The Hammer Falls

Today the NCAA put the hammer down on Penn State: all victories from 1998 to 2011 will be vacated, the school must pay a $60 million dollar fine (equal to one year of profit from the football program), a loss of some scholarships, and the football program will be banned from post-season play for four years. It's a harsh penalty, but it's not the death penalty.


A lot of people, especially rabid sports fans, think this is totally unfair. They don't think the NCAA has jurisdiction, there was a rush to judgment, they didn't give PSU due process, they didn't wait until the case played out in the courts and all the appeals were exhausted. Somehow Sandusky's conviction doesn't matter to these folks.


But that's all irrelevant, because the NCAA isn't a government organization. It's a club that universities are invited to join. As such, it has the right to pick and choose its members. If one of its members does something that it perceives as corrupt, or has the appearance of corruption, it has the right to punish such behavior to discourage other schools from making the same mistakes.


The fact that Paterno wasn't convicted in a court of law is irrelevant. It's not a crime for boosters to give athletes cars or for students to play professionally before participating in an NCAA program. But such infractions will get your football program banned and its victories vacated in a heartbeat. If giving an athlete cash so he can pay his mom's rent is an infraction, letting former coaches use the shower to molest children should be an infraction as well.

The NCAA has a lot of problems. Many of its rules seem pointless and ridiculous, especially for "non-revenue" programs. The question of unpaid student athletes playing in college football and basketball programs that are essentially farm teams for the NFL and the NBA is particularly vexing. Hundreds of football players suffer permanent injuries from multiple ACL tears, to concussions, to broken necks. Some even die on the field. It makes you question why unpaid student athletes are the backbone of a multibillion dollar sports franchise, and why we even have football programs at universities. But that's a question for another day.

Yes, this punishment will hurt more than a hundred athletes and coaches who had nothing to do with Paterno's disgrace. It will hamstring the Penn State program for a decade. It will disappoint thousands, if not millions, of football fans. But maybe the next coach who finds himself in the same situation will do the right thing. Maybe the next university president will have the guts to stand up to a coach whose fans think he's the right hand of God.

The problem is, this entire fiasco was self-inflicted. If Paterno had turned in Sandusky way back when, he would have been the hero for doing the right thing, the hard thing, the sort of thing that he was famous for. Why didn't he? Why didn't he stay true to what he was?

That question is the most disturbing. Because it makes us wonder whether Joe Paterno ever really was that guy.