No athletic program has ever deserved the NCAA's "Death Penalty" more than Penn State.
They need to lock up the gates to Beaver Stadium in State College, Pa., for at least one year.
CNN’s report exposing a trail of e-mails among the powers at Penn State University seems to confirm the extreme lack of institutional control that existed on that campus going back more than a decade.
Only five times has the NCAA enforced its Death Penalty, shutting down an athletic program for at least one season, and none of those came anywhere near to this apparent pedophile cover-up in the Penn State football program:
• Kentucky basketball was shut down for the 1952-53 season following a point-shaving scandal.
• Southwestern Louisiana (now Louisiana-Lafayette) lost its basketball program for the 1973-74 and 1974-75 seasons for academic fraud, including an assistant coach forging a principal’s signature on a recruit’s high school transcript.
• SMU football for the 1987 and 1988 seasons for making cash payments to players and then lying about it to the NCAA.
• Morehouse College soccer for the 2004 and 2005 seasons for allowing two players with professional experience to compete.
• MacMurray College men’s tennis for the 2005-06 and 2006-07 seasons for providing players with scholarships, which are not allowed at the Division III level.
None of those actions come remotely close to what allegedly transpired at Penn State after former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was reportedly seen sexually assaulting a young boy in the football team’s showers in 2001.
It was a classic case of CYAP -- Cover Your Athletic Program.
Three days ago, CNN revealed a seemingly inhuman exchange of e-mails between Penn State’s athletic director Tim Curley, vice president Gary Schultz and president Graham Spanier.
The e-mails indicated that they initially planned to confront Sandusky and report him to the Department of Welfare and to Second Mile, a nonprofit organization serving the youth of Pennsylvania that Sandusky allegedly used to meet his victims.
That plan was later changed, according to an e-mail Curley sent at the time, CNN reported.
“After giving it more thought and talking it over with Joe yesterday, I am uncomfortable with what we agreed were the next steps,” Curley wrote in the e-mail. “I am having trouble with going to everyone, but the person involved.”
A subsequent e-mail from Spanier, also obtained by CNN, responded to Curley’s message.
“I am supportive,” Spanier wrote. “The only downside for us if the message isn’t heard and acted upon, and then we become vulnerable for not having reported it.”
It’s stunning to read their written words, but not that surprising at this point.
You had to be incredibly naïve to dismiss the possibility of a major cover-up that included the likelihood of Paterno being involved.
Football coaches are control freaks by nature. There’s nothing that goes on in or around their program that they don’t try to control directly, especially a major incident such as this one.
To have automatically dismissed Paterno’s possible role -- regardless of his seemingly distinguished coaching career -- was not just naïve; it was flat out ignorant and insulting to the victims.
Anyone who continued to defend and glorify Paterno, even after the sickening story about Sandusky surfaced last fall, should do a little soul-searching themselves right now.
The monster, Sandusky, is in jail for life, but that’s not enough in this case.
Sadly, we know there are sick people like Sandusky in this world. Just watch the news any day of the week.
What’s alarming, assuming these e-mails are accurate, is that intelligent, respectable people at an institution of education like Penn State would allow it to go on unpunished.
They protected their friend, their athletic program, themselves.
There’s never been an instance with such lack of institutional control involving a school president, vice president, athletic director and Hall of Fame coach.
Innocent people, obviously, are going to pay the price if Penn State’s football program is given the Death Penalty.
The players weren’t responsible for any of this, and neither was new coach Bill O’Brien.
But that’s always the case when any program gets punished. Unfortunately, there's no getting around it.
The current Penn State players should be allowed to transfer with immediate eligibility to any other school while the coaching staff continues to receive full pay, provided the university has any money left after all the civil lawsuits.
But make no mistake about it, Penn State football needs to be closed down for a while.
If that doesn’t happen, then no program should ever be given the Death Penalty again.
This is as bad as it gets.
