A year ago, Jim Tressel said he saw himself as only a caretaker at Ohio State. This week, at its preseason meetings, the Big Ten goes on without him.
View full size"[Ohio State] has some history that we don't have our fingerprints on, and it will have a lot in the future that we won't," former OSU coach Jim Tressel said at the 2010 Big Ten preseason meetings, when he was the only one who knew that he had withheld information about potentially ineligible players to his superiors and the NCAA. "But right now, we're the caretakers, and we're trying to take care of it the best we can."COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Jim Tressel hurried through the hallways of Chicago's McCormick Place a year ago, briefly interrupting a conversation on his life and legacy to greet friend and Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio with a hearty, "Dino!" then engaging a young, shoeless woman near the escalator.
"Your feet sore or something?" Tressel asked with a smile. "You look like you feel good, so that's good."
At the time, the same could have been said of Tressel, who was wearing dress shoes with his suit. Approaching a decade at Ohio State, Tressel on the outside had plenty of reasons to feel good. His Buckeyes were the Big Ten favorites once again, quarterback Terrelle Pryor was the conference's preseason player of the year and nearly everyone at Ohio State, from his players to his bosses to the Board of Trustees, loved what Tressel was doing.
Yet at that moment, Tressel had known for three months the information that would eventually cost him his job. He'd told no one at Ohio State, and hadn't told his wife, yet he knew that the NCAA violations committed by Pryor and receiver DeVier Posey with Columbus tattoo parlor owner Ed Rife would eventually catch up with them and program. By then he believed the criminal case with Rife had been tied up, but he still didn't know what it meant to his players, his program or his future.
Then he went on and talked about what he'd meant to Ohio State, and then went back to Columbus and prepared to coach a football team that, in the end, was a bad first half against Wisconsin away from playing for the national title.
As the Big Ten prepares for its preseason meetings next Thursday and Friday, it's jarring to think about what the conference will be like without the coach who dominated it for a decade. We've known since his Memorial Day resignation, but this week the 2011 Big Ten football season begins without Tressel.
For months he's been seen only in an NCAA context, but now we're reminded again, one last time, of what Tressel did on the field, because in the end, this is about football.
Tressel won seven Big Ten titles in 10 seasons, at least before the 2010 season and co-championship were vacated because of those NCAA violations. The 12 current coaches in the conference, in a combined 53 years in the league, have won a total of seven titles. Among current coaches, Wisconsin's Bret Bielema would have to go 39-1 over the next five years to win as many conference games in his first decade as Tressel did. No one else is close.
This is not a conference, outside of Penn State's Joe Paterno, teeming with coaching personality. The Big Ten isn't like the SEC, where Florida can wave goodbye to Urban Meyer and the conference can still burn up Twitter when, for instance, LSU's Les Miles, South Carolina's Steve Spurrier or Alabama's Nick Saban has something to say. Tressel, in his own way, as a brand, as a winner, as a topic of conversation, will leave a void, though there will be plenty of talk in Chicago about the reasons he is gone.
Just as fascinating, in light of the 140-page transcript of Tressel's February interview with the NCAA that was released Friday, is to ponder what Tressel carried around with him last season, while only Columbus lawyer Chris Cicero, Pryor mentor Ted Sarniak and the players themselves knew what was going on. In his final, winning season, Tressel was either able to block out or ignore what he thought may have been a drug ring that could bring down his program, or he thought about it every day and went about his business with his stomach in knots.
Consider this Tressel NCAA testimony of what he was thinking after his last email from Cicero in early June.
"Let's prepare ourselves mentally for the inevitable, because something's gonna come -- the phone's gonna ring and something's coming," Tressel said. "The worst-case scenario, they're going to prison with Eddie Rife. Maybe they're selling drugs. Maybe they're using drugs.
"I guess best-case scenario, you know, they're selling memorabilia and let's -- we'll take care of that. They know better than that. You know, I don't have a problem addressing that. And I wrote a little note down ... which was, 'When the Feds are ready, we will find out the extent of our guys' involvement.'"
As he spoke at these Big Ten meetings a year ago, Tressel didn't know if the Feds would be ready the next day, the next week, the next month or the next year. We know now the word came down in December, which led to the suspensions of Pryor, Posey and others. Tressel called that news "the hallelujah letter," because by then he knew his players wouldn't face criminal charges, just NCAA issues.
But as he readied for what would be his 10th and final season with the Buckeyes, Tressel knew only that two of his best players were in trouble, and he was keeping a secret. In that hallway in Chicago, he knew I wanted to talk about the fact that he was coming up on a decade in his dream job.
"[Ohio State] has some history that we don't have our fingerprints on, and it will have a lot in the future that we won't," Tressel said. "But right now, we're the caretakers, and we're trying to take care of it the best we can.
"If you go back and look at the last 100 seasons of college football, the team with the highest winning percentage is Ohio State. That's over the last 100 years. I would say we're caretakers."
In the moment, it seemed mostly like a humble brushoff and a nod to the great tradition he intimately understood. Now, it perhaps seems like more, as if he knew he wouldn't be back in Chicago this week.
Thursday, the Big Ten goes on without him.
Source: http://www.cleveland.com/osu/index.ssf/2011/07/big_ten_preseason_meetings_pre.html
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