Tom Izzo and Mark Dantonio Need to be Fired

Just when you thought the scandal at Michigan State couldn’t get worse, it did! Today an ESPN Outside the Lines report detailed the Michigan State basketball and football teams transgressions that are more than damning.

Michigan State football transgressions

Let’s start with the Spartans football team. Since Dantonio’s run began in 2007 with the Spartans, at least 16 MSU football players have been accused of sexual assault or violence against women, according to interviews and public records obtained by Outside the Lines. There is even more damning claims against Dantonio, who was said to be involved in handling the discipline in at least one of the cases several years ago. As recently as June, Dantonio faced a crowd of reporters who were asking questions about four of his football players who had been accused of sexual assault. Six questions in, a reporter asked Dantonio how he had handled such allegations previously. Then Dantonio figured this would be a good time to lie:

“This is new ground for us. We’ve been here 11 years — it has not happened previously.”

That is complete B.S.! It had happened before and he had let it go with little to no penalty.

Former Michigan State sexual assault counselor Lauren Allswede, who left the university in 2015 over frustrations about how administrators handled sexual assault cases, said an attorney from the university’s general counsel’s department came to her office to try to reassure her that the coaches were taking allegations of sexual violence seriously. Allswede says the attorney told her how Dantonio, the football coach, had dealt with a sexual assault accusation against one of his players: He had the player talk to his mother about what he had done. You read that right, he had the player converse with his mother. That is really teaching the player that what he did was wrong…Yeah right!

Michigan State basketball transgressions

Tom Izzo’s storied basketball program also has turned their cheeks on numerous occasions also, including one report made against a former undergraduate student-assistant coach who was allowed to continue coaching after he had been criminally charged for punching a female MSU student in the face at a bar in 2010. A few months later, after the Spartans qualified for the 2010 Final Four, the same assistant coach was accused of sexually assaulting a different female student.

What did Izoo do? Nothing! The allegations against both basketball and football are both egregious and need to be dealt with swiftly by the NCAA. But we know from the past that the NCAA is slow to react and reluctant to punish, especially when it comes to marquee coaches like Dantonio and especially Izzo.

What should the outcome be?

Both coaches need to be fired immediately and I think a case can be made that maybe the programs should be suspended for a few years. In the Nassar case, which I won’t go through here because if you are reading this I am sure you are well aware of what happened campus police and Michigan State’s Title IX office did not formally begin investigating him until 2014–17 years after the first complaint was made to a Michigan State coach.

If the coaches are let go for this, the players should be able to transfer anywhere they want without having to sit out a season, but since the NCAA is a completely corrupt institution it’s hard telling what they will do?

In the end a coach is supposed to be a father figure for a player, not an enabler and we see more and more today that coaches are just worried about securing their next huge contract. It is the coaches responsibility to make sure he is bringing quality players onto his team, but in the case of these two coaches that was not a concern.

Sources:

http://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/22214566/pattern-denial-inaction-information-suppression-michigan-state-goes-larry-nassar-case-espn