This punishment is fine by me, hell, I’ll take another year of probation if the NCAA wants to get frisky.

It doesn’t really change anything.

Are you sure it is still a loss? I never thought it would be switched to a win I assumed it would be removed entirely.

I thought an 8-5 Iowa (who lost to OSU) would now have an 8-4 record and that the game would not count towards the all time series record between the two schools.

Alabama lost it but FSU vacated it. If both teams would have to vacate it if they won, did it actually happen? Classic!

woulda got crushed anyway….

And you would have been crushed by another SEC team wearing maroon.

That sounds like “hey, we’re now going to throw you under the bus for this whole fiasco to save our asses, so don’t worry about that quarter mil fine and we’ll call it even.”

then Tressel is a cheap whore amongst other things.

where he takes the blame for everything that happened. This isn’t just hush money, it’s $300,000 worth of fall-on-your-sword money.

a bribe to assist in the NCAA workout, by quitting.

Nebraska followed the precedent and acted accordingly. Ohio State is whistling past the graveyard.

It was also a violation of NCAA rules, but NCAA rules are not the law

so there was a game.

but they will never make Ryan Mallet a winner!

/Braveheart’d

“Because I just redacted it from my DVR a week ago”

I think you would have been better off vacating it.

"Who cares about the opinion of an E-SEC-PN puppet?"

OSU is trying to squeak by doing the absolute minimum, and in an instance where that won’t be enough. Just incredibly mishandled by the administration from the start.

from what I’ve been reading today, OSU is not only throwing Tressel under the bus, but they seem to be tying whats left of him to a set of train tracks. The fact that he is still going to speak in front of the NCAA (even though he doesn’t have to) makes me think that he really is going to be the fall guy and do his best to dump all of these problems on himself instead of OSU.

If that happens, OSU could come out of this fairly unscathed.

Well then, case dismissed! No chance that anything happens to OSU now! Oh wait, I seem to recall that the lead attorney for OSU was also the lead attorney for USC. How’d that work out?

OSU is in the tall grass, so they pay money to professional fence-sitters. (I’m still awake, but bored.) This has nothing to do with any objective evaluation of outcomes. In high profile cases, the prosecutor understands that the integrity of the system is the real objective function.

All of that is still out there and could yet be added by the NCAA.

is Tressel LYING to the NCAA. On repeated occasions. The tattoos, cars, drugs are are (to varying degrees) minor issues. The real issue is that the head of the program decided to cover-up his learning that multiple players were potentially ineligible, and then lie to the oversight body – to whom he had a duty to report – about that fact. Even worse, Tressel actively went outside the school’s established guidelines and protocols in an attempt to, in the most charitable reading possible, circumvent discovery and minimize the damage.

As an aside, it has been amazing to watch the complete 180 you and a large number of other Buckeye fans have pulled on this. In the wake of Tressel’s Memorial Day resignation, all we heard from you and others was that it was all the fault of the Tat 5, Pryor in particular, and that Saint Jim was simply trying to protect his players. Now, all we hear is how what the players did is irrelevant (and I agree that it largely is), this is all on Tressel, that he’s the only bad guy your honor. Your school harbored him and stuck up for Tressel until it was too inconvenient, now you are trying to pin everything on him because that’s what is convenient now. I think this is almost entirely Tressel’s fault, but that doesn’t change the fact that OSU is going to have to pay the penalty for the actions of one of its executives.

I mean, jesus, we already interrupted Illini week for OSU bullshit (and I don’t think we ever got a proper Illini hatepost, come to think of it). I just want this to be over so we can actually start talking about who is going to be good at football again.

there were two ways to handle this

1. Impose relatively severe sanctions (e.g. a 1-year bowl ban and limited scholarship reductions for 2012) and hope that this satisfies the NCAA. Benefits of this approach is that it might impress the NCAA enough that they feel further punishment is not warranted; potential drawbacks include that you’ve conceded the bowl ban/scholarship reduction principle if the NCAA thinks more severe measures are needed (i.e. multi-year punishments a la USC).

2. Give a lowball estimate as the opening offer in negotiations. There is a much less likely chance that these are accepted by the NCAA, but you haven’t conceded as much ground for punishment.

Neither approach is “right” in this instance, though I tend to think OSU undermined its claim that it is taking full responsibility for going for the lowball offer. But this is, of course, a matter of opinion.