It is difficult to watch the story of Maurice Clarett and know that it will air directly after the Heisman Trophy ceremony. The way in which the national sports media conversation turned on Clarett a decade ago, and now has circled the wagons around Jameis Winston reveals a selective and fickle lottery that can end in jail or a plush NFL contract. Some grossly insignificant infractions like borrowing a car lead to mental unraveling and a prison sentence, but an alleged sexual assault can linger for a year and stink to high heaven of small-town justice with dozens of unanswerable questions. The circumstances of their criminal (or alleged) situations could not be more different, but by placing this documentary immediately following the award ceremony, I can’t help but think The Youngstown Boys is at least a slight rebuke to the way the NCAA conducts business, and how college football coverage demands tidy build up/tear down arcs for even the careful players.
Directors Jeff and Michael Zimbalist previously made The Two Escobars, perhaps the strongest entry in the 30 For 30 series thus far (at the very least in contention with June 17, 1994 and No Crossover), so going in there was a lot of pressure on Youngstown Boys to live up to the promise of that earlier documentary. That’s not entirely fair, since the story of Escobar (the player) and Colombia at the 1994 World Cup had international interaction and a more global impact. But the Zimbalist brothers are astute in crafting Clarett’s significance at the time. Football was and still is bigger in northeastern Ohio than basketball, and Youngstown recalls the final high school days of LeBron James, when it was clear he was around the corner from a huge payday, as opposed to Clarett, who would be required to go to college for three years and maintain eligibility.
That parallelism evinces the hypocrisy of how the NCAA, and the American viewing public, treats athletes with respect to their earning potential depending on the sport. LeBron was able to jump directly to the NBA and rake in endorsements as a teenager. For years that was an acceptable move; now it’s after a mandatory year of college that requires bare-minimum eligibility before a player goes pro. Conventional wisdom suggests that college football players aren’t physically ready for the rigors of the NFL until after three years in college. Better scientific data would suggest that nobody is prepared for the physical demands of the NFL. Highlighting this thought in Clarett’s head during the BCS Championship season, when he was earning praise while getting banged up and keeping a mental tally of hits running backs could withstand, is one of the most enlightening observations the Zimbalists make in crafting the film.
Youngstown Boys suggests that the film gives equal weight to Jim Tressel, former coach at Youngstown State and OSU, and the man who “recruited” Clarett—interviews seem to suggest Clarett basically made up his mind without an official offer. The coach formerly known as The Senator had a reputation not just for winning football games with reckless abandon, but for being a genuine, caring man who still taught a class every year. The film treats him like a supporting player, a mentor, a father figure, but ultimately a man hamstrung by the system to hang Clarett out to dry when a star player flew too close to the sun.
When Tressel went down for NCAA violations, it seemed like a stoic and proud man going down for lying. But it also shed light on some of the ridiculous things that the NCAA will take a program down for. Tattoos and merchandise sales? Borrowing a car? These are the kinds of things that make people nervous enough to lie and protect others, leading to program-shifting roster and personnel changes. Worse still, it’s an insensitive and tone-deaf investigation process that left Maurice Clarett, by every account heard from in the film—friends, coaches, family members, so take that with a grain of biased salt—an exemplary person off the field, no way to participate in organized football in a meaningful way. The depression of that loss spiraled out of control.
Jim Brown has always spoken his mind, at times to the detriment of the people he tries to defend, and his attempt to stem the tide of negative attacks from Ohio State’s athletic department against Clarett was one of those instances, even if Brown’s inflammatory comments had more than an ounce of truth to them. Having said that, perhaps a guy like athletic director Andy Geiger—who rowed crew at Syracuse before a short stint as a crew coach at Dartmouth, then made the jump to the athletic department at Syracuse, then athletic director positions at Brown, Stanford, Maryland, and Ohio State—shouldn’t have stumped on pride throughout the entire scandal, throwing a kid under the bus for not properly groveling at the feet of a system that afforded the athletes few rights. Geiger comes off like a petulant missing Winklevoss brother, so conditioned to believe his education and management birthright gives him an imperative authority over any student that he either can’t see the damage he’s doing to a kid, or worse, just doesn’t care. If there’s one singular villain above all the others who turned “The Beast” from the football field into a monster on the streets, Youngstown Boys singles out Geiger.