Uncertainty: Your favorite team has it. You have no idea which backup quarterback is going to be seeing most of the action for the first five games of 2011 while Terrelle Pryor and his gratuitously-inked teammates are in NCAA purgatory. You cannot be certain which tailback will be filling in the void left by Pryor’s cellmate Boom Herron either.



With Sir Saint Dane Sanzenbacher (he’s been both Knighted & pre-emptively given Sainthood in my church) graduated and DeVier Posey also doing time, the wide receiver spots are even more up-for-grabs. One thing that isn’t uncertain about the pass-catchers though: Duron Carter will not be among them. Not at Ohio State, anyway.

When Carter flunked his way out of the trip to Pasadena his freshman year, the prevailing thought was that he could get his act together in junior college and then gain acceptance back into the football program. Based on what he did in Coffeyville, an area of Kansas famous for having the fewest distractions in all of…Kansas, Ohio State still wasn’t having it. Carter publically state that wanted to return, but in the end he wasn’t invited back. Apparently he did not demonstrate what needed to be shown to his coaches: That he could – at worst – stay eligible for the duration, or – at best – actually matriculate toward a college degree.

FBS scholarship offers are investments that are laden with risk. A potentially great player with no shot at matriculating is a risk, as is a potentially mediocre player who can inflate the team GPA but do little to elevate the quality of football being played. These types of players are both risks in different ways but share a commonality: They occupy a coveted spot in the program that could otherwise accommodate a great player who also makes the grade in the classroom. That’s the ideal guy, though exceptions are infrequently made cough Ray Small cough in what could be seen as extraordinary circumstances cough Glenville pipeline cough.

Carter was an extraordinary circumstance. A uniquely-talented Ohio State legacy from a great high school should be a no-brainer for a spot on any Buckeye roster; the problem with Carter is that “no-brainer” takes on an unfortunate, deeper meaning. Carter had multiple opportunities to demonstrate that he could navigate through an entire academic term to acheive a GPA that began with a crooked number. If he could just do that – even in a light course load, in-season term that included playing football for academic credit, he’d be welcomed back. It only seems easy because it is deliberately structured to be easy.

The particulars of Carter’s extraordinary circumstance even included the fact that his father’s head coach still has an office at the WHAC and is close to the program, and his father Cris - despite his own public troubles at Ohio State - is a still a favorite son. There is no single player on the roster who could have been more favorably positioned to return, not even Pryor himself (who is a repeat academic All-Big Ten performer in the classroom; sort of gets overshadowed by everything else, doesn’t it). There are almost too many people close to the Ohio State program that could have been an emotional decision instead of a rational one to invite Carter to return. They knew too much to invite him back. Brain defeated Heart by technical knockout.

I personally don’t think that Carter is the laziest, most entitled athlete to ever grace Columbus with his rapid-fire blasé. I do think his is the most visibly lazy, entitled athlete to come to Ohio State, with apologies to his on-campus mentor Mr. Small. For the Twitter crowd that takes pleasure in watching A-to-Z-list celebrities demonstrate their basic ineptitude and lack of self-awareness, Carter has been an all star.

During his extremely brief tenure at Ohio State, Carter routinely tweeted about how bored he was, as he was accumulating somewhere between zero and LOL academic credits toward graduation. Like any other distracted college freshmen, he made no secret of his love for video games and partying, but unlike most students he had a team of people deliberately focused on keeping him eligible. Navigating through and defeating that kind of a support system – especially for a kid with no known academic deficiencies – takes a special kind of apathy.

Once Carter was academically suspended and publically reprimanded, he heroically took to his Twitter account to express how demanding his course work was and how difficult studying for a couple of hours had been. He was immediately rebuked by his fellow teammates who pointed out that survey courses - as the one he was apparently describing - are designed to be as demanding as water aerobics in a retirement community.

Even after flunking out in late 2009, Carter was unable to muster the energy to make a series of academic layups the following spring and ended up in Coffeyville. If you were hoping that he’d find his way in junior college and return to Columbus a changed man, you were setting yourself up for a disappointment that should have been very predictable. Here is who is going to see action at wide receiver for Ohio State instead of Carter: Some guy who actually has a chance of seeing the field. Pick one. There are several already on the roster.

With no scholarship at Ohio State available, Carter is taking his football skills to the Crimson Tide. While FBS scholarships are investments laden with risk, Alabama’s advantage is that they do not concern themselves with risk, because they strip their portfolio of failed investments each summer. Maybe Nick Saban really believes that Carter left his serial public laziness in Columbus, or perhaps he thinks Alabama’s academic support structure that keeps apathetic football players eligible is superior to Ohio State’s. It could be that he doesn’t care. When you’re oversigning players every year and cutting the fat during the offseason, you don’t have to.

It makes perfect sense that Saban would bet on Carter, because there’s no downside to Alabama assuming the kind of a risk he brings. If he doesn’t make it academically, his spot will be cleared for someone else, just as Carter’s admission to the Alabama program is going to result in a current player being removed from the team sometime this summer. If he does make it, then all he has to do is be good at football and he gets to stay. That's a great bet.

The risk to Ohio State was that Carter would return to Columbus only to flunk out again. The ultimate determination was that he wasn’t worth the risk. It’s natural to hope for his sake that something clicks and Carter figures out that while he’ll never have to work, a college degree is still worth the trouble. It would be great for the entire Carter family if that barely flickering light finally turned on for Duron.

However, it is wholly unreasonable and unnecessariliy paranoid to fear that Ohio State and Alabama might be paired in a bowl game for the third time in history, and that in that rare circumstance an eligible Carter might come back to bite Ohio State like Ryan Brewer did at South Carolina 10 years ago. Chances are that if Carter bites anyone, it will be Alabama. Fortunately for the Tide, their coach operates a program where those kinds of bites don’t leave any marks. They just disappear.