[snip]
Time flies. It’s been 25 years. They are recovering however. It’s arguable that the best college quarterback in Texas is Garrett Gilbert at SMU.
Strewth. I’m a little surprised they weren’t asked to join the Big 12.
I will say that Penn State would recover a lot faster than SMU. Penn State is a large school with a rich football pedigree. SMU, on the other hand, is a relatively small school that had spotty football success until they got consistently good only in the five or six years before they got whacked. Even their “success” these days is limited to mediocre Conference USA opponents.
If you suspend the program for a year - you essentially tell the lower-level employees like McQueary, and any mediocre scholarship players, that they are out of a job next year and their career is basically flushed. There’s an incentive for someone like McQueary to report an incident to anyone.
IIRC they still haven’t identified the boy in the shower; the major fall-out is from the fact that Paterno and the administration were told years ago and did nothing. If it weren’t for McQueary’s report, this would just be another guy charged with stuff he did out at some charity, who happened to be connected to the college.
So if they suspend the whole football program, the moral to anyone else in a similar position is “don’t report it, don’t make waves, just back quietly out of the room before anyone knows you’re there, and start polishing your resume before the shit hits the fan…”
What punishment could they give to the program that would make someone want to come forward and get the program punished?
Barring the school unless the responsible parties left its employ.
This makes the assumption that every scholarship player plays just football. Under NCAA rules, if you are on scholarship at a Division 1 school and play football and any other sports, you count only against the limit in football, so some scholarship athletes may decide to stay - assuming, of course, that the school has any scholarships remaining in one of the athlete’s other sports. If the athlete just plays football, there would be no rule against the school giving him a scholarship, as it wouldn’t be considered an athletic one.
Another problem: while players can transfer without having to sit out a year, what other schools have any scholarships left? In FBS football, all scholarships count as full scholarships toward the limit, so you can’t just divide the 90 scholarships among 100 players by giving each one 90% of the full value.
Oh, man! Is it wrong to laugh at this? Classic!
Maybe… punishing just the people responsible, not the whistleblowers and innocent bystanders as well?
Unlike say, some college deciding that they would bend the rules severely to give scholarships - this is not a case of collusion by senior staff. We have reports that 2 officials and the coach knew and did nothing. At least 1 or 2 employees who actually tried to bring the case forward and seemed to hit a brick wall - in McQueary’s case, after 2 separate discussions with responsible officials, including the man in charge of the campus police. We have no evidence that the team in general or a lot of the staff there knew and decided to cover up the situation.
Whereas when you either break the rules to “hire” ineligible players for scholarships or break the rules to pay them under the table, offer inducements or whatever - that’s something that’s pretty hard to do without the knowledge and cooperation of a large contingent of the university and team heirarchy.