The NCAA spared Penn State the “death penalty” yesterday, but that does not mean it did not kill the football program.
The scholarship limits and bowl ban will render the once-proud program unrecognizable for decades. About the only thing left from the glory days will be the uniforms.
Instead of the “death penalty,” Penn State received the equivalent to a life sentence with no hope of parole for covering up Jerry Sandusky’s child molestation.
As a Penn State graduate, yesterday was another difficult day in a long line of them since Sandusky’s horrific crimes came to light last November. It has been like finding out someone in your family did something terrible. It is hard to wrap your brain around someone you knew doing something like this.
Make no mistake, though, the NCAA had to do this. The culture of football at Penn State had to change. The monster that is Sandusky and the cowardly co-conspirators who covered up his crime, including Joe Paterno, all have paid a price. But Penn State also needed to pay for allowing a culture to grow where football became more important than anything else.
Take a look at Beaver Stadium if you want an idea how large Penn State football grew under Paterno. It had less than 50,000 seats when Paterno took over. Now, it is has a whopping capacity of 106,572.
As the stadium grew, so did Paterno’s influence. The discoveries of the past eight months show it grew out of control.
The NCAA made sure football will not matter at Penn State for a long, long time. No blue-chip prospect will want to play there for the next four years, and when the scholarship limits and bowl ban become history so will the memories of the Nittany Lions being a national or even regional power.
Many of my fellow alums undoubtedly will be distraught over this. But I think the end of Penn State football as we knew it is a fair price to pay for what the leaders of our school did. If the Freeh Report is accurate, when they learned of Sandusky’s terrible acts they protected everyone involved except the children who were Sandusky’s helpless victims.
It seems trivial to worry about scholarship losses and bowl bans when you think about those kids.
“No price the NCAA can levy will repair the damage inflicted by Jerry Sandusky on his victims,” NCAA president Mark Emmert said yesterday when announcing the penalties.
By stripping Penn State of all of its wins from 1998-2011, the NCAA did far more damage to Paterno’s legacy than the university did over the weekend by removing the statue of him from outside Beaver Stadium. The NCAA ensured Penn State’s football future is bleak with the sanctions and then wiped out part of its history with the record-book revision.
The hope now is that the healing can begin. It has seemed each week has brought a new punch to the stomach for Penn State. There still are civil suits and criminal cases to be decided. But hopefully, this is the low point.
The thought always has been that Penn State was about more than football wins and losses, that it truly was a special place to grow and learn.
Now, it’s time to prove it.
brian.costello@nypost.com