Along the Links: Memorial Day Weekend Special Edition

With the eyes of college football directed towards Ohio State, there have been a number of interesting articles written the past few days that should be read but don't quite deserve a full post to themselves. Here's a special  weekend edition of Along the Links that contains some of these stories.

A day after Ohio State's student newspaper, The Lantern, published a story laced with Ray Small quotes indicating that the improper benefits cases were more widespread than initially believed, Small is turning to other, grown-up media sources to cry foul.

10TV: Ex-Ohio State Receiver Ray Small Changes Story

Former Ohio State wide receiver Ray Small said on Friday that he was mischaracterized this week in an interview he had with the university's newspaper.

Small, who said he and "everybody" on the team sold memorabilia and received discounts on cars while playing football, told 10 Investigates' Paul Aker that he was misrepresented in an article that was published this week in The Lantern.

"It's hard being an athlete," Small said.  "That was basically what I was saying.  (The Lantern author) just flipped my words around and make the whole Buckeye Nation hate me.  I spoke (about) my college career (and) never spoke (about) anybody else.  (I) never talked about (Ohio State coach Jim Tressel).  That whole conversation, I never mentioned anything except about myself."

Small went on to say that The Lantern got the majority of the story wrong.

The Lantern denied Small's allegation, Aker reported.

"We, 100 percent, stand by our story," said Lantern Editor Zack Meisel.  "Everything (Small) said was recorded."

Everything Small said is documented, so his claim of mistreatment sounds hollow. It seems quite clear that Small, not realizing the implications behind his statements, now recognizes the danger of using general statements when speaking in the third-person.

Next is another non-story story that has already been bandied about as bad news for Ohio State when it is really just an insignificant milking of the cow.

The Sporting News: Salesman: OSU compliance director called me ‘over 50 times’

Aaron Kniffin, the Columbus, Ohio car salesman linked to Ohio State’s internal investigation into athletes receiving alleged preferential treatment, told Sporting News on Friday that every deal he made with players was cleared by the school’s NCAA compliance department — in direct contrast to Ohio State’s claims.

Kniffin said he has sold more than 50 cars to Ohio State athletes and/or their relatives over the last five years, and that the OSU compliance staff directed players and relatives to him. OSU compliance director Doug Archie told The Columbus Dispatch that he had spoken to Kniffin only once and that he never sends players to dealerships.

On December 29th, 2010, I wrote something about how this whole scandal about Ohio State was, in my words, dumb beyond repair.  In the following six months, it proceeded to get dumber, and dumber, and dumber, and dumber.  Each iteration of every news cycle, corresponding to — I don’t know — every week or so, takes us incrementally further down the dumbward spiral until the spiral finally culminates in some type of Hobbesian nightmare.  Rather than spending all of our time killing each other, we will just spend all of our time making things dumber than they need to be......

Making this discussion even dumber is The Lantern.  I love our tight end corp.  They all have a good attitude and a good head on their shoulders, but all — Stoneburner, Fragel Rock and Heuerman — blamed The Lantern for selling out the team.  It’s not The Lantern’s fault that Small did what he did or that there is this scandal surrounding Ohio State.  It would be better to blame them if they were withholding information and not doing their job.  But, we can blame them for handling a sensitive issue poorly.

 Small’s confession, whatever compelled him to it, is newsworthy.  And yet, the co-authors merely "quote dumped" Ray Small vis-a-vis Malcolm Jenkins’ implicit counterpoint that the Small is one of perhaps (and hopefully) a small class of OSU football players with poor impulse control.  The authors’ own words simply remind the reader of who Jenkins and Small are and preface the preceding or succeeding direct quotes.²  Two competing takes on the same issue make for an interesting article.  Think of it as a Hegelian dialectic.  If Small provides the thesis, and Jenkins provides the antithesis, then the authors’ means to synthesis may entail probing Small on describing "everyone".  No such thing is attempted.  To be fair, this might be more a hallmark of their amateur status than it being dumb.  But, it provides incentives for dumb, and that’s where I get cranky.