Penn State Gets Life Sentence

The Lion Shrine at Penn State. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We didn't think the National Collegiate Athletic Association had it in them, but they did.  As judge, jury and executioner of college sports in America, the NCAA handed down what amounted to a life sentence for the Penn State University football program in the wake of the child sex scandal there.

The NCAA showed a little mercy in not shutting down football for a year or two, as some observers wanted them to do.  Instead, they said they based their sanctions on the information contained in the recently-released Freeh Report.  In it, the report said that then-football coach Joe Paterno and other Penn State officials had conspired for over a decade to hide allegations of child sexual abuse against then-assistant coach Jerry Sandusky for fear of negative publicity.  Because they are Penn State.

Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse last month, and is awaiting sentencing.  Paterno died last January.

Here are the highlights of the Penn State sanctions:

• A $60 million fine, which would go into (as the NCAA puts it) "external programs preventing child sexual abuse or assisting victims and may not be used to fund such programs at the university".  We'll believe it when we see it.
• No bowl games for four years.  No conference championship games either, as the Big Ten conference has tacked on its own penalties.
• Athletic department gets five-year probation.  Apparently, the other sports at PSU need to share the pain too.
• Scholarship reductions over four years.  Not to state the obvious, but that will definitely affect recruiting.
• Player transfers.  Those with the remotest NFL aspirations would be wise to take their talents somewhere else ASAP.
• Victories from 1998-2011 erased.  That's 112 wins, including conference championships and bowl appearances.  It also means that Paterno is no longer the winningest coach in major college football, with his record being cut from 409 wins to 298.  Former Florida State coach Bobby Bowden now leads with 377.  (It should be noted that Eddie Robinson of Grambling State, now deceased, holds the overall NCAA Division I record with 408.)

With Paterno's reputation all but destroyed, PSU officials decided to remove his statue to parts unknown.  Maybe they'll just become parts.  But there's still the issue of what to do with a library named for the former coach.

So to sum up:  More than a decade of Penn State football and the work that the coaches and what the NCAA likes to call "student-athletes" have put in have gone up in smoke, because a legendary head coach and his university higher-ups chose to enable an assistant coach who couldn't keep it in his pants around young boys.

The NCAA has made sure that Penn State will not have a competitive football program for at least a decade.  (Even in its diminished state, they would still be more competitive than the University of Minnesota.)  This is an extraordinary situation, to be sure.  But one has to wonder what the NCAA would do about other holier-than-thou athletic programs accused of wrongdoing.  Let's see how serious they really are about putting sports in the proper perspective.