<p>This reply is at the heart of what I find so unbelievable about this situation and conversation.</p>
<p>This post is correct that the sanctions were more severe at Penn State than at USC … but let’s recap.</p>
<p>At USC one athlete’s family had it’s rent paid for by a booster for a couple years (with lousy oversite from the coaches and athletic department) and USC got hammered by the NCAA with one of the toughest sanctions ever. Then, on this board anyway, virtually not a peep from the students, parents, or alums complaining about the sanctions.</p>
<p>At Penn State EVERYONE in the chain of command at the university failed kids who were being raped for at least 14 years. The program did receive the harshest NCAA penalty ever … but shouldn’t they have? I’d like to see Cosmicfish to a proportionality analysis of the sanctions … let’s see 2 years rent = a couple years of bowls and 3 years of scholarships … 15 years of child rapes = 4 years of bowls and 4 years of scholarships … seems to me they failed the proportionality test big time; they let Penn State off very easily relatively speaking. And a lot of the PSU folks are complaining … a proportional penalty would have been something infinitely worse than what they were given.</p>
<p>Finally, IMO the NCAA gave Penn State a break by not invoking the death penalty and letting the games continue … if Penn State folks love football and games they can still some and support their school (and the local economy). And still lots of Penn State folks are complaining (could it be because they don’t want to watch 5-5 teams instead of 10-1 teams?)</p>
<p>Frankly I think Penn State supporters should be thankful that Penn State football was not permanently shutdown (or for something like 14 years).</p>
<p>SMU got the death penalty for paying players … USC got hammered for 2 years of rent … Penn State got hammered for 15 years of rapes. The school with over a decade of rapes is the one with the most supporters complaining … I find that beyond unbelievable.</p>
<p>3togo, it is unbelievable, but coureur posted something last night which I think goes a long way toward explaining how Penn Staters are reacting to this whole thing. Hope you don’t mind, coureur:</p>
<p>Let’s admit that the actions of the Professor Emeritus were reprehensible. He is a sick guy, but also a criminal, and he’ll spend up to 442 years in prison, and we can all be thankful that Penn State now has the good sense to take away his football tickets (even if not his title). But the reality is that he could have been anywhere - there are child molesters everywhere.</p>
<p>What is special here is what looks like the systemic, long-term enabling of a child molester on the part of Penn State (yes, the university President represents the university, and surrogate university President even more so), perhaps up to and including a criminal conspiracy to engage in child sex trafficking (as defined under the Mann Act). I think we are still in the 2nd quarter of a four-quarter game, and, when concluded, Penn State is going to look even much worse than it does today (and the penalty is going to make Emmert look like a fool).</p>
<p>We’ll see. (Perhaps we can meet at the JoePa Library to compare notes.)</p>
<p>"… let’s see 2 years rent = a couple years of bowls and 3 years of scholarships … 15 years of child rapes = 4 years of bowls and 4 years of scholarships … seems to me they failed the proportionality test big time; they let Penn State off very easily relatively speaking. And a lot of the PSU folks are complaining … a proportional penalty would have been something infinitely worse than what they were given…</p>
<p>…SMU got the death penalty for paying players … USC got hammered for 2 years of rent … Penn State got hammered for 15 years of rapes. The school with over a decade of rapes is the one with the most supporters complaining … I find that beyond unbelievable."</p>
<p>^^^The NCAA is responsible for creating a fair playing field. Paying a player’s rent and paying the players creates an unfair playing field. How exactly do incidents that happen off the field (especially being done by coaches not in the program??) create an unfair advantage for a team?</p>
<p>Hops- Penn State attracted recruits, in part, by promoting the image of a completely honest and clean program. Turns out - not so much. The lack of integrity didn’t involve too many texts to recruits or lying about a barbecue at a coach’s Ouse (Bruce Pearl-TN) but something much, much worse. It truly was a total failure of institutional control.</p>
<p>In my opinion, many of those who are called “Penn State haters” are actually the truest Penn State supporters. Will this intervention be enough? The dysfunction runs very deep …</p>
<p>SMU got the death penalty for paying players … which is not a crime, but a violation of NCAA regulations that significantly affects their competitive ability as a football team</p>
<p>USC got hammered for 2 years of rent … which is not a crime, but a violation of NCAA regulations that significantly affects their competitive ability as a football team</p>
<p>Penn State got hammered for 15 years of rapes … which IS a crime and as such does not appear in NCAA regulations and has never before been addressed by the NCAA before because finding an actual benefit or advantage gained by the team requires substantial contortions, AND which is already being punished by criminal courts that will shortly send one man to jail for the rest of his life, will likely send two or three more men to prison, and which drain the university of what may well turn out to be a great deal more in civil penalties than the NCAA would dare to impose.</p>
<p>I am still shocked that so many can’t see the connection between Sandusky and paterno and the rest and how they used the football program to enable a child rapists. I see it. The ex FBI guy and his staff see it. The public and most sports commentators see it.</p>
<p>If Sandusky was using say the history department as a cover, or the library or computer lab to rape children, with the implied approval of the staff there, you bet those departments would be culpable. But how anyone can explain away to be naked showering with littlemboys alone. Point is, paterno and the rest approved of sanduskys behavior and facilitated it. Paterno was the institution. And Penn state allowed and pushed for that reputation. Now it’s time to pay, and I hope they have to pay big. And not just money.</p>
This argument relies on the idea that the cover-up netted the team advantages. That is to say, the idea that the revelation that a former coach was a child molester who had been identified and turned in by the remainder of the athletic staff would influence recruiting (and what else) so much that covering it up represented a substantial benefit that in fact blows away all other types of athletic transgressions seen before - because, ultimately, the NCAA is only responsible for punishing those parts of ANYONE’s behavior that are actually directly related to athletics.</p>
<p>So, given that we STILL have most of our recruits, EVEN WITH a scandal that is MASSIVELY greater than the original disclosure would have been… what is this based on?</p>
<p>"Penn State (~45,000 students) is in State College (~42,000 residents, ~1:1)</p>
<p>Do you see the issue? All of those universities contribute to the revenue of their host towns and cities, but these are the biggest sanctions ever levied, on the only listed university that is bigger than the town it occupies. Said town is named for the presence of the school and exists in an essential tourist vacuum that is filled only for home football weekends and a couple of other events (all but one, Arts Fest, associated with PSU) - there is nothing else to draw people for hours around State College, so this void is NOT going to be replaced by anything else."</p>
<p>So sanctions should be modulated or adjusted according to the size of the town that a university is in, and/or how dependent that town is on revenue from the college? Is that your argument here?</p>
<p>PSU Haters? I can honestly say that I do not hate any college/ university. I am not sure why anyone would be a “hater”. Unless they are a football fanatic from a rival school. But I have not really seen that type of talk on this thread. I could have missed it though.</p>
I was responding to someone who was asking why members of the PSU community were objecting to sanctions to greater extent than members of past sanctioned communities. And the answer is that the “collateral damage” of these sanctions will have a much much greater impact on those people than on members of previously sanctioned communities.</p>
<p>In other words, I was not answering the question that you pose. But, since you asked…</p>
<p>
To a certain extent, yes. It cannot ever be the largest part of the decision, but to the extent that you have the ability to punish people in the name of justice, you have the responsibility to ensure that people are being punished in accordance with their level of wrongdoing - that is what justice means. Economic sanctions against a team are a very broad and blunt punishment, and using them to punish the guilty invariably means unjustly punishing some innocent people as well - do you think that should be ignored? Do you not think that doing so damages the name and honor of the ones issuing the punishment, and incites rebellion in the unjustly injured?</p>
<p>Don’t you think that the NCAA took the town and the needs of the community into account? Would it not have been easy to just give the death penalty to PSU football? It would have made most people outside of the community happy. instead, they chose a plan that would allow the community to continue to have their games and their livelihood.</p>
<p>Pizza i ususally agree with you this time I don’t. I see the NCAA getting involved in an area they have never been involved in and sanctioning a college in a way that impacts everyone OTHER than the people who were actually involved as the criminal courts are taking care of them. I think to say that Paterno was able to recruit and win games because of the cover up alittle fastasmagorical. Kids came to Penn State to play for Paterno, not because Paterno was covering up for a former player…no one knew that. Now, I CAN agree that the administration was particularly weak but i also can’t speak for any authority that the BOD and other administrators not named knew about what was going on. See yes, I see the issue - perhaps it’s like a coin, some see one side of the coin, some see the other.</p>
<p>I think the NCAA did what it could to spare the local economy…there will still be football this season. The fines are payable over a number of years, and are equal to one year’s profit (not income). If the PSU fans attend the games, the fines can be paid, the local economy will not suffer, etc. </p>
<p>NCAA fines/penalties, etc always punish the current players/coaches/economy for the problems of the past. It’s just what happens. If you don’t want to be subject to the sanctions, don’t play in NCAA.</p>
<p>Paterno and his ilk covered because above all paterno was all about image. </p>
<p>People have covered up for friends and business associates and fellow officers for much less motives. It was more a well we covered and fixed this once, guess we have to keep doing it. It wasn’t about an advantage in the on the field advantage, it was keeping the image of squeaky clean so they could get money, endorsements, donations etc, so I suppose in that regard, hiding sandusky in plain site was an advantage. Not having to admit imperfection was so importsnt to paterno, he was willing to support sandusky. </p>
<p>It doesn’t have to be rational to be true. Seeing the church cover for rapists, seeing the military cover for rapists, seeing s football coach do the same isn’t such a stretch.</p>
<p>And this wasn’t two sides of a coin, it was a web with paterno in the middle</p>
<p>In a year marred with controversy and national notoriety, Penn State University alumni and boosters finally have something to smile about.</p>
<p>In fiscal year 2011-2012, the school earned $208.7 million in donations – the second highest annual amount in school history – according to a release from the Development and Alumni Relations division.</p>
<p>Just sayin, looks like Penn State will be fine(no pun intended)</p>
<p>cosmicfish and momofthreeboys - You folks should really watch the video of the Emmert’s NCAA press conference. He addresses a lot of the points that you’re struggling with, e.g, institutional vs. individual culpability, the role of the dysfunctional culture, “the rationale behind being involved in an area that it’s never been involved in,” etc. It’s really a very solid presentation. Even if you disagree with parts of it, you should hear those arguments so that you can strengthen your own positions, if only to be able to debate them credibly.</p>
<p>For example, the NCAA would state that this case falls squarely into the very essence of their mission. Do you know why? If not, wouldn’t you be interested, if only to build an informed opinion?</p>