Jim Tressel's Apology to the Buckeye Faithful

By Jim Tressel

I would like to begin by apologizing to all of the fans of The Ohio State University. While we are very proud of what we accomplished as a football program over the last 11 years, I have now brought disgrace and shame to a once proud institution. Whatever it is that I did wrong, my advisors have assured me that it is much worse than when Woody Hayes attacked an opposing player during a game, and for that, I have the gravest of regrets.

My time at Ohio State has been a roller coaster ride. When I began, I did not think there was any way I would be able to fulfill the sky-high expectations that the program had for me. When we started winning one Big Ten title after another, I thought that life could not possibly get any better. Over the last few months, I have experienced the lows that correspond to those previous highs. When I was in the staff cafeteria last week, the school's mascot would not even say hello to me, and I couldn't help but thinking to myself, “Et tu, Brutus?” But then I realized that my career and my life were crumbling around me, and I should probably focus on something other than making a bad Shakespeare pun.

[RIGHT: The vest's the thing!]

The reason I am writing this letter to Buckeye Nation is not to make excuses for my actions. It is to explain what really happened- to shed light on a mysterious situation so everyone can know how our program went from being one of the most revered in the nation to being tarnished by impropriety. The fall is not the responsibility of the players. It is not the fault of the boosters, nor is it the fault of the University administrators. No, the fault lies with my trademark sweater vest. Once the sweater vest gets its tentacles in you, it is a parasite that dominates your entire life. It will take your well-intentioned plans and your moral rectitude and wipe its ass with them. It is a horrible beast, and it deserves all of the blame for the fall of the Ohio State football program.

Things were not always this bad for me. When I started out, I thought the sweater vest was just a professional garment that would garner respect from the players while simultaneously displaying my team spirit. For many years, it worked wonderfully. I was able to keep all of the negative side effects and the temptations that go with the sweater vest at bay. I wore sweater vests dating back to my time at Youngstown State. Those days look so innocent now. Who knew that it could have been the root of something so vile and reprehensible? We were known as the Penguins, for crissakes!

But the sweater vest is a greedy and desirous mistress. The sweater vest will never leave well enough alone. Even if I was able to win a 1-AA National Championship and move on to be the coach of one of the nation's great programs, the sweater vest always pushed for more, more, more. In many ways, the sweater vest is like heroin, because you always think that you are so close to where you want to be, but you never get there. In another way, it is like one of those weird science fiction movies where the villain invents a brain control device and makes the hero do evil things, even though the hero's friends don't know that he is being controlled by the villain. Yes, I realize that I just described the plot to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but I don't deserve to be compared to Indiana Jones these days. The sweater vest, though, bears more than a passing resemblance to that freaky voodoo priest kid, at least in his sinister ways.

For a very long time, I thought that I could keep wearing the sweater vest but control its evil powers. Sometimes, I would put a windbreaker over it so my reliance wouldn't be so obvious, but my friends could always tell when I was using the sweater vest. They told me that I was more aggressive, more cutthroat, and not my usual, thoughtful self whenever I put it on. Hell, when I first found out that my star quarterback Terrelle Pryor was receiving illegal benefits from a car dealership, I wanted to immediately suspend him and report the story to the rules committee. But before I knew it, the sweater vest had me forwarding the emails to Pryor's advisor so he could try to cover up the story before the NCAA would find out and cause us to lose our star player for a big game. A lot of people said it seemed fishy that all the players who broke the rules were allowed to play in our bowl game last year and had their suspensions delayed until the following year for lower-profile games. Do you think I didn't realize that? I'm not a complete moron. I know that everything I was doing was completely hypocritical and dishonest, but that's just the way people act when they wear the sweater vest.

I'm not the first person to fall victim to the curse of the sweater vest. Look at Bobby Knight. Everyone that knows the guy says he is an upstanding and exemplary human being. He even started his career at West Point. He was able to recruit star players for a system that deemphasized individual achievement because the players' parents knew that he was a great role model. Even Bobby Knight eventually lost control of the sweater vest, though, and saw his career come crashing down as he berated officials, choked his own players, and threw chairs at referees. Enough is never enough with the sweater vest. Just ask Bobby Knight.

Some people would say that my career has unraveled over the past several months. If only it was that easy. If this sweater vest had unraveled, I would have been left with an Ohio State polo shirt and a solid, respectable program. Sure, we wouldn't have had the same level of success and we would have gone back to the 7-5 days of John Cooper. The sweater vest can take you far in life. Almost to the top. It can take a bunch of slow white guys from Ohio and Michigan and get them all the way to a BCS bowl year after year where they get crushed by more athletic SEC teams. But is it worth it? Is all the glory of getting to the Fiesta Bowl every year and being disemboweled by Florida or LSU really worth it? Even wise men will never know the true answer to that question.

The bottom line is that I have learned my lesson from this disaster. I now know that the sweater vest is not the way to build a great football program. I have learned that trying to give players improper benefits then covering your tracks will never take you to the top of the mountain. The only way to build a truly great college football team is through hard work, dedication, and openly, unapologetically paying the best players to come to your school, like Auburn did to win the national championship.

If the country takes anything away from this experience, I hope it is this: young coaches may think that they have control of the sweater vest, and they may think that they are able to reach the pinnacle of their profession with the help of that damned piece of clothing, but at the end of the day, no one is immune to the evil powers of the sweater vest. If you wear it long enough, it will corrupt you, and you will become as evil as the shirt that you wear on the sidelines.

HGTV's Scott McGillivray named 'Greatest Living Canadian'

OTTAWA- Scott McGillivray, host of HGTV's marginally popular home renovation show “Income Property” was voted 2011's Greatest Living Canadian by members of the prestigious Canadian Media Guild. McGillivray, a first-time recipient of the award, ended the 31 year run at the CMGs by hockey player and demi-God Wayne Gretzky. Musicians Gordon Lightfoot and Alex Lifeson, wrestler-singer-dancer-game show host Chris Jericho and current Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper rounded out the top six.

[RIGHT- Scott McGillivray has made Canada proud by turning real estate into real income.]

Representatives from the CMG said that the organ-i-zaytion was proud to bestow the honor on McGillivray, who has raised the profile of Canada with his useful tips and tricks around the house. In a press release following the announcement of the award, the CMG cited McGillivray's dedication to open-concept living/dining areas, as well as his creative work in difficult crawl spaces as two accomplishments that separated him from the rest of the field. Furthermore, the CMG pointed out that McGillivray's 1998 sense of style and the fact that he tirelessly stretches out vowel sounds in words like “progress” and “about” both contributed positively to Canadian culture at home and abroad over the last year.

Terry Miller, a newspaper columnist for McGillivray's hometown Brampton Guardian,championed the host's candidacy with the CMG. “I can only speak for myself, but McGillivray and the CMGs seem to go together like french fries and poutine, like maple syrup and sex, or like peanut butter and something else that Canadians stereotypically love,” Miller said in a speech to the assembled CMG. “It is hard to estimate how many times he has directly impacted my life, such as the time when I was preparing to install new tile in my den and hadn't even considered a sealant layer to prevent moisture from seeping between my wood floor boards and the tile until Scott explained it on 'Income Property.' It was the kind of advice that would make any Canadian want to salute him. Plus, I would go gay for him.”

Impressive as McGillivray's accomplishments on “Income Property” are, his resume does not end there. McGillivray earned an honors degree from the University of Guelph in marketing management, and is now the fourth most popular search term on Google that begins with “Scott Mc.” Additionally, McGillivray runs an online consulting business named the Lifetime Wealth Academy that may or may not be a pyramid scheme where poor saps fork over cash in exchange for promises of secret real estate strategies that are really just common sense that anyone could execute if they started with enough capital. Perhaps most impressively, McGillivray has an achieved an exact duplicate of the haircut sported by Creed's Scott Stapp in the video for “Arms Wide Open.”

[LEFT- Scott Stapp tries to convince those last few holdouts that he is a huge douche.]

Despite McGillivray's heroic status in Canadian pop culture, some dissenters remain. Actor and comedian Dan Aykroyd accused McGillivray of being a bad role model and an even worse patriot. “If you watch McGillivray's show, he never mentions that he is in Canada. He never says the name of a single city because he doesn't want to alienate viewers down in Buffalo or Syracuse. What does he have to hide? I think McGillivray is a fraud and a disgrace and a fraud,” Britney Spears's co-star from Crossroads told newspaper reporters. “He also makes Canada look even more low-class than it really is. When he does a virtual preview of his remodeling jobs, the graphics are so poor that he looks like a character from Tron. Not the new Tron, the one from 1982, which, I believe, is also the year when he bought his cutoff t-shirts.”

[RIGHT- Dan Aykroyd hasn't been this sure of anything since he wrapped the pilot for Soul Man.]

McGillivray accepted the honor gracefully, explaining to reporters that, “some people will obviously say that homeimprovement is not as important as helping the poor and needy, or keeping Canada peaceful. But the reason that I dedicate myself to my work every day is that I think of home improvement as the greatest humanitarian cause. I'm in the trenches every day, fighting battles against enemies like bad insulation. You know what happens when insulation goes bad? Houses start to lose heat, and the owners have to burn more oil to keep themselves warm. When we waste heating oil, we're creating a demand for more foreign oil, which everyone knows funds terrorism. I'm not saying that I have done as much to fight terrorism as Seal Team 6, but I'm definitely in the conversation. I deserve this award. Oh, and I've got a great Canadian joke for Dan Aykroyd. Knock knock. Who's there. Go fuck yourself, Dan Aykroyd.”

Ultimate Fighter Fails Pre-Fight Physical for Being “Extremely Unhealthy”

By Terrence Dillard

SAN BERANDINO- Ultimate Fighter Doug “Thunderfist” Lowen will be scratched from this weekend’s UFC 134 pay-per-view event after failing his pre-fight physical. Dr. Vikram Choudary, the physician who performed the physical examination on Lowen, said that there was not a red flag in the examination, but that Lowen is a ticking time bomb with a list of health problems so long that he should be hospitalized indefinitely due to his condition.

Choudary went on to say that Lowen’s health problems reminded him of a hypothetical question from medical school. “I’m not exactly sure where to start, but it’s a miracle of science that Mr. Lowen is able to stand up, let alone participate in professional sports. Starting from the ground up, he had two broken toes on his left foot that never properly healed and now look like mangled cocktail sausages. He has two staples in his right ankle that are holding his Achilles tendon in place. I asked him if he knew how they got there, and he told me that when he sprained his ankle in training a few years ago, he Googled the surgery that the doctor did on Curt Schilling in the 2004 World Series and tried it on himself so he wouldn’t miss a fight. He has severe tendonitis in his left knee from an old weight lifting accident, but that’s his good knee considering the fact that he had his right kneecap replaced with a lens from a pair of aviator sunglasses after kneeing a guy with a metal plate in his skull. And that’s just below the waist.”

Choudary added that Lowen has a ruptured spleen, a condition that can be fatal if not treated promptly, but that Lowen reported feeling the symptoms for “two or three years, ever since that fight got stopped for the guy headbutting me repeatedly in the stomach.” He also has no knuckles in his left index finger, which Dr. Choudary postulated might have something to do with Mr. Lowen’s nickname.
“The truly appalling thing is that Mr. Lowen has been approved for fight after fight in the UFC, and any one of these debilitating injuries should have been enough to keep him out of the Octagon,” Choudary said of Lowen, who has lost his last six fights to bring his career record to 9-23. “I was called in as an emergency doctor because UFC’s in-house physician was riding dune buggies in Wyoming. How anyone could let this human punching bag continue to put his face in front of other people’s fists and call himself a professional physician is beyond me.”

[LEFT- Lowen after his last win.]

Choudary explained that Lowen’s problems go beyond what can be seen on a simple x-ray. After his initial examination, he had enough concern for Lowen’s health that he sent him to have a full MRI. The MRI indicated that Lowen had the marker for Chronic Traumatic Encephelopathy (CTE), the brain condition blamed for former professional wrestler Chris Benoit’s murder-suicide of his entire family. CTE expert Christopher Nowkinski weighed in by saying that allowing Lowen to fight with CTE would be “wildly irresponsible.” Nowinski went on to say that, “I understand that UFC is in the business of marketing violence, but at some point it becomes more likely that not that someone is going to die. If these competitors would rather get their names on Affliction shirts than see the age of 50, that’s their decision, but they should not be in the position to hurt other people.”

When presented with the results of the examination, Lowen seemed to be in denial about the conclusions. “I know that my brain thoughts are sometimes not as clear to me as the thinkings that there are for other people. I always do a punch or a kick better than book learnings. Does that make me too stupid to fight? I don’t know. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But what I do for work is to fight and that’s what I do so that’s what I’ll do if they let me or not. I might just get a ticket and start a fight and bet on myself. It’s no big deal.”

Choudary explained that Lowen’s delusions arise from his severe psychological problems. “I’m not a psychiatrist, but from spending 20 minutes around the man, I can tell you that he has enough psychological problems that he should not be involved in contact sports.” He said that Lowen likely has high-grade depression and a borderline personality disorder, which creates a vicious cycle whereby Lowen hates his life and fights to compensate, only to put himself in a worse position. “All things considered, Lowen is one of the most unhealthy people I have ever encountered.” But Choudary went on to say that Lowen, as sick as he may be, is typical of his profession, and that he expects the average life expectancy of a UFC fighter to be somewhere between 40-45 years.