Les Miles Involvement in OSU Investigation, Pt.5 - Fallout

After spending a week being embarrassed by both local Oklahoma media and the national sports press for their inaccuracies, SI quietly released the final segment of their report on Oklahoma St: The Fallout. It's an odd title for a section that is about players who were "driven out of Stillwater, returning to worlds they had hoped to escape."

The piece details the tragic lives of players who were kicked off of the OSU program for one reason or another, supposedly because they were "expendable" non-star players who didn't receive the same special treatment in the classroom or other improper benefits that others did because they were talented (the same benefits SI spent all of last week trying to convince us were rampant within the program). There was only one specific example given in the piece of a player who was removed from the team during Les Miles tenure as HC:

Offensive lineman Jonathan Cruz says his scholarship was revoked in the summer of 2003 because of academic troubles -- troubles that many more prominent players avoided by having substantial coursework done for them. Cruz says he loaded a single bullet into a 9-mm revolver, spun the cylinder, put the gun to his head, closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. "[I'm] hoping that maybe if it does go off [the Oklahoma State coaches] are going to find me," Cruz said in a taped, two-hour interview last April. "They'll know why this happened." After the gun didn't fire, Cruz cried for hours. "You want to reach out [to someone], but where do you go?" Cruz says. "I was so miserable, and nobody understood because, in my opinion at the time, nobody cared to understand." He says he became a cocaine addict and "a major drug trafficker," moving as much as 30 pounds of marijuana a week. Cruz enrolled at Northeastern State, a Division II school in Tahlequah, Okla., and eventually cleaned up. He now teaches and coaches at a high school in the Dallas area.

Cruz sounds like a person who has more personal issues than just "academic troubles," issues he likely detailed  in his "taped, two-hour interview last April." but all we get out of that lengthy interview is the above.

And that's all for Miles. The rest of the examples are all players who left under Mike Gundy's tenure. SI does try to tie Miles to OSU's rate of  "43.5% of the players who enrolled at the school left before exhausting their five years of eligibility, and that's not including one player who died and those who declared early for the NFL." But the number is for a period from 2002 to 2010, only 2 years of which Miles was the HC.

So what will come of all this? I'm going to go out on a limb and say Nothing. SI's work has been ridiculed all week in the college sports world for its factual inaccuracies and the apparent shady interview recording tactics of Thayer Evans. The story has so little traction that most people forgot it was even still going on after this weeks college football action (myself included). Local media in BR didn't even breach the subject during the Monday Press Lunch. Miles will still likely release some sort of statement, but that's about it. OSU *might* face some scrutiny as some of the allegations leveled did occur in the last 4 years, but if the former players interviewed remain as uncooperative and defensive as they have all become since the piece was first released, there wont be anything for the NCAA to go on.