His latest article will certainly stir the pot to say the least. Bianchi is a jerk of epic proportions and now he turns his venom toward Lord Saybinz. Is he correct...off base...should he shut his cockholster and contract teh goat aids? Just copied and pasted to teh X's
Shame on Nick Saban for comparing Jim Tressel to a fallen soldier
There is truly honor among thieves
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Mike Bianchi
SPORTS COMMENTARY
6:07 p.m. EDT, June 5, 2011
Last year at about this time, Nick Saban got up on a podium in front of bunch of reporters at a Southeastern Conference gathering and ranted about the evils of unscrupulous sports agents, calling them "pimps" who put football programs in jeopardy by preying upon poor, innocent players.
Now let's fast forward to a few days ago when Saban was at another Southeastern Conference gathering and disgustingly compared ousted Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel to a fallen soldier.
"I guess if you were in the military, you would say we lost a fine comrade," Saban said of Tressel.
Actually, I guess not. Soldiers die for the love of their country; Tressel got canned for the love of a Sugar Bowl bid.
Welcome to the warped world of college football, where Saban's twisted description of Tressel's firing is the latest example of honor among thieves. Of course, why should we expect better from a self-important coach like Saban, who once compared getting defeated in a football game to the catastrophic national tragedies of 9-11 and Pearl Harbor?.
Saban went on to call Tressel "one of the finest people in our profession." Which, in itself, should tell you something about the profession … a profession where hypocritical college coaches have seemingly gone out of their way to paint Tressel as some sort of sympathetic figure.
Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt on Tressel: "I think he's one of the finest men I know."
Where's the outrage? Where's the indignation and defiance we got last summer when coaches were ripping into unscrupulous sports agents who were putting entire athletic programs in jeopardy? What about unscrupulous football coaches who put entire athletic programs in jeopardy? Aren't they just as bad – if not worse?
Just once, wouldn't you like to hear a college coach get on his soapbox and say guys like Jim Tressel and Bruce Pearl are disgraces who have given everybody in the profession a bad name? Wouldn't you like to hear a coach stand up and say college sports need to be purged of men who intentionally bury illicit violations and then it lie about it to their own bosses and NCAA investigators?
I've always found it curious that college coaches who make $4 million a year somehow portray unscrupulous sports agents as scum-of-the-earth bloodsuckers who exploit players. Shouldn't these college coaches look in the mirror every once in a while and point the finger at themselves? They will get up on their high horse and speak out against the shady agent or the renegade booster, but they remain strangely silent when one of their own gets caught breaking the rules.
Where is ESPN commentator Urban Meyer's outrage about Tressel? Last year when he coached the Gators, he referred to shady sports agents as "predators" and "piranhas preying on our kids." He verbally abused a sports writer as being a "bad guy" for accurately quoting one of his players. Since becoming an ESPN analyst, he has been preaching that college football and basketball need to clean up the "garbage" that now litters the sport.
But when Meyer was asked about Tressel the other day during an ESPN segment, he deftly tap-danced around making a judgment on one of the biggest liars and cheaters in recent college history.
I keep hearing coaches rationalize Tressel's behavior as "making a mistake" instead of accurately calling him out for telling a series of lies and perpetrating an elaborate cover-up to keep his players eligible.
Among coaches, Tressel's departure seems more like the death of a friend than a deceitful coach getting canned.
You wonder if Nick Saban and the rest of the college coaching fraternity are flying their BCS championship banners at half-mast in honor of their "fine comrade" who lied and cheated his school into the abyss of NCAA hell.