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Football
OSU Football Has Sad History with Agent Issue
By Brandon Castel

It has been a quarter of a century since Cris Carter accepted that money from an agent, but not a day goes by where he doesn’t feel some sort of regret.

“Even to this day if you ask me one thing in sports, what would you change, it wouldn’t be a game. It would be that situation,” Carter said Friday while co-hosting Mike and Mike in the Morning with Eric Kuselias.

“Give me back my senior year.”

The topic of agents in college sports has been one of the hottest of the summer, even taking center stage at SEC Media Days down in Hoover, Ala. with Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban calling them “pimps” and Florida’s Urban Meyer referring to it as an “epidemic.”

However neither Saban nor Meyer has experience the kind of devastation Ohio State did back in 1987 when Carter was ruled ineligible for his senior season in Columbus after secretly signing a contract with notorious sports agent Norby Walters.

“I saw my eligibility taken away by signing with a sports agent and I saw what it did to my football team, and I saw what it did to my teammates, who I had committed to being there with,” Carter said.

“I saw the effect it had on them and I saw the effect it had on their careers, and ultimately had on Earle Bruce, the head coach at Ohio State, with him being fired the season after I left.”

One of those teammates was linebacker Chris Spielman, who joined Carter on the set of Mike and Mike Friday to discuss the incident in full for the first time on national radio.

“I was disappointed. I was extremely disappointed. I was saddened because I loved playing with him and I lost that,” said Spielman, who was recently inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

“Was I mad? Of course I was mad, I think our whole team was mad because Cris was such an integral part of our team.”

Carter and Spielman had come to Ohio State together as a part of the heralded class of 1984. They were the top two players in the state coming out of high school, and decided early in the process that they wanted to spend their college years together playing for the Buckeyes.

“We had made a commitment to each other,” said Carter, who pledged his allegiance to Ohio State even before Spielman. 

“We both played as freshmen and we were very, very close. Very, very different individuals, but the closeness we had with those 24, 25 guys that we came in together, and then also Tom Tupa was my quarterback and his roommate and best friend. I could have made him a lot better player.”

After sitting behind Mike Tomczak and Jim Karsatos for his first his first three seasons in Columbus, Tupa took over as the starting quarterback in 1987. But without Carter, he threw only 15 touchdowns against 12 interceptions while completing only 55 percent of his passes.

The Buckeyes went 6-4-1 without their All-American wideout as Everett Ross led the team with 29 catches for 585 yards. Coach Bruce was fired after the season despite a .755 career winning percentage and four Big Ten championships in nine seasons.

“He was our offense. If he’s on our team, I guarantee we at least contend for the Big Ten championship if not win it all. He meant that much to our football team,” said Spielman, who led the Buckeyes with 156 tackles that season as a defensive captain.

“Back then I was a little bit more high-strung—we all were, we were younger—and I was upset with Cris because we love Ohio State. I know how much he loves Ohio State, and it was our senior year and we were coming off a great Cotton Bowl victory. We had high hopes but we didn’t have a lot of depth, and we had a young offense with a new quarterback coming in Tom Tupa. Here you have maybe the best receiver in the history of football, in my opinion, and all of a sudden he was removed from your team. It was devastating.”

Carter was coming off back-to-back seasons of leading the Buckeyes in receiving, including the first 1,000-yard season in school history. He was the second-leading receiver in school history (2,725 yards) behind Gary Williams (2,792) and his 27 career touchdowns were 11 more than any Ohio State player before him.

“I think he’s the greatest receiver to ever play the game, NFL and college football,” Spielman said.

“I’ve never seen him drop a football; ever, practice or game.”

Although he was angry with his teammate for letting an agent get the best of him 25 year ago, time has healed the wounds 

“I’m not mad now. I would be mad at him if he wasn’t remorseful and he didn’t love Ohio State and he didn’t recognize (his mistakes),” said OSU’s third all-time leading tackler.

“The thing that I’m upset about—and I’m a guy who believes in second chances—and at the time Cris recognized his error. He recognized he had made a mistake and he had the opportunity to pay that money back, but the university, and I believe Rick Bay was the athletic director at the time, said no. 

“If Rick would have let Cris pay that money back, I think a valuable lesson would have been learned. Cris would have been taught and he would have been part of our team.”

It was Bay who would announce the school’s decision to fire Bruce, effective immediately following the season-ending game against arch-rival Michigan. He also preemptively turned down any future bowl invitations that season before announcing his own resignation under protest of then Ohio State President Edward Jennings’ decision to let Bruce go.

The Buckeyes defeated the Wolverines 23-20 in Ann Arbor with Spielman and his teammates wearing headbands bearing the word “EARLE.” It was something Carter wishes he could have been a part of.

“Letting those teammates down and not being able to run out there with the Scarlet and Gray on for the last time, there’s no price you can put on that,” he said.

“You don’t go to the NFL and act like you advanced in life when you left people and you hurt them. There’s no way I ever felt good about that.”

And he probably never will.

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