On the heels of Matt Hayes' devastatingly overstated essay, "How Urban Meyer Broke Florida Football," published last week in The Sporting News, comes a follow-up being bandied about as absolute proof of that first piece. A local Gainesville TV Station interviewed Chris Rainey and questioned the former Gator running back about the central charge levied by Hayes---that Urban Meyer gave preferential treatment to certain players, treatment that ultimately "broke" Florida football by creating a culture of entitlement around the program. Rainey supported the accusation with a brief quote, alleging that there were "certain players, (that) even coaches were scared of."

The Sporting News soon latched onto Rainey's comment as corroborating evidence, commissioning another piece about Meyer and his deficiencies from writer David Whitley, who, presumably, makes a decent living penning this stuff. To put it mildly, the first piece by Hayes was not an investigation, despite the claim, but a gathering of well-known facts and the acquisition of a few anonymous quotes. It was troubling in the sense that a documentary about unhealthy fast food is troubling; we've had the suspicion that something was off, and now that we know for sure, we take one extra second before returning to the cheeseburger.

I accept almost every claim in the original article, as I accept most nasty rumors about college football programs--it's a matter of cynical distance, really. That's not to say, of course, that there aren't numerous reasons to question a salacious article driven by anonymous sources, especially when the sources come from a program whose fortunes plummeted following the departure of the individual presently at swordpoint.

Yet I reject, as every serious person must, the sanctimonious tone dripping from the prose and the brash expectation that we should be shocked and offended at the allegations. College football players receive opportunities that normal students don't? The best players find more favor with their coaches than the worst? You don't say, Poirot?

I would rather Urban Meyer not make concessions for unsavory characters, but I have enough critical faculty to recognize that the world is undemocratic, and blessedly so. Not everyone deserves the same treatment and equal is no synonym for fair. If certain players earned special rewards under Meyer's system, as a few Buckeyes have already done with their inclusion in the Champion's Club, then so be it. Coaches must win to retain their plush offices and high salaries, and keeping the best players motivated and performing is the only way to do so. Nick Saban, Les Miles, Gene Chizik, winners of the last six BCS Championships, all have mechanisms in place to ensure their best players keep winning games.

Percy Harvin sounds like every narcissistic athlete praised for his ability to gallop over other skills you would hope to find at a university. There are Percy Harvins and Chris Raineys at every school, I assure you, including multiple at Ohio State right now. They arrived yesterday, pre-Urban, and pre-Tressel, and pre-Cooper, too. They were formed in middle and high school, when they learned that adults would swaddle them in attention and praise the more touchdowns they scored.

Percy Harvins are rewarded because they do something few others can, and our culture values it. When we stop caring how fast someone can run, or how many touchdowns a person can throw, our entitlement culture for athletes will vanish like Marley's Ghost, disappearing behind a flash of greed. Of course, ESPN and Yahoo! and Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News will then follow.

Bernie Fine, who has been accused by four men of sexual abuse while they were ball boys at Syracuse in the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s, was the victim of at least one malicious lie. Zach Tomaselli, the fourth man to accuse Fine, has admitted to fabricating his entire story, allegedly at the behest of one of the other three accusers, Bobby Davis.

In a phone interview with CNYCentral, Tomaselli said "It was a game to me. It was fun trying to make this story come alive." By email, Tomaselli expanded his admission. "I NEVER met Bernie fine or went to an autograph session. I sat in the nosebleeds at the Pitt game at the (Carrier) Dome in '03 but that is it. I lied."

For five months, Tomaselli maintained the claim that he was molested by Fine in a hotel room in Pittsburgh following a Syracuse game in 2002-03. Along with filing a police report and cooperating with prosecutors, Tomaselli traveled the media circuit repeating his story to every station dealing in salacious detail, including CNN and ESPN. On November 29th, Tomaselli went on Anderson Cooper's daytime television show and paraded his story around in front of a national audience.

Tomaselli, who himself is a pedophile, will serve three years and three months in prison for abusing a teenager at a summer camp in Maine. If the state charges him for filing a false police report, as they almost certainly will, or should Fine wish to pursue defamation damages, he could face further time in prison and compensation demands for his harmful lie. When pressed why he fabricated an entire narrative, and stuck to it so desperately, Tomaselli revealed himself as both a pathological liar and potential sociopath.

"I don't have feelings most of the time. I just hate people without caring," Tomaselli stated, before adding that he had been abused in the past and hated the Syracuse basketball program because it beat his favorite team, Kansas, in the 2003 NCAA championship game.

Bobby Davis, the Fine accuser Tomaselli has accused of feeding him information about Fine, has denied the claim that he provided details that helped Tomaselli's story gain traction. Whatever the case, Tomaselli's actions have muddled a serious investigation and cast doubt upon an innocent victim, whether it be Fine or Davis. Fine could still be guilty of the abuse allegations levied at him by the other three men, and Davis could be every bit the victim he claims. Or he and his fellow accusers could be perpetrating a cruel ruse that ruined the dignity and moral good standing of one man.

Tomaselli's revelation does nothing to calm the dust and reveal the ultimate truth, other than his own mental capacity for evil.

The Ohio High School Athletic Association voted to add an additional division to their playoff structure after years of debate about how well the Division I field represented the student size of each school. A new revised division system will split the top ten percent of schools based on enrollment from the rest, creating a new Division I filled with the biggest schools in Ohio. The remaining 644 schools will then be evenly divided between the next six divisions. OHSAA commissioner Daniel B. Ross highlighted the benefits of the new division structure.

"Adding a seventh division not only helps address the enrollment disparity in Division I, but it also will create 32 more tournament opportunities for student-athletes, their schools and their communities, many of which have never or rarely experienced the playoffs," Ross said. "The committee members believe that this is an issue unique to football, especially since not all schools qualify for the OHSAA football tournament."

The proponents for adding another division argued that the biggest schools were behemoths and shared few characteristics with their more moderate Division I competition. Under the old rules, come playoff time, it was possible that a school like Mentor, buoyed by a student body 3,200 strong, could face an opponent half its size. The distribution of football talent being a somewhat haphazard phenomenon, of course, there is no absolute guarantee that more students will equal a better football team, but there is more room for error. If ten percent of the student population joins the football team at every school in Ohio, the odds are greater for a good squad at a school like Mentor than at North Royalton where the student population tops out slightly above 1,000 individuals.

News Net 5, the web presence of a Northeast Ohio news station, projected the new divisional breakdowns based on the number of male students enrolled at each school.

Division I – 600 to 1,164

Division II – 410 to 599;

Division III – 288 to 409;

Division IV – 216 to 287

Division V – 159 to 215;

Division VI – 114 to 158

Division VII – 30 to 111.