Dez’s Trial

If you know me at all, you know there are two OSU athletes that I cannot in any way talk about rationally. Two-handed reverses become 540-hammers, 40-yard corner routes become “he beat 3 guys to the pylon and made a diving one-handed catch.” Mundane becomes legend and legend is collegiately immortal.

I think everyone who’s ever loved a university has those one or two athletes that stand out because of a personal encounter, emotional experience, or, on rare occasions, just because that athlete was peerless in his sport.

Like I said, I have two, and they’re both named Desmond.

The one with the nickname, the football one, has been in the news a bit of late as I’m sure most of you have seen. The figures are numbing to those of us trying to balance our rent and food budgets: lawsuits for $200k in jewelry, $15k in unpaid sports tickets, and another $590k in more jewelry.

It really begs the question a question with no reasonable answer: after you’ve dropped two-hundred thousand dollars on jewelry, what series of events leads you to say, “screw it, I’m tripling that, my eighty-thousand dollar charm necklace isn’t cutting it, let’s go drop some serious cash this time”?

The unpaid tickets could be the most damning for OSU fans. He was still a student, albeit already suspended, at the time ESPN is reporting he took them.

There’s no indication that this will affect the program in any way, and I have no reason to believe it would, but OSU can’t seem to escape the shadow of the man upon whose shoulders they once placed so many hopes.

I tweeted the other day that we need to wait and see how this plays out. For now the lawsuits are little more than allegations backed up by some numbers on a piece of paper. But given how shaky the tightrope Dez is walking I can’t believe they’re unfounded.

So many times over the last three years I’ve defended Dez, to the point I finally realized I was becoming irrational exhibit #1. “He’s never had a felony,” I’d say. “What has he ever done wrong?” I’d rhetorically ask. “Haters gon’ hate!” I’d yell.

No, I never said that last one. I’m not even sure why I just wrote it. But I’m sure at some point I probably thought it.

The evidence is piling up against my defense though. I feel like I’ve just gone from my blitz package into a full-fledged 4th quarter prevent. Dez isn’t giving me much of a case to make.

Nevertheless, I have one last plea for my readers: let’s step back and re-evaluate this in a few months. Let’s see what comes of all the rumors and rumors of rumors. Let’s reserve condemnation until the facts are sorted out.

For now though, I’m not sure new Desmond can ever walk in old Desmond’s shoes, but he can at least salvage what’s left of his public persona over the next decade. And I’ll be rooting for him to do just that.