I’m not hearing from anybody happy with the NCAA’s punishment of Penn State.
It’s outrageously inadequate, some say.
Inevitably they decry the contrast: SMU got the “death penalty,” meaning its football program removed altogether for a time in the 1980s, for paying players. But Penn State gets less for enabling and covering up a high-level football coach’s serial sexual abuse of young boys.
No, it’s an outrageous over-reach, others say.
They say the young men now playing football for Penn State aren’t to blame for the evil sins of a few men.
They say an unfair price will be paid by athletes in other campus sports that are underwritten by the football program’s $60 million in annual earnings that now will be the amount of a fine.
Impairing the opportunities for innocent bystanders, meaning intercollegiate student-athletes, won’t do anything to compensate those horribly abused boys, they contend.
As usual, these are worthy points on both sides. So I’m thinking the NCAA got it about right.
SMU’s transgression was strictly a football one that demanded the ultimate football penalty.
Penn State’s sin was broader and invited an array of sanctions both more elaborate and strategic.
There is that big fine that will be spent on child-abuse-prevention programs.
There will be a steep reduction in football scholarships and a ban on bowl appearances, assuring ongoing punishment in the two places where it really hurts—on the balance sheet and on the field of competition.
Speaking of which: All Nittany Lion wins since 1998—when Jerry Sandusky’s behavior became known to key university personnel—will be vacated. That has the piercingly punitive effect of posthumously taking away Joe Paterno’s status as the winningest head coach ever.
It is a punishment that transcends lost football games; it erases for all of history an icon’s legend and legacy.
Sandusky, we are told, is getting taunted these days by other jail inmates who serenade him with that Pink Floyd lyric—“Teacher, leave them kids alone.”
Paterno is dead, buried and disgraced.
All the relevant administrative officials are gone.
An institution has been brought to its knees, and to shame.
There is a more general benefit. It’s the long-overdue frontal assault on the coach-as-god culture.
Paterno had become bigger than his institution, which is almost always a fatal place to be.
He stayed too long, for 46 years, until he wasn’t really coaching anymore. He was deferred to. He was allowed to have things his esteemed and venerated and dictatorial way.
His reputation became such a matter of eminence—as did that of his football program—that protecting those reputations provided a higher priority than protecting innocent children from an institutionally insulated monster.
Paterno’s prominence was the most egregious example of the coach-as-god culture. But there are lamentable increments at collegiate football factories all over the country.
And now the culture is made vulnerable—and that is good.
For example: We should assume that Jeff Long, the athletic director at the University of Arkansas, would have done the right thing in the Bobby Petrino debacle anyway.
But I’d wager that Penn State weighed on his mind, as it should have.
Excusing immoral and unethical behavior by a highly successful football coach was not as viable an option for Long as it might have been prior to the outrage coming from State College, Pa.
Fortunately for the Razorbacks, their most successful coaches have always been mired in so many ego wars and misbehavior incidents that none of them could ever achieve the singularly untouchable pinnacle of Paterno.
The Hogs have always stayed bigger than any man, which is good, I guess.
Surely it’s better to have an unhealthy addiction to a team of ever-changing college-age athletes than to a permanent fixture whose monument you might end up having to take down.
John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.