There are three people or groups to whom you should never tell a lie:

1. Your mother. She’ll always find you out.

2. The feds. They’ll always find you out, and maybe send you to jail in the process.

3. The National Collegiate Athletic Association. They’ll always find you out, and you’ll wish they had only sent you to jail.

Such is the predicament in which Jim Tressel, the former head football coach at The Ohio State University, finds himself today.

You may have missed it over the holiday weekend — okay, you probably didn’t because college football never takes a holiday in SEC Land. But on Monday, Tressel — the most famous person to be known for wearing sweater vests since former Finebaum radio sidekick Bob Lochamy — fell on his sword.

Tressel resigned under pressure, after previously being suspended for two, then five games of the coming season. His offense: lying to the NCAA in their investigation of improper benefits, such as memorabilia sales and free tattoos — yes, I said free tattoos — by a handful of Buckeye players.

No, Tressel was not explicitly involved in the actions which made the players ineligible. He did not sell any championship rings or anything like that, and the thought of tattoos brings up a mental image that I’d rather not think about. But when he found out about what the players did in an email from a Columbus lawyer, he acknowledged the tip but said nothing to his superiors at Ohio State.

Tressel kept the incident under his hat, until some folks from the United States Attorney’s office contacted the school in December, eight months later. Seems the feds had raided collector/tattoo parlor owner Eddie Rife, and found his home, uh, rife (sorry, couldn’t resist) with signed memorabilia from the players.

The coach still said nothing, and OSU didn’t know about the email exchange until they did a search of all football staff accounts in January, where they found the implicating messages.

To the NCAA, that is a cardinal sin. It also a perfect example of Richard Nixon’s Law: The cover-up is always worse than the offense itself. What the players are charged with doing is fairly minor, and should have resulted in suspensions of two or three games.

But the association depends heavily on member schools policing themselves, and relies on the self-reporting process. The schools have a reason for abiding by that procedure: violations which are self-reported usually incur much lesser penalties.

The whole sordid affair would not have been such a surprise if Tressel didn’t have such a reputation as a straight shooter with a clean NCAA rap sheet. His faith is well known — how many coaches do you know that keep a prayer-request box on their desk? Plus Tressel had dominated the Big Ten and arch-rival Michigan. He had the best winning percentage for any conference coach of 10 years’ tenure or more. Only the Wolverines’ Fielding Yost was better, and that’s going back quite a long time.

Now, just weeks after OSU President E. Gordon Gee — not to be confused with G. Gordon Liddy, by any means — had his own “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” moment, Tressel is kicked to the curb.

So why should college football fans here in Alabama care about Tressel’s travails?

Because Ohio is one of the few places in the nation that is as passionate about college football as our state. Even though Ohioans have the Reds, Indians, Cavaliers to root for (note how I excluded the Browns and Bengals from that list), the Buckeyes are still the big team in the state.

And if a seemingly minor offense can topple a coach who won a BCS Championship in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl, what could a similar situation do to a Nick Saban or Gene Chizik?

Remember this above all else. When the NCAA sets its mind to taking someone down, no one is immune — for better or worse.