Jim Tressel, The Game and Paradise Lost

I've not said much about the allegations mounting against Ohio State's football program and coach Jim Tressel.  Partly because, for all the football animosity between Michigan and Ohio State, I respect the rivalry and the whole situation kind of stings.  This rivalry is the reason I became an avid college football fan.  It's why I love the maize and blue.  It is, above all else, the reason my social awareness falls to debilitating depths from September to January.  To overstate what Michigan vs. Ohio State means to college football is not possible.  It is a rivalry steeped in tradition and lore, one that draws it's history from territorial disputes between the states of Michigan and Ohio over the Toledo Strip.  It saw the meteoric rise of one of college football's most respected coaches in Bo Schembechler and set off the Ten-Year War with Woody Hayes at Ohio State.  And most recently the rivalry has resulted in the longest winning streak for Ohio State (7 games) in it's more than 100 year history and herein lies the problem.  It seems that, for about 10 years now, Jim Tressel has been running a program that has been competing on a level so far removed from the loosest standard of fairness that even Bruce Pearl would laugh.

If you want to look at a pretty comprehensive laundry list of Tressel's issues at Ohio State, feel free.  But for me, it's not about the growing landslide of evidence (Sports Illustrated is coming out with even more information this Tuesday), it's about The Game.  For the past seven years Buckeye fans have moved from reveling in Michigan's losses to being bored by Michigan's inability to field a competitive team (which, fine, the Rodriguez era left something to be desired for everyone involved).  And they've done it all by cheating both off the field and on the field.  But perhaps most importantly, they've cheated themselves out of the longest winning streak against Michigan in rivalry history.  Because anyone who's honestly paying attention knows that the Tressel era will forever be painted with this brush.  The NCAA will undoubtedly force the University to vacate a truckload of wins and in the end it's the seven year win streak that'll no longer be a part of the lore of the rivalry.  It's a shame, not least because Michigan still leads the series by 13 wins, or that Michigan's consecutive win record stands at nine and, after the expunging of the Tressel era, Ohio State's will stand at four.  It's a shame because it seems the majority of Buckeye fans and administration at Ohio State seem to be okay with the whole cheating thing (perhaps not endorsing what happened, but ambivalent towards it).  And so, I have to ask myself, what's the point in competing against a rival (or for that matter even considering someone a rival) if they don't want to compete on a level playing field?  It's like trying to play a board game with younger siblings that don't understand why cheating is a problem.  Eventually you stop playing with them until they grow up.

The joke over the past seven years has been that The Game has been uncompetitive because Michigan has failed to win.  The reality is that Ohio State, under Jim Tressel, has sullied the mystique of the rivalry.  An entire decade of Ohio State football (a decade in which they accomplished so much) will forever be marked with a giant red asterisk.  As a Michigan fan proudly indoctrinated from birth I can only share my disappointment that Jim Tressel never found a more important standard to live up to other than winning.

UPDATE: (May 30, 2011) Per the Columbus Dispatch Jim Tressel  has resigned as the Head Football Coach at Ohio State. Obviously I'm taking full credit.

Eliade and the Recollection of Undergraduate Studies

As part of our graduation requirements and exit interview in my undergrad program we were to come prepared with a statement on our understanding of religion.  It was an exercise in reflection as we were also required to write a similar statement when we entered the program.  Mine was relatively short:

Religion is a tool people employ to help them order their world. Whether it is making sense of suffering or explaining that which one does not know, religion and religious thought aids people by providing a framework that allows them to perceive understanding and control of the world in which they live.

The statement was meant to be as value neutral as I could manage while simply stating that religion is essentially utilitarian.  I took pains to make sure that it didn't set religion apart, that there is nothing particularly special about religion.  The reason is wrapped up in the naming of this blog and Mircea Eliade's seminal work The Sacred and the Profane.

In the work Eliade provides an argument for understanding both religious and non-religious experience (or to use the title of the work, the experience of the sacred and profane).  One of his contentions in the work is that non-religious people still act "religiously" when ordering their life or assigning value to specific events.  It is an interesting point as Eliade attempts to differentiate between sacred and profane experience via an understanding that the experience of the profane, while arguably religious in nature, tends to be personal and private and the experience of the sacred tends toward to the communal and becomes ritualized.

I loved Eliade (to be fair, I loved most of what I read in undergrad) but his concept of sacred and profane created a problem for me.  Creating the dichotomy of "sacred" and "profane" naturally created other dichotomies in his work that tended to force divisions in his analysis where I never felt there needed to be.  The part of Eliade's work that tended to embed itself in my thinking, however, was the fact that religious practice and experience is and has been an incredibly ordinary experience in human history.  Instead I choose to subvert Eliade's dichotomy of sacred and profane because I can't help but see the myriad constructions of religious belief and practice throughout the world and acknowledge that religion is not special or unique or at all sacred.  It is simply the experience of different cultures, both privately and publicly, attempting to make sense of life.

I bring all of this up because I'm truly fascinated by the way different people understand their worlds.  Whichever way one approaches the world, I've always thought the key to continued progress as human beings is through understanding of ourselves and those around us.  For myself, religion has played an important role in my life and over time I've come to understand that, in the end, religion is really a story about us.  For my own experience the journey to understand the meaning and purpose of the divine has really been a journey to understand myself.  As Eliade would admit religion is about the stories we tell and the meaning we assign to those stories.  It is, in an oddly peculiar way, what we do as human beings as well.  We tell stories.  We construct our mythologies and assign to those mythologies symbols and rituals to remember them by.  And I wouldn't call that a religious endeavor, I would call that a human compulsion.

What about you internetland?  How do you see the world around us?