Slime And Punishment

It's highly unlikely that Oklahoma quarterback--make that former Oklahoma quarterback-- Rhett Bomar has many Depression-era ditties loaded on his iPod. Ditto for former Ohio State basketball coach Jim O'Brien. But last week, when both were in the news for their blatant disregard for NCAA bylaws, Bomar, 21, and O'Brien, 56, might have appreciated The Rich Man and the Poor Man, a 1932 hit by a country crooner named Bob Miller. The rich man gets a lawyer and the lawyer pleads his case, Miller sang in a proto-Guthrie riff on inequality among the classes, while the poor man asks for sympathy, but of that there is no trace.

As Bomar and O'Brien have discovered, it is still very much Miller time in the NCAA. The line of privilege isn't the imaginary one between rich and poor though--it's the sideline, painted right there on every football field and basketball court. On one side stand the NCAA's great unwashed: players, who can expect to be dealt with harshly when their misdeeds become public. On the other are their coaches, Teflon dons who survive and thrive no matter what they've done.

It is good to be the coach in big-time football and basketball. That was never made plainer than on Aug. 2, when Bomar, a sophomore and the Sooners' starting QB, and offensive guard J.D. Quinn were booted from the team by coach Bob Stoops for receiving cash--at least $15,000, according to some reports--from no-show jobs at a Norman car dealership. Stoops's announcement, which effectively torpedoed the national title hopes that had been running high at Oklahoma, came a few hours after a shocking NCAA bulletin. In Columbus a judge ruled that the Buckeyes were wrong to fire O'Brien in 2004, even though he had cheated by giving $6,000 in cash to a recruit's family in 1998. In a wrongful termination suit, O'Brien successfully argued that his contract allowed him to keep his job even if he ran afoul of the NCAA. O'Brien was awarded $2.25 million, enough to cover the final three years of his eight-year, $6.4 million deal. It may be a while before O'Brien gets another coaching job, but his court victory ensures that it will be a while before he needs one.

O'Brien is merely the latest coach to go off to greener pastures after leaving a job in disgrace. Kelvin Sampson, found guilty of recruiting violations at Oklahoma earlier this year, will start anew as Indiana's hoops coach this season. Bob Huggins was an NCAA violator at Cincinnati, which was found guilty of a lack of institutional control under his watch in 1998, but that didn't stop Kansas State from hiring him as basketball coach in March. Let's not forget Dennis Erickson, Idaho's new football coach, who left Miami in 1994 just before the school was put on probation for violations he committed. Even Todd Bozeman, who was caught in a recruiting scandal at California in 1996, has resurfaced, as Morgan State's basketball coach.

Bomar's future is hardly as rosy. Once the top-rated high school quarterback in the country, he set an Oklahoma freshman record with 2,018 yards passing last season and was a big reason the Sooners were ranked No. 5 in the preseason coaches' poll. Now, he'll lose at least a year of eligibility and would likely face NCAA sanctions (such as a suspension) if he transfers to another Division I program. One option: Bomar could play at Texas A&M--Commerce, a Division II school that said last week that it would be glad to give him a second chance.

Not that Bomar shouldn't be contemplating the shards of a once-promising career. He has admitted he knowingly broke the rules, and Stoops has noted that "in the end the players need to be accountable." That's the message Ohio State thought it was sending when it axed O'Brien. Unfortunately, the school seems to have forgotten that it panicked in 1999, when officials feared that O'Brien would jump to another school or the NBA after that year's Final Four run; the Buckeyes ripped up his existing contract to give him a raise and lock him up until 2008. O'Brien also got a clause that said he couldn't be fired unless an NCAA investigation uncovered major violations in his program.

O'Brien's cash payment was found by the NCAA to be a major infraction-- Ohio State was placed on three years' probation and forced to repay nearly $800,000 in tournament earnings--but the judge ruled that it wasn't serious enough to get the coach axed. "The contract is extremely favorable to [ O'Brien]," Judge Joseph Clark said, in finding for the coach. "The parties ... negotiated a contract virtually guaranteeing that he could not be terminated for an NCAA infraction."

Apart from having to pay out millions, Ohio State now looks foolish for relieving a coach of accountability for his behavior. The cases of O'Brien, Sampson, Erickson and Bozeman also send a message to players: When coaches make speeches about the importance of responsibility, they are talking about you, not them. Back in '32 Miller sang that there's just two kinds of people, the sinner and the saint. But in college sports there are two kinds of sinners. And you know which one will find a way out of hell.

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