NCAA investigating Cam Newton

That whole incident exposed Robert Smith as an arrogant twit. People forget that he indignantly transferred to USC, then left school early to enter the NFL draft without playing a down for the Trojans. Academics, schmacademics.

 

Meanwhile, a part-time Bammer employee loses his job over Cam dig...

http://txedit.ny.atl.publicus.com/article/20101129/NEWS/101129616/1011?Title=UA-staffer-terminated-over-song-choice

 

And former Auburn coach and current Auburn influence peddler Pat Dye said on the radio today that he was under a gag order from Auburn.

 

I'm no fan of Urban Meyer, but he wasn't at Ohio State when Robert Smith was. The assistant coach you're thinking of was Elliot Uzelac.

 

Dye also got flustered on air with Finebaum and hung up on him.

 

You're right. Don't know how I confused them.

I Am Fail.

 

Dye could get flustered making a ham sandwich and hang up on someone, depending on how close the liquor cabinet is. And the line of ex-coaches Auburn still has on the payroll to keep quiet stretches halfway to Notasulga.

 

Not to hijack the thread -- and this has no bearing on whether he's an arrogant twit -- but I don't think that's what happened with Robert Smith. As I recall, he played as a freshman in 1990, then took a year off in 1991 and considered transferring -- and USC was one of the places he looked at -- but came back and played for Ohio State in 1992. Then he entered the draft. I don't think he ever went to USC. (I certainly could be wrong, though.)

 

According to an Austin Murphy article in 1991, it was a guy name Uzelac who was backed by Cooper.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1140635/1/index.htm

At around 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 15, the first day of Ohio State's preseason football camp, Buckeye tailback Robert Smith was hunched over his dorm-room desk. A sophomore premed student, Smith was slogging though a chapter of General Chemistry, the text for inorganic chemistry, his bear of a summer school course. The final exam was two weeks away, and Smith was worried. He needed a good grade to stay on track in his premed program.

Suddenly, his door swung open. "Lights out!" barked Elliot Uzelac, the Buckeyes' new assistant head coach-offensive coordinator. Smith tried reasoning with him. No luck.

"Lights out!" Uzelac repeated. Incredulous and furious, Smith defied Uzelac. Finally, Uzelac went away.

Nine days later Smith was cheek by jowl with Boris Yeltsin on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Yeltsin had dissolved the Communist Party in Soviet Russia, but Smith had done something really shocking. He had walked into coach John Cooper's office on Aug. 23 and quit the team, citing these reasons:

•Cooper and Uzelac were not concerned with their players' physical well-being.

•Cooper and Uzelac had been "stripping players of their dignity."

•Ohio State coaches were less concerned with their athletes' educations than with keeping them eligible to play.

According to Smith, on at least three occasions Uzelac pressured him to miss class to attend football practices or meetings. At various times Uzelac told Smith, "You're here to play football" and "You take school too seriously."

"Guilty as charged," says Smith. "I simply can no longer play for those two [Cooper and Uzelac]." Last Friday, Smith held a press conference in Columbus to reaffirm his decision. Though he apologized to "Cooper and Uzelac and their families" for "inappropriate" statements made in the last week, Smith didn't back off from his original accusations.

In the wake of Smith's charges against the two coaches, Ohio State president Gordon Gee held meetings with Cooper and athletic director Jim Jones, who canceled a trip to Belgium with the Buckeye basketball team. The tension could not have improved the health of Uzelac, 49, who on Aug. 29 underwent an emergency angioplasty to clear a clogged coronary artery after suffering chest pains on the practice field. It was his second such operation in three months. Uzelac, who was released from the hospital the next day, would not talk to SI. But Cooper defended his assistant, saying, "I have discussed [the allegations] with Elliot, and I don't think Elliot has lied."

Look who's the OSU president then, gee its .....President Gee!

 

Ahhhh. Elliot Uzelac. The football coach at St. Joseph (Mich.) high School.
The man who once compared my criticism of his play calling to a then-famous rape case involving an Upjohn heir ("everyone's got opinions') when he was head coach at Western Michigan University.

 

hope you worked that in, or at least went with Western Michigan was sodomized.

 

Yeah, I guess my memory was a little off. Nevertheless, the point is Smith left for the NFL without obtaining his degree. So maybe academics weren't that important to him, he just didn't like being told what to do by someone he considered intellectually inferior.