Reilly's latest is appalling.

He's done this trick several times, so it was nothing new.
Far more interesting if he gets a booster to agree to an interview, then makes him the X.

 

I think it was a tad unfair to single out one player. He should've used an example from 4-5 players to illustrate OSU's largesse. And maybe, just maybe, try and find a down-on-his-luck Columbus native who's not crazy. Basically the column made no sense. There are much bigger ways to show how out-of-whack Buckeye love is in Columbus. Just walk around town for a weekend.

 

So that carpenter has to sleep on the street because Ohio State has a large athletic budget? Is that the corollary?

 

Except none of Reilly's million dollar salary comes from public money.

How SI and ESPN choose to spend their own money is a very different analysis than how much a taxpayer subsidized university directs toward an athletic department that already has enough left over to put 15 plasma screen TVs in the players' locker room, build 4 separate football practice fields and a 5th just for the band, private basketball and raquetball courts just for football players (god forbid they co-mingle with real students), and players-only lounges loaded with plasma screens, juice bars, hot tubs and so many other pleasantries.

I just read the piece, and personally thought it was good. I don't see how he was blaming Freeman or painting him in a bad light, just using him as a comparative device that any reader should know would apply equally to any Buckeye player.

Although, instead of using the homeless guy as his counter comparison, it might've been more appropriate to point out other more necessary ways the University could've spent that money on academic programs, scholarships or whatever. But it is noteworthy that Ohio, the state that has perhaps suffered more than any other economically the last few years, has the public university that spends more obscenely on sports than any other.

 

Maybe a better comparison would have been an average OSU student working to put himself through school and barely making it financially.

 

...and we won't put that on any of the state's counties that decided the last presidential election, but I digress...

There's nothing new here, or in the fact that Reilly -- or eons of muckraking journalists -- have done this before.

 

Would have been better, certainly. But - even then - I don't think it would have been fair to single out individual OSU football players to make the comparison. Unless those players happened to express extreme unthankfulness for their football-earned privileges, or extreme uncaringess about the plight of their classmates, they've done nothing wrong.

It's the university, the state government, etc. etc. etc., who Reilly should go after if he wants to go after somebody.

 

You actually would be surprised at how little of a major public university's annual budget is direct appropriation from the state's general fund (taxpayer money). In my state, which has the classic big liberal arts U and the land-grant U, it's only about 20-25 percent in each instance.

(One of those U's, which has a major, major benefactor who could make it possible, seriously was talking about going private within the past year, since the state appropriation had dropped so low.)

The rest comes from student tuitions and fees (which in a sense isn't really tax money, since you are not obligated under penalty of law to pay); income from endowments; voluntary annual giving, by individuals and corporations; federal and corporate research grants, and the like.

Now, you can argue that Ohio State's athletic budget is high (however, it does sponsor an incredible number of sports, and football earns tens of millions) and it unnecessarily treats its athletes as kings and queens. No quibble there.

But it's not going to make any difference in this carpenter's life if Ohio State becomes Kent State and cut it's budget by 80 percent.

That ship sailed a long time ago, by lifestyle choices he made.

(And I Nehru King your Sirvaliant Brown). 8)

 

I'm still waiting on the story where he gets drunk and big-times his way into the LSU pressbox with some skank so he can write about the tolerance level of SIDs in the SEC.

 

Isn't the OSU athletic department self-supporting? And doesn't the athletic department, in effect, do more to subsidize the rest of the university than the other way around?

 

http://www.cleveland.com/collegesports/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/sports/1189674086182260.xml&coll=2

 

Even in our podunk state of Mississippi, no money -- that's right, zero -- is appropriated from the state for Mississippi State and Ole Miss athletic departments. Don't know what it is in Ohio, but the money going to the Bulldogs and Rebels is unlikely to have fixed many homeless issues otherwise.