the tindog coffeehouse

On Monday, Ohio State coach and sweater vest aficionado Jim Tressel was forced to resign as a Sports Illustrated exposé revealed that the recent scandal concerning football players trading Buckeye memorabilia for tattoos, money, and possibly drugs actually went much further than originally reported. According to SI, such NCAA violations stretched back all the way to his days as coach at Youngstown State in the mid ’90s. Any time a player violation was exposed, SI argues, Tressel would claim he didn’t know anything about it. Yet the pattern was so widespread and so ingrained into the culture of both schools, that it would be virtually impossible for the head coach to be completely ignorant of them. And emails obtained by The Columbus Dispatch prove that he did at least know about the latest violations concerning quarterback Terrelle Pryor and others but never notified the university or the NCAA.

The most damning part of the SI article, though, is the description of Tressel as both “the Christian who lifted kids out of troubled neighborhoods” and “the coach who claimed to have been kept in the dark after he had assiduously avoided the light.”

In other words, he wasn’t just ignorant of violations, he consciously chose — time and again — to look the other way, all while maintaining his straight-laced Christian image.

Of course, scandals involving celebrities, pro athletes, and politicians are nothing new, and compared to a lot of other recent scandals, Tressel’s transgressions may seem rather minimal. But they’re not. At the very least, he actively ignored a systemic pattern of corruption; at worst, he actually encouraged it. Either way, he’s guilty of not putting an end to it when he had the opportunity.

As is so often the case, Tressel’s sin wasn’t just a single occurrence, a momentary lapse in judgment. It may have started that way, but clearly it grew over time, much like in the Biblical account of David and Bathsheba. In David’s case, it started with him noticing a woman taking a bath. Had he turned away and ended it there, it wouldn’t have been any big deal. But he chose to take it a little further, asking who she was. Then further by having her brought to him so he could have sex with her. Had he ended it there and repented, there would’ve been consequences, but at least it would’ve been over. Instead, he covered it up, and had Bathsheba not gotten pregnant, it would’ve been hidden forever. When she revealed that she was with child, David again could’ve admitted to his mistakes, but he didn’t. He hatched a plan for Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, to sleep with her so that he would think the child was his. When that failed, David once more chose not to come clean and instead had Uriah killed. What had started as a rather innocuous accident had snowballed into a devastating scandal that cost an innocent man his life and nearly cost David his.

The point is this: I don’t think Jim Tressel ever set out in his coaching career planning on fostering an environment of corruption, but that’s what Ohio State became in part due to the smaller, incremental choices that he made along the way. And the same thing can happen to anyone. What seems like a rather innocent mistake with few repercussions can quickly escalate if we don’t deal with it immediately.

The scandal involving Tressel and Ohio State is still unfolding and may not be fully understood for quite some time, but if nothing else, it should serve as a warning to each of us of the dangers of avoiding the light.

Previously:
What happens next?
‘Sin is a condition, not necessarily an action’
Longhorns Inc., Part 2
Sorry, Leach is not ‘the best college football coach in the country’