Marshalling Your Contacts

Here's an interesting irony given that Jim Tressel got forced out of his Ohio State coaching job earlier this year for lying about improper player perks. Tressel got his OSU gig courtesy of a great run in the 90s at Youngstown State, taking them to the I-AA title game six times and winning four.

The first three of those trips were against Marshall, headed up by Jim Donnan; Donnan parlayed his good fortune at Marshall into a gig at Georgia (somehow I don't recall him at UGA). He's now accused of helping run a Ponzi scheme by his creditors.

The federal court documents, filed Thursday and Friday, are part of a larger bankruptcy case involving West Virginia-based company GLC Ltd.

Formed in March 2004, GLC Enterprises, as it was known then, attracted investments from several high-profile figures from the world of sport. Among them are former University of Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys coach Barry Switzer; Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer; Texas State football coach Dennis Franchione; and Texas Tech football coach Tommy Tuberville.

Here's a copy of the complaint. There's echoes of Bernie Madoff scamming the folks he knew in New York Jewish circles or the Mainse brothers using their 100 Huntley Street connections to bring Canadian Pentecostals into another Ponzi scheme; Donnan seems to have used his football connection to bring a who's-who of college football coaching into the mix. He's yet to be charged with a crime, but the SEC and FBI might well be interested in what comes out in Donnan's bankruptcy filing. 

This seems a lot bigger than fibbing about free tattoos, but it is a sad state of affairs that the two top coaches in college football's "second division" of two decades ago are now getting disgraced within months of each other.

 

Comments

[alan]

It is bigger, but it is also important that your coaches and programs teach work, honor and honesty; all the while stepping up training to rediculous levels to constantly raise the skill. Crooked coaches have to to be out, but we can rate the variance on the causes.