "well yeah, this is pretty bad, but Chip Kelly's not gonna get fired or anything" ... and then I got to this part:

Lyles said they requested printed reports on Class of 2011 prep prospects, ones that had already signed letters of intent, as soon as possible.

“So I just threw it together.”

Lyles said he took old profiles off a computer, copied some information from elsewhere and tried to accumulate a last-minute recruiting package. He said he never bothered to consider the quality because he felt Oregon didn’t care.

“They were covering their tracks,” Lyles said. “They were covering their asses. They were scrambling.”

Prepare your distressed politician face, Chip Kelly. The coverup is ALWAYS worse than the crime (just ask Cheatypants McSweatervest).

I honestly have no idea whether Kelly's job is in immediate jeopardy, but we can expect the following things:

1. Some sort of contrite or defiant public statement;
2. An NCAA investigation;
3. Punishment that may or may not make Kelly unemployable (this is dependent on both his response and what exactly the NCAA believes Lyles was doing in exchange for his hefty paychecks).

The second and third items on that list will be tedious and slow, maybe even slow enough that the whole issue will have drifted out of the public consciousness and Kelly will be salvageable if Oregon wins a lot of games and stops doing stupid, rule-shattering things.

But given the vengeful axe the NCAA has been wielding of late, it's probably not the best time to find out. Paying middlemen has been known to be a coach- and program-destroying tactic.