Professional football today lost one of it's great coaches with the resignation of Jim Tressel.
It's exhausting to me just to think about how Tressel's resignation will be reported on and interpreted. There will be the "realists" camp that says he "just got caught" and there will be the "moralists" that say he was just another dishonest coach and that the vast majority of coaches do play by the rules. The truth is somewhere in the middle but who cares about the truth?? There really is a much more important issue at stake here and that is the blatant inconsistency of using student athletes to generate billions in profits for universities.
Tressel is clearly guilty of something. My guess is that Tressel thought he had found a perfect "work around" NCAA rules and regulations by stretching but not breaking them. The problem for Coach Tressel is that he was either naive or stupid. One cannot set up a wholesale "work around" operation with numerous persons involved and not understand the inevitability of that system eventually morphing into something abusive. And thus, "tattoo gate" and "used car gate" have come to be Tressel's waterloo.
Some coaches in the NCAA do follow the rules without trying to bend them, but human nature is that when there are hundreds of millions to be made in profits for each university and each coach, it is unrealistic not to expect greed to take over.
There is only one solution. We must put an end to the NCAA "for profit" system. Above all else, the disporportionate undercompensation of players is patently unfair. These athletes have limited years in which their body can endure the punishment of professional football and the current system robs them of four of their best years. A professional system that more closely mirrors professional baseball's minor league system or even better Europe's professional soccer system would eliminate the money from college football and create new professional sports teams and hundreds of paying jobs for football players, who could always get an education once their careers are finished. What would be left for universities are players not good enough to play professionally, in other words, student athletes.
