As Jim Tressel was booking his flight for a mandatory NCAA compliance seminar next month, more questions arose over the integrity of the Ohio State football coach’s program. The school announced over the weekend that they would be reviewing car sales from two Columbus-area dealerships to at least eight Ohio State football players and their families. More than 50 sales from 2004 to 2010 will be under investigation.

Public records show that in 2009, a 2-year-old Chrysler 300 with less than 20,000 miles was titled to then-sophomore linebacker Thaddeus Gibson. Documents show the purchase price as $0.

Mauk could not explain it. “I don’t give cars for free,” he said. Gibson said he was unaware the title on his car showed zero as the sales price. “I paid for the car, and I’m still paying for it,” he said, declining to answer further questions.

–Columbus Dispatch.

To be fair, that’s about as much as I would pay for an American car these days.

But the Buckeyes are giving us an argument to bring the NCAA’s death penalty–a one-year ban from competition–back to Division I football for the first time since Texas’s Southern Methodist got the chair in 1987.

If both this and the “Tat Five” investigations are determined by the NCAA to be major violations, Ohio State would be slapped with the “repeat violator” label, placing the football program within the proper criteria for such a ban. Of course, Jim Tressel probably knew all about this, but just wasn’t sure who to tell about it. Oh, quiet Jimmy. I bet when he was nine years old, he was a Catholic priest’s wet dream.

Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel addressed the media earlier today as the Buckeyes are set to begin spring practice, but The Vest will need more than camo helmets to dodge the inquiries about his program’s status with the NCAA. Ohio State stands to potentially be cited by the NCAA as a repeat violator, since Tressel didn’t disclose emails involving five of his players trading team memorabilia for tattoos, which is just classic American capitalism unless you’re a college kid that’s really good at football.

Tressel said he kept that information to himself and did not notify anyone from Ohio State or the NCAA to maintain confidentiality, as requested by the attorney who emailed him the details, and to preserve the sanctity of an ongoing federal investigation into the tattoo parlor where the players sold their team awards and received free tattoos.

“I probably, or definitely, didn’t move forward with this information to anyone simply because, in my mind, I couldn’t think as to who that best would be, with the seriousness of the emails and the confidentiality component,” Tressel said on March 8.

On Friday, the Columbus Dispatch, citing multiple sources, reported Tressel indeed forwarded the emails about Pryor to the player’s “mentor,“ 67-year-old Ted Sarniak, who owns a glass factory in Pryor’s home town.

–Fox Sports Ohio.

Linebackers coach Luke Fickell will coach the team during Tressel’s five-game suspension. The question remains: Once the dust settles, will it be worth keeping Tressel in Columbus? Hey, all the guy did was not rat out his players. And win another Big Ten title. And pound Michigan to a pulp again. Tressel could lead a Nazi march down High Street and keep his job as long as he keeps winning.

It’s one thing for one of the most straight-laced head coaches in all of American sport, but quite another to be called out by your own student newspaper. That’s what happened to Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel earlier this week when The Lantern, Ohio State’s student-run newspaper, published an editorial calling for The Senator’s head.

When Regular Joe with a normal job breaches his contract, he gets the boot.
So should The Vest.[..]

Doing the right thing? Surely a deeply religious man with a newly released book titled “Life Promises for Success: Promises from God on Achieving Your Best” knows the difference between right and wrong. Or does he?

–The Lantern, via Dr. Saturday.

Well good job, whatever guy who wrote this. You’ll catch a lot of links with this bait. One problem with that logic, though: “Regular Joe” didn’t win six Big Ten titles. Or a BCS national championship. OR DID HE?

There’s a reason that he’s the highest-paid public employee in Ohio, and it’s not because he knows how to type. And really, all he did was just “forget” about a few emails. I do that every day. It’s not like he’s been stewarding some slave outpost, oppressing the nation’s youth…wait.

Img via the late, great Tressel’s World.

Yes, someone does have some time out coming. *zing*

Ohio State University has suspended football coach Jim Tressel two games and fined him $250,000 because he not only knew about five of his players selling autographs and merchandise to a local tattoo parlor, but he also failed to report it to the university’s compliance department or athletic director Gene Smith for more than 9 months. The NCAA, however, is still investigating the Buckeyes and the school’s flimsy punishment could be overturned in favor of a harsher penalty. And we all know that nobody punishes a top tier football program like the NCAA.

In reposnse, Tressel got all weepy on us, offering these free rides on the whaaaaambulance:

“Obviously I’m disappointed that this happened at all,” Tressel said. “I take my responsibility for what we do at Ohio State tremendously seriously and for the game of football. I plan to grow from this. I’m sincerely saddened by the fact that I let some people down and didn’t do things as well as I possibly could have.”

“I think that your No. 1 critic is yourself,” he said, tears welling in his eyes at a Tuesday night news conference. “You spend time thinking about how you can do things better. I don’t think less of myself at this moment. I felt at the time as if I was doing the right thing for the safety of the young people and the overall situation.” (Via Fox News)

And of course by the “right thing” he means seeing an email on his computer screen from an attorney telling him that his players done goofed, and simply covering it with a game of Minesweeper. Tressel said that the thought of resigning has not even occurred to him, which is good because it will make his firing so much more fun. I’m kidding, of course, because even with the damning evidence of the emails, nothing else is going to happen to him and OSU will still start the season 2-0.

Check out the emails after the jump…

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Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel has a bunch of nicknames, and all of them are terrible. Whether it’s “The Senator” or “The Sweatervest” or “Client No. 14″, Tressel always comes off as a guy that operates above-board. But now Yahoo! Sports is citing an anonymous source–one anonymous source–that the curator of Tresselball knew about the actions of five of his players that are set to serve suspensions in 2011.

Tressel received information that players were selling items to Edward Rife – the owner of Fine Line Ink Tattoos in Columbus – as early as April 2010, according to a source. However, neither Ohio State nor the NCAA investigated the transactions or the players’ relationship with Rife until December 2010, when the school claims it was informed of the situation by the local United States Attorney’s office.

The source said that Tressel looked troubled and would follow up; whether he actually did remains unclear. If there was no investigation into the initial report, Tressel could be hit with multiple NCAA violations, and even be fired. Five of Ohio State’s players already will be sitting out the first five games of 2011. These seem like pretty severe penalties for guys that were just selling their own stuff.

UPDATE: Uh oh.

Dr. Saturday has assembled their latest takedown of Ohio State’s performance against Southern Cal, and it is as impressively executed as it is empirically damning of the state of the Jim Tressel regime at Ohio State. For the second time in as many years, The 105,000+ that packed Ohio Stadium last Saturday were betrayed by Tressel’s predictable game-planning and his steadfast refusal to let Terrelle Pryor play like the quarterbacking phenom we all knew he was going to be.

Pryor was not coached to make a bootleg fake at all. Instead, he would hand the ball off to the running back and, as if he was Dan Marino, stand there and watch the play. How insane is that? You take your most talented runner, and ask him to hand it off and then stand there to ensure that the defense knows it need not worry about him? And not worry about him they did; OSU’s power plays were overwhelmed with Trojan defenders. The bootleg fake is one of the keys to making the power stuff go; that’s why the zone-read stuff was invented, to better control that backside defender. Quarterbacks from Fran Tarkenton to Joe Montana — guys with sensible coaching — paved the way for this for years. via.

It’s hard to dump on a guy with five national championships in Division I, until you realize that his team simply gave away a game that could have put them at No. 2 in the polls and, ergo, a fourth BCS title game (de facto or otherwise) in seven years. With Michigan and Tate Forcier rolling after beating Notre Dame last week, Tressel will have to start pulling rabbits out of his ass if he expects to win in Ann Arbor this year. And not those conservative, Power-I running rabbits, either.