As Jim Tressel was booking his flight for a mandatory NCAA compliance seminar next month, more questions arose over the integrity of the Ohio State football coach’s program. The school announced over the weekend that they would be reviewing car sales from two Columbus-area dealerships to at least eight Ohio State football players and their families. More than 50 sales from 2004 to 2010 will be under investigation.
Public records show that in 2009, a 2-year-old Chrysler 300 with less than 20,000 miles was titled to then-sophomore linebacker Thaddeus Gibson. Documents show the purchase price as $0.
Mauk could not explain it. “I don’t give cars for free,” he said. Gibson said he was unaware the title on his car showed zero as the sales price. “I paid for the car, and I’m still paying for it,” he said, declining to answer further questions.
To be fair, that’s about as much as I would pay for an American car these days.
But the Buckeyes are giving us an argument to bring the NCAA’s death penalty–a one-year ban from competition–back to Division I football for the first time since Texas’s Southern Methodist got the chair in 1987.
If both this and the “Tat Five” investigations are determined by the NCAA to be major violations, Ohio State would be slapped with the “repeat violator” label, placing the football program within the proper criteria for such a ban. Of course, Jim Tressel probably knew all about this, but just wasn’t sure who to tell about it. Oh, quiet Jimmy. I bet when he was nine years old, he was a Catholic priest’s wet dream.
