Saturday, January 27, 2018

The housecleaning begins

The university president is gone, trailing a lot of self-serving nonsense about how a great tragedy had been "politicized," and so the only thing she could do was step down.

(By which she meant, as almost everyone does when they resort to the P-word, that the tragedy got exposed by dedicated newspeople committing top-drawer journalism. Yes, Lou Anna Simon, getting caught not doing your job does indeed suck.)

Now the athletic director is gone, too, opting for retirement over outright banishment. Mark Hollis stepped away right before ESPN rolled out another devastating Outside The Lines report that indicated Michigan State's ham-handedness in dealing with athletic sexual predators extends far beyond letting Larry Nassar give young women a lifetime of nightmares for 20 years.

Which means this house ain't tidy yet, and the reckoning in East Lansing is going to continue. The latest OTL report puts bullseyes on both football coach Mark Dantonio and basketball coach Tom Izzo, which means they could easily get caught up in the purge. Even NCAA president Mark Emmert is on the griddle after it came out that he'd heard about the allegations against Nassar as far back as 2010.

It's an ugly business, getting yourself clean.

This brings us to Michigan State's utterly clueless board of trustees, currently backtracking in furious haste. The head of the board, Brian Breslin, now says it's obvious that MSU "has not been focused enough on the victims," mere days after telling us how important it was for the board to stand by the irretrievably tainted Simon. Various other board members who gave Simon the thumbs up are now telling the victims how sorry they are. You can take those statements with the grain of salt they deserve.

And then, show the people making them the same door Simon and Hollis took, and ask them to do the honorable thing.

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