WHEN MEL TUCKER HAS SEX WITH A RAPE SURVIVOR, COACHING IS IN TOTAL CHAOS

Michigan State is the last university that should hand $95 million to anyone, much less a newcomer who knows little about the Larry Nassar horror, so why hasn’t the university dismissed this man?

     Remember when Michigan State handed Mel Tucker a $95 million deal? This was the beginning of a non compos trail of football coaching, about someone who lost one season at Colorado before Deion Sanders and owned no other permanent record. He had a splendid first eight games in 2021, beating Michigan, and the school’s financial gatherers gave him one of the biggest contracts in his craft.

     Why? Did they do any work on Tucker’s mental background? Did they know he married his wife after proposing on their first date? Did they know he wasn’t happy in that marriage, despite two sons, as he started what he thought was a sexual relationship with a prominent rape survivor who spoke to teams like his? You’ve probably heard of one investor: Mat Ishbia, who agreed to provide $14 million for Tucker’s deal, all because he beat the in-state Wolverines before locating $4 billion with his brother to buy the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, where he soon was wrestling with the ball at courtside with the MVP of the entire season, Nikola Jokic.

     They may not have noticed, as the ink was drying, that Michigan State lost the following week at Purdue, 40-29, and was bludgeoned before the month was up at Ohio State, 56-7. The Spartans won the Peach Bowl, over Pittsburgh, and in 2022, they went 5-7 with devastating losses to Minnesota, Maryland, Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan and … Indiana. It’s the same university that never will overcome two decades of waiting on the shamed Larry Nassar, who is in prison for more than 100 years after sexually assaulting more than 300 female athletes locally and on the U.S.A. Gymnastics level. East Lansing is about the last place on Earth that should throw $95 million to a coach on scant, elusive success.

     But it happened, thanks to morons, to a football man who obviously had no clue about Michigan State’s horrid history. When Tucker met Brenda Tracy, he should have had the adult sense to let her do an intensely difficult job. Instead, he kept inviting her to campus three times. And he became wrapped in her personal life that on one night, in spring of 2022, the personal slashes of her own past — a rape by four men, three Oregon State football players and a high school recruit — were torched as Tucker sat on a phone and masturbated. He thought it was phone sex.

     “The idea that someone could know me and say they understand my trauma but then re-inflict that trauma on me is so disgusting to me, it’s hard for me to even wrap my mind around it,” Tracy told USA TODAY over the weekend. “It’s like he sought me out just to betray me.”

     Now that Tucker has acknowledged masturbating on the call, along with countless other details with Tracy, he should be fired at any moment. Why not earlier? At Michigan State, of all godforsaken places, a football coach is having sex on a phone with a women counseling young athletes about sexual violence. Nothing else matters at this point. Tucker is gone, and if Ishbia is waiting for his money, cause is cause. No parent I know will send his kids to play for Mel Tucker, anywhere. And to think he was helped at one point by Alabama’s Nick Saban, who helped him for a season before Georgia’s Kirby Smart hired him as a defensive coordinator. Do they even know what they’re encouraging to other programs?

     “Ms. Tracy’s distortion of our mutually consensual and intimate relationship into allegations of sexual exploitation has really affected me,” Tucker wrote in a March 22 letter this year to the university’s Title IX investigator. “I am not proud of my judgment and I am having difficulty forgiving myself for getting into this situation, but I did not engage in misconduct by any definition.”

     He never should have been such a position at that school. As he told the investigator, Tucker said of the masturbation, “Unequivocally, there’s no doubt about it. She was the one who said we’ll do it.” Did he wonder what went through her mind at the time?

     “You’re touching yourself?” asked Tracy, said the report.

     “Yes,” Tucker said.

     “Oh my god, this is happening, and I can’t stop it,” she thought.

     That he remains employed, at ungodly money, should remind everyone of one fearful fact: Michigan State hasn’t changed at all and never will. Those who want to beat Michigan might want to grab $80 million — cause is cause — and give it to a coach who truly shares their horrors about Larry Nassar.

     If they have any.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.