Ohio State: Where Wins Matter More Than Women

This is a column about the action Ohio State University took this week to punish its highly successful football coach, Urban Meyer, for ignoring serious allegations of domestic violence involving one of his assistant coaches. As regular readers know, I often begin my columns with a bit of history — so let’s take a quick trip to 2010, when the equally successful Jim Tressel was Ohio State’s coach.

In Tressel’s decade in charge, the Buckeyes won one national championship and six Big Ten titles, and went 9-1 against hated Michigan. Then the National Collegiate Athletic Association learned that football players had for years been trading Ohio State gear and memorabilia for services at a local tattoo parlor. Though the gear was their own property, this was still an NCAA rules violation, and resulted in five-game suspensions for a handful of players. As for Tressel, he was forced out by the university after the NCAA discovered that he had lied about what he had known about the violations.