NOTE: A previous version of this blog indicated Sports Illustrated didn't mention dismissals of former OSU players who made accusations against Oklahoma State. In its overview, however, SI wrote, "While most of them did not graduate from the university and many left on ill terms, the picture they paint is consistent: The school acted on two fronts to build a winning program."
The blog has been corrected to reflect that context.
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There are plenty of problems so far with the Sports Illustrated story on Oklahoma State football.
That doesn’t mean it’s not all true.
OSU administrators are looking into the allegations. So, presumably, is the NCAA. O-State brass must be exhaustive in their efforts to find the truth — something the SI reporters apparently were not.
Through two days — Money and Academics — here are the big problems:
* Most glaringly, Sports Illustrated barely mentioned that the majority of its sources from the Day 1 report were kicked out of school or dismissed from the program: nine of the 12 players who spoke. Most were for legal issues or multiple behavioral transgressions. That’s absolutely vital information, and glossing over it is either something well beyond shoddy journalism or just plain self-serving. As if not detailing their reasons for dismissal and why they may have had an ax to grind against their former school and team and coaches somehow strengthens the report.
* Not interviewing Marilyn Middlebrook in the Day 2 report doesn’t fly. She’s the reigning czar of OSU academics for athletes, and has been for 20 years. If you read the SI report and believe the program was in bad academic shape during the Les Miles era, you have no idea how bad things were when she walked in a decade earlier. Middlebrook cleaned up the academic side of the athletic department, though she obviously had a lot to do. This is fact: most of the athletes there love and adore her like a second mom because she’s all-in for them. Some of them even call her Mom. But, just like a mom, they also fear her. She doesn’t put up with hijinks from athletes, and she doesn’t take crap from coaches.
* The stated goal of the investigative series was to find out “How does a Division I program make such a large leap in such a short time?” That’s a good idea. But are we to believe, so far, that sudden college football success only comes through seedy donors passing out stacks of cash, dirty coaches arranging preferential (and, in the NCAA’s vernacular, illegal) treatment and from professors, tutors and boosters? Will one of SI’s forthcoming pieces laud the coaching chops of Les Miles and Mike Gundy, or their ability to hire effective assistants and recruiters? Will it detail the fulcrum effect of Miles’ 2001 and 2002 victories over Oklahoma, or the Cowboys’ other pivotal triumphs during those early years? Or will it delve into how Boone Pickens’ hundreds of millions of dollars for all-new facilities — spurred primarily by Miles’ milestone victories — changed everything in Stillwater?
* Attacking the character of a local FCA director, especially one as beloved throughout the area as John Talley, probably wasn’t the best tactic to prove a point about disreputable boosters.
* Going after Kay Norris, another revered figure among OSU athletes, would be perfectly fine — if Norris was still alive to defend herself. Sadly, she’s not. SI should have tried to verify the claims made by disgruntled former athletes against her by contacting her surviving family. Maybe with one additional phone call the reporters would have learned what one of Norris’ children apparently claimed on Tuesday: Norris’ alleged rent houses that players were paid $700 an hour to clean? They didn’t exist.
* Letting guys — again, guys who were kicked out of school or dismissed from the team for multiple behavioral and legal matters — point fingers at Darrent Williams and Vernon Grant, who are dead, without getting input from those players’ families is simply reprehensible. It’s bad on one level that the accusers did it. But that’s just who they are. It’s bad on an entirely different level that SI, a bastion of sports journalism, took those accusations and ran with them.
* Here’s what both stories needed: more from the other perspective. Oh, Orange Nation is filled with smarmy Santa Boosters who pass out Benjamins on the plane? Fine, who were those boosters? What were their names? Players went to a local business owner for infusions of cash? Which business? Professors handed out easy A’s? Which professors? Tutors did all your work? What were their names? Again, not saying any of this didn’t happen. Maybe it did. But why not substantiate it, strengthen your report, make it entirely irrefutable, by digging up the dirty boosters, merchants, professors and tutors? Just turning on a recorder and letting people talk doesn’t constitute investigative journalism.
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