High and mighty Big Ten has as many football disgraces as any league

Mel Tucker stopped being the highest-paid state employee in Michigan Wednesday after he was fired for cause as Michigan State’s head football coach.

The university dismissed Tucker "for his admitted and undisputed behaviors which have brought public disrespect, contempt and ridicule upon the university; and constitute a material breach of his agreement, and moral turpitude." Yikes!

Michigan State Athletic Director Alan Haller said the sexual conduct Tucker admitted to was a violation of his contract. Tucker had been tied with Ohio State’s Ryan Day as the Big Ten’s highest-paid coaches, at $9.5 million per year. Tucker was working on a 10-year contract.

Nice work if you can get it. And keep it.

Mat Ashbia and Steve St. Andre, Michigan State graduates, had pledged to donate $24 million of Tucker’s $95 million when Tucker’s contract was extended following the Spartans’ 11-2 season in 2021. They went 5-7 last year.

Never assume billionaires are knowledgeable about everything. Also, never assume coaches stand on higher righteous ground just because they are idolized multimillionaires.

Saturday will be the first of Iowa’s two games against teams with interim head coaches when it hosts Michigan State. In November, the Hawkeyes play Northwestern, which fired 17-year coach Pat Fitzgerald in July for what school president Michael Schill called “his failure to know and prevent significant hazing in the football program.”

This ugly stretch for the arrogant, pompous Big Ten is no outlier. Over half of the league’s current members had some sort of football scandal within the last eight years. Next year’s four incoming programs from the Pac-12 need not worry about hitting their heads on a high moral bar.

Do you remember …

Illinois: Head coach Tim Beckman was fired in 2015 after an internal investigation determined he'd forced players to play through serious injuries and had the medical staff clear injured players before they should have been allowed to return.

Three months later, Illinois Athletic Director Mike Thomas was fired by interim school chancellor Barbara Wilson. He hired Beckman. Wilson now is Iowa’s president.

Indiana: Head coach Kevin Wilson resigned in late 2016 with athletic director Fred Glass citing “philosophical differences.” Later, it was learned the school had investigated Wilson’s treatment of injured players while he was coach.

A month later, Urban Meyer added Wilson to his Ohio State coaching staff.

“We at Ohio State did our homework … that was all crap,” Meyer said last month about Wilson’s exit from Indiana. Wilson now is Tulsa’s head coach.

Iowa: Meyer hired Chris Doyle to be the Jacksonville Jaguars’ director of sport performance when Meyer was the Jaguars’ head coach in 2021. Doyle had been the football strength and conditioning coach for Kirk Ferentz at Iowa for 21 years before the school announced a separation agreement between itself and the highest-paid strength coach in college football.

That happened after Doyle was accused of bullying and racism by several former and current Black players at Iowa. Doyle got a $1.1 million buyout.

Doyle resigned the day after Meyer hired him, thanks to an immediate firestorm from outside the Jaguars’ offices.

When he announced he had hired Doyle, Meyer said “We did a very good job vetting that one.”

As for Meyer himself …

Ohio State: Meyer’s NFL tenure lasted one awful 3-14 season. Before that, he won many games and championships at Ohio State. He retired after the 2018 season in which he had been suspended for three games over his handling of domestic abuse allegations against one of his assistant coaches, Zach Smith.

Ohio State's investigation revealed that Meyer had known about those allegations since at least 2015.

Forty-one players from Meyer’s 2008 Florida team were arrested in college or afterward. One was convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez.

Today, Meyer is a college football analyst for Fox, a football wise man employed by one of the networks that soak college athletics with cash. Which lets the schools keep paying their football coaches giant sums to be hailed as the focal points of their institutions of higher learning.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com