In the end, the NCAA decided not to hit Penn State with the “death penalty” — demolition of its football program — over the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal.
But the unprecedented sanctions leveled against the university yesterday amount to the same thing.
Penn State will be banned from post-season play for four years; athletic scholarships will be limited and current and incoming football players will be allowed to transfer elsewhere.
The net effect will be to reduce the Penn State program to the stature of your average Pop Warner team — probably the inevitable outcome, but a little topsy-turvy given that the perpetrator of the crimes will spend the rest of his life in prison, his protector is dead and the student athletes now about to be disadvantaged had nothing whatsoever to do with the scandal.
More problematic is the $60 million “fine” the NCAA has levied against Penn State. The school’s not complaining — it wants everything just to go away — but the notion that a private organization gets to coerce that much dough from a taxpayer-funded university is a tad bizarre.
The sanctions, said NCAA President Mark Emmert, are “greater than any other seen in NCAA history. No price [we] can levy will repair the damage inflicted by Jerry Sandusky.” Well, true enough.
But at the most fundamental level, the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are the ultimate victims here — certainly the taxpayers will be forking over many more millions before the books are closed — and a duly constituted authority must ultimately make things right.
And not an organization whose principal interest is its continued fiscal viability.
The sanctions, says Emmert, are meant to show that “football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people.”
Like, at the NCAA Division 1 level, that ever was the case. Or ever will be.
For sure, the NCAA’s outsized role in this scandal serves the interests of Pennsylvania’s political class; it allows Harrisburg to outsource its responsibility to fix things to a heavily conflicted private contractor.
So far, taxpayers are on the hook for an uncontested $60 million payout and a bunch of kids who had nothing to do with the scandal are the biggest losers.
That’s just not right.