NCAA: Justice is a Dish Best Served Cold

One year ago tomorrow, Ohio State announced that five players would serve five-game suspensions apiece for their involvement in a tit-for-tattoos scandal. Today, after a tumultuous year of media brutality, suspensions and the loss of its head coach, the NCAA said to Ohio State: 'no soup for you.'

The oft-criticized organization, inconsistent on its best days and hypocritical on an average one, added a one-year bowl ban (served in 2012) and additional loss of four scholarships to Ohio State's self-imposed probation and docking of five grant-in-aids over a 3-year period. The message, though, is still unclear. After all, who's being punished? The players and coach involved in the scandal will all be gone.

It seems, to be honest, that Ohio State dismissing Jim Tressel, forfeiting bowl monies earned from last year's Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas and 31 games in suspensions of involved players en route to a 6-6 season should have been punishment enough. Instead, the NCAA has opted to cave to the righteous indignation that permeates throughout the media and college football fandom. See how quickly opposing fans would do an about-face when the shoe is on the other foot.

In fact, last year when it was determined that the five players found to have traded tattoos in exchange for memorabilia and autographs would be allowed to play in the Sugar Bowl, people went universally bananas over the decision. How, they asked, could athletes possibly be allowed to delay their punishment? In an ironic twist, those same people are nowhere to be found wondering why the NCAA could let Ohio State participate this year in the (meaningless) Gator Bowl and force it to serve a bowl ban next year when the stakes would assuredly be higher under new head coach Urban Meyer. See anyone complaining about it now? Double-standard, indeed.

Make no mistake, however, Ohio State is not without blame.

Major collegiate athletics is a culture of winning. Ohio State is the largest university in the country, over 50,000 strong with nearly 500,000 living alumni, and is located in a major metropolitan area. Whereas a university such as Penn State, which we've recently learned is not immune to corruption, is at least sheltered and isolated in a smaller college town. Nonetheless, when Jim Tressel learned of his players' possessions turning up in the home of now-convicted tattoo parlor owner Edward Rife, he had a moral and legal obligation to adhere to NCAA code and turn in the possible violations.

Tressel, for his part, has been issued a five-year show-cause penalty by the NCAA, meaning if any institution seeks to hire him, they must make a case to the NCAA why it should not also be punished as a result of his hire. No institution, of course, would be desperate enough to accept those terms, rendering Tressel practically unable to be hired until 2016 at the earliest.

Though Tressel and seven different players served their sentence -- an eighth, Terrelle Pryor left this past summer for the NFL Supplemental Draft -- the NCAA has opted to deliver justice as defined by the outraged public rather than by practicality. The public won. Justice was not blind, she was partial and she was vindictive.

Until the system changes, this punishment only serves to effect the innocent. No player will be any less inclined to accept impermissible benefits. No coach is going to be any more willing to intervene when they do so. And the culture is most certainly not a deterrent for boosters at Ohio State, Miami or USC to take a hands-off approach to supporting their favorite programs.

Instead, we're left with players who did no wrong at both Ohio State and USC serving unjust sentences. The Trojan players will be sitting out a second consecutive bowl season for the hundreds of thousands in dollars of benefits received by Reggie Bush and his family. In total, Ohio State players received $14,000 in benefits according to the NCAA public report, but an entire future generation of players will suffer next year because their coach didn't act on a tip that the possessions of said players turned up in another man's home. That mere fact by itself, by the way, is not a violation.

It's not that Ohio State is totally undeserving of this punishment, but it accomplishes very little. The moral majority that manipulated the NCAA into this decision will not care if this disciplinary measure is rehabilitative or merely punitive. They simply want blood.

When the NCAA convened this past August at a special conference for presidents and conference commissioners, President Mark Emmert promised sweeping change to NCAA policies and practices. To its credit, the NCAA has already followed through on several large scale changes on NCAA rules, including a tighter application of the Academic Progress Rate (APR) and loosened recruiting restrictions of men and women's basketball prospects. It still has not, however, figured out a way to properly enforce wrongdoers while maintaining any sort of consistency with amateurism. As long as billions of dollars are spent annually on the sport(s), it's still counter-intuitive to hammer institutions for players receiving what one could argue should be their piece of the pie.

The NCAA did approve a $2,000 annual stipend to student-athletes on full scholarship a few months ago. However, that stipend is being challenged in the NCAA appeals system by some concerned presidents that worry the stipend would put too much distance between the majors and non-majors. One could argue that's one of the slick, unstated purposes of the legislation as it would create the need for a third subdivision in Division I college football. By having a third subdivision, the upper level would be free to institute a college football playoff without awarding automatic bids to each of 11 major conferences. Instead, it could deal with just 4-6 conferences.

Though the stipend is probably for all the wrong reasons, and would not cure the culture, it would at least give the NCAA and member institutions a leg to stand on when taking a zero-tolerance policy on impermissible benefits. Intellectually, it's hard to criticize a player for taking money in a system where so much of it is being made, free education be damned. But when a student's additional college expenses are assuredly covered, even above-and-beyond the additional money an athlete receives with his tuition payment, the athlete cannot cry poverty.

Many would argue Ohio State's punishment should not be a referendum on amateurism or corruption within the NCAA. On the contrary, it is.

The NCAA promised constituents stiffer penalties for rules violators, and now it must prove it can walk the walk. The only problem is that this punishment is simply superfluous. The people that committed the violations were already punished and most won't be in Columbus for the 2012 season. Instead, it's the ones that played (and coached) by the rules that will be taking the brunt of the heavy-handed action.

If there's a bigger crime than this injustice, it's that Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith didn't see it coming.

When the NCAA added the charge of "Failure to Monitor" to Ohio State's allegations this past October, a bowl ban went from extremely unlikely to better than a 50-50 proposition. Whereas before the only way Ohio State would get hit with a ban was due to being a repeat major violator, the addition of the FTM charge made the repeat violator status of much greater concern. Smith's arrogance and insistence that Ohio State would not receive a bowl ban cost the university an opportunity to self-inflict its wounds in the fleshy part of the thigh. Instead, it took a dagger to the gut.

The result is that Ohio State will participate Jan. 2 in a meaningless showdown of 6-6 football teams. Ohio State's payout will be lucky if it breaks even given its troubles to sell a full ticket allotment of 12,750 (according to the Sports Business Journal). Smith badly misplayed his hand with a bluff and he was called on it. Now Ohio State will be enjoying Jacksonville, if you want to call it that, when it instead could have been enjoying Miami next season.

But this should be of no surprise. Ohio State has badly misplayed this from the beginning.

When the suspensions were first announced last December, it would have been a great time for Tressel et all to inform the world he knew in April of this possibility. Who would have blamed him, in fact, for his stated rationale: protecting confidentiality of law and safety of his players?

When it was learned a month later Tressel didn't disclose those emails, president Gordon Gee remarked that he hoped Tressel didn't fire him. Smith reiterated on multiple occasions that Tressel would not be fired. He was and as a result, Smith should be.

In a case where public perception played such a large role, Ohio State lost because it lost the public relations battle. The fire that inflamed the media the past year was given fuel with every miscalculation; every fib; and every wrong hand Ohio State played. Ohio State's athletic department was fighting a forest fire with a water pistol.

Ohio State will survive these sanctions. It's unlikely to lose any of its major recruits as a result of this action, and while Urban Meyer will not have a chance to compete for a national title or Big Ten Championship in his first season, the Buckeyes will undoubtedly be a force to be reckoned with in 2013 and beyond.

Hopefully, by then, the NCAA can figure out how to adequately distribute the punishment to the ones that deserve it. Ohio State is not absolved of blame, but the brunt of the punishment is being given to those who are.