Wow, is Frank Solich getting 'hammered' in his gig as coach of the University of Ohio Bobcats. The Athens News (where Ohio Univ campus exists) is hammering the former Nebraska coach.
First, Solich's players are experiencing 'off field troubles' as the euphemism goes.
Athens Police arrested and charged two Ohio University football players late last week in connection with what one witness said was a violent incident in an uptown restaurant.
The Athens NEWS has also learned that in January, a third team member was cited for rear-ending a car on Richland Avenue. The crash sent a local man to the hospital and brought the player his sixth traffic charge since October 2005.
Then the Athens paper asks the question: 'Should Cats player problems be surprising?
Off-field troubles involving Ohio University football players during the past 13 months roughly parallel those of the 1998 and 1999 teams, court records show, but the checkered disciplinary record of head coach Frank Solich's players stretches back further than that.
Solich didn't hit it off quite right in Ohio:
Solich's own drunken-driving conviction in November 2005 only served to trigger greater scrutiny of off-field incidents in Athens and foreshadowed the cluster of OU football players who have been arrested in the months since...
At least 14 team members have been arrested since late January 2006 on original charges of assault, vandalism, DUI or for fleeing. That's 12.2 percent of the team, and does not include citations without arrests.
It gets more interesting:
NOTHING OVER THE PAST decade in Athens, however, could begin to equal the off-field history of the University of Nebraska football team in Lincoln, Neb., under legendary Cornhusker coach Tom Osborne and Solich, Osborne's protege and successor.
In a 2003 Lincoln Journal Star report, Osborne lauded Solich's recruiting skills, citing several former Cornhuskers, including Irving Fryar, Mike Rozier, Ahman Green and Christian Peter...
What Osborne didn't mention was that each of those Nebraska athletes, and many others, ran afoul of the law in college or later as professionals, usually with minimal consequences...While at Nebraska, Peter was convicted four times, including once for sexual assault, and arrested eight times..Two Lincoln women also said they were raped by the player, though Peter was not convicted. Kathy Redmond was one of those alleged victims, and she later formed the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes, largely because of a look-the-other-way mentality she claims was prevalent at Nebraska... "Tom Osborne ran the city of Lincoln, he ran the university, he ran the state of Nebraska," she said. "(Cornhusker football players) knew what they could and couldn't get away with, and they passed it down the line," she said. "Frankly, that's what can happen at Ohio."..THE LIST OF TROUBLED FOOTBALL players in Lincoln chronicled by published reports in major newspapers is long, and includes reputed gang affiliations, shootings, steroid use and, allegedly, receiving cars and cash through boosters...
"Big Red Confidential" cites a Lincoln Police source's claim that current OU offensive line coach and former Husker player Keven Lightner was spotted in 1986 "injecting a substance believed to be steroids into his buttocks."
At least the NU player had the right injection spot. The Nation toured the NU training room when Solich and Tom Osborne reigned there. We knew physicians who took care of Scotty Baldwin. Believe us, it was nuts.
This is going to be a very interesing story to follow in the heartland.
No list of Cornhusker miscreants would be complete without the legendary Lawrence Phillips.
Posted by: Tony Jobe | 02/22/2007 at 21:46