Maurice Clarett didn't know what hit him. This past week, the former Ohio State running back came clean to ESPN The Magazine to reveal all that's rotten in one of the NCAA's premier programs.
Clarett dropped dime on the perks of big time College Football, making Ohio State sound like an amusement park operated by Tony Soprano. He detailed receiving construction site cash for 'watching paint dry', the quick money from Boosters for 'playing Sega with their kids' and free access to tricked out SUVS - all under the watchful eye of Coach Jim Tressel. 'I thought he'd give me the NFL,' Maurice Clarett said of Tressel. 'I thought he'd say, 'You took from me and you didn't tell on me, so here's the NFL.' He could have painted me as the first pick in the draft, as the world's greatest everything. He wound up selling me out.'

This story is historic, a high profile All-American coming clean. Clarett should be Valachi in a varsity jacket. Yet in the era of ESPN and the merger of big business and sports journalism, Clarett gets to disclose and be discredited in one fell swoop: with ESPN's College Football cash cow safely spurting milk.

The ESPN The Magazine story is Stop 1 on the Contain Clarett Express: a skillfully written piece with a dash of rhetorical relish by someone named Tom Friend. Clarett is described as a 'football pariah, denounced by his own school, a school he carried to a national championship almost two years ago.' Friend continues in this stylistic vein, explaining - as violin strings are plucked - that Clarett's has been smeared 'by an Ohio State system that he says lined his pockets and then methodically tore him down.'

Yet before the ink was even dry on Friend's friendly text, Clarett became the tackling dummy for eight hours on ESPN Radio as an 'untrustworthy' 'pathetic' and 'wholly ridiculous' individual who should 'just shut up.' By the time the day was done, the scandal – for now – had largely been explained and contained.

To have ESPN – 'your home for College Football' – break this story is utter farce. This would be like Karen Silkwood exposing the truth about plutonium leaks in the Los Alamos corporate newsletter, or Deep Throat taking his tales of Watergate to the National Review, or Mordecai Vanunnu revealing Israeli nuclear weapon secrets to Ha'retz.

Their disclosure and discarding of the Clarett story reveals far more about how corrupt College Football has become than the allegations themselves. Once the NFL's poor Saturday afternoon cousin, College Football – on the back of ESPN – is now televised every single day of the week. This serves to generate millions for athletic conferences, all of which negotiate individual deals with ESPN with the total sum in the billions. Consider that the mid major Conference USA's deal with the 'World Wide Leader' is eight-years for $80 million. Yet while ESPN gets record weeknight ratings and universities rake in the bucks, the players who have to maintain the fiction of being student-athletes suffer.

Will Rueff, a senior defensive tackle at Miami has come forward to say, 'After away games, it's terrible. When we played Marshall, we didn't get back until 4 in the morning. If you have an early class, it's almost impossible to get there. It's almost impossible to sleep on the bus. You're just worn out.'

Allen Sack, who played on Notre Dame's 1966 national championship and is a member of the Drake Group, a consortium of professors attempting to bring light to the exploitation of student athletes says, 'Schools playing midweek is incomprehensible to me. ...The networks are in this to make money. The universities have decided to make money. Let's not put the responsibility on the network, but put the responsibility on the universities that have seen the technology and decided to exploit the athletes.' Which brings it back to Maurice Clarett. Clarett has attempted to break into the NFL since his stellar freshman season. He now finds himself on the outside looking in, losing court cases and watching his draft status sink like 'Kerry in 2008' T-shirt sales.

Because of the NFL's desire to keep College Football as a free minor league, the League has moved heaven and earth to fight Clarett's push for early entry. When athletes produce billions in revenue and don't get paid, the label 'student athlete' rings awfully hollow. If the NCAA doesn't pay these athletes for what they produce, the graft and hypocrisy that stains College Football will never end and the athletes will continue to suffer for this fiction. As Maurice Clarett said to ESPN the Magazine, 'Ohio State created me. They created what they suspended.' ESPN created Maurice Clarett as well. They'll recreate him as a malcontent if it means protecting their cash cow. It's high time for the players to seize control of this cow, and make some steak.



--To get Dave Zirin's column every week, e-mail edgeofsports-subscribe@zirin.com. Remember, Spring 2005, What's My Name Fool? - sports and resistance in the United States hits the stands! Send feedback at editor@pgpost.com.



» Find more of the online edition.