After former Iowa star football star Tyler Sash died this week at the age of 27, ex-Iowa State player Jeff Woody wrote a powerful piece that anyone who works in college sports should read. Woody is best known for scoring the biggest touchdown in Iowa State history in 2011 when the Cyclones upset No. 2 Oklahoma State. In his piece, Woody said he has “a good idea as to what was going on in (Sash’s) soul … and I was guilty of stoking the flame. I have felt what he felt too, and I had to deal with it the way I knew how.” Woody said he regretted making “unflattering” and “downright mean” remarks to friends about Sash and his personality when he was alive and didn’t try hard to get to know him. “And I regret that more than I can explain right now,” Woody wrote.

Woody described the public’s attention on college athletes as a “two-bladed sword” that can help them but also puts them under a microscope where “you are not allowed access to forgiveness that follows many people like a shadow. In a state like Iowa, this is especially true. We have no one else to watch, so the college kids are what we watch. And we tell them how good they are. And we tell them about how important they are. And we tell them about how much we love them. And we tell them how much they mean to the colors they wear and the state they represent. The only issue with that? We aren’t talking to them. We are talking to a persona of them.”

Woody said he was lucky to have a wife who told him he has more value than simply being an athlete. “I just wish I was able to talk to Tyler now to tell him what he was as Tyler, but no one ever will,” Woody wrote. “My plea is that in the next encounter with an athlete of any level, ask them about their sport, sure, but ask them about what makes them, them. The next time you think about calling a quarterback a ‘stupid son-of-a-bitch’ because he displeased you with a bad pass, remember what you are telling them.”

Attorneys for the NCAA and Football Bowl Subdivision conferences argue that US District Judge Claudia Wilken’s class-certification analysis in the Ed O’Bannon case means she should deny class certification in two other lawsuits, including the Jeffrey Kessler case. The NCAA and conferences took that position in court documents filed this week in anticipation of the Oct. 1 class certification hearing for the Shawne Alston and Martin Jenkins (i.e., the Jeffrey Kessler lawsuit) cases. The lawsuits seek injunctions that would essentially allow schools a free market to pay FBS football players and Division I men’s and women’s basketball players.

At this stage, the NCAA and conferences are trying to show conflict among players so the classes won’t be certified by Wilken, who is the judge in all three of these cases. The NCAA and conferences pointed out that Wilken did not certify a damages class in O’Bannon over the use of players’ names, images and likenesses because of conflicts of interest within the class. Wilken did certify an injunctive class “only after concluding that intra-class conflicts did not exist for the unique reason (not present here) that the group license sought in O’Bannon would not cause class members to compete against one another for compensation,” the NCAA and conferences wrote.

The NCAA and conferences state the injunction sought by Alston and Jenkins is “markedly different” from the injunction sought in O’Bannon. In Alston and Jenkins, the injunction will cause athletes to compete against each other for money and, depending on the differences in the value of each class member’s individual talent, some class members will be harmed by the removal of the NCAA’s no-payment rules, the NCAA and conferences say. Also, they say the plaintiffs’ attempt to certify two “duplicative cases is inherently improper,” and Wilken is empowered to dismiss, stay or enjoin a duplicative action, or to consolidate both actions.

Michigan has the largest social media fan base, the SEC has the most socially engaged conference in America, and the Pac-12 generates the most intentional buzz. Those were the results of a recent analysis by Adobe Digital Index. The study measured social media engagement data through data such as mentions, page likes and followers on various social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr and YouTube. The analysis was conducted from June through August.

Michigan was No. 1 in socially engaged fans with 1.7 million fans, including 323,000 Twitter followers. Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh became a Twitter sensation in the offseason. The rest of the top 10 in order: Oregon, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Alabama, LSU, Florida State, South Carolina and Ohio State.

Each week. this space will highlight some excellent recent work by college sports media on difficult topics to report.

* George Schroeder of USA Today wrote that Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby and Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione do not like ESPN’s new focus on betting during college football telecasts. (Full disclosure: CBSSports.com provides sports picks in its coverage.)

* Pac-12 Networks will likely overhaul its business model — the Pac-12 owns 100 percent of the channels — in order to reach a carriage agreement with DirecTV. AT&T, the parent company of DirecTV, may take an equity stake in the networks, Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury News reported.

* ESPN.com’s Ivan Maisel wrote about Stanford quarterback Kevin Hogan quietly endure the death of his father.

“I hired too many people that wanted to use the school as a steppingstone for a head coaching job.” — Charlie Weis, speaking at the Little Rock Touchdown Club, on tracing his struggles coaching Notre Dame to the composition of his staff, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Three assistants left Weis’ staff to become head coaches — a common occurrence for ambitious assistants. Weis justified his failures at Kansas by saying his wife asked why he would coach at a basketball school. By December 2016, Weis will have been paid $24.6 million to not coach Notre Dame and Kansas.