I dunno. This could be construed as the worst case of Lack of Institutional Control in the history of organized sports. Sandusky is obviously a sociopathic predator who ruined children’s lives. What PSU, Spanier, Paterno, etc did is like sending victims back to Dahmer.
Penn State should get the boot, but my cynicism about the NCAA knows few boundaries, so i’m not counting my chickens yet.
I’d bet against. No players were raped. No games were interrupted because of rapes. The NCAA will do all it can to treat the issue just like Penn State did. They will talk it over with the PS Board, advise counseling, insist that they create some new official rules on paper that will probably be ignored, and forget it. It’s the ‘humane’ thing to do.
I retract my disagreement with silenus, because I didn’t understand the meaning of the term “death penalty” in NCAA parlance. I thought it was really a severe punishment, like casting them out permanently. Having looked it up, it means a one (or maybe more) year suspension from playing in NCAA games and tournaments, which amounts to a pricey slap on the wrist.
Yes I agree they will do this, for the sake of their own image if for nothing else.
Don’t underestimate it. The one time it was actually used, it permanently changed the landscape of college football.
Who knows if they’ll do it.
From the ESPN coverage, according to at least one lawyer, there might not be enough according to NCAA rules to impose the death penalty:
That would be a travesty, if it were the case and a demonstration the NCAA needs to revise its policies.
Even a year suspension of a football program can have effects that resonate for multiple years after. The best high school recruits aren’t going to want to go to a school with a suspended program, and current upperclassmen aren’t going to stick around and waste a year of eligibility.
Look it up in Wiki. It’s been used half a dozen times, though not always against the football team. Please explain to me what permanent changes this made – I haven’t noticed anything. If the NCAA wanted to be really serious about a “death penalty”, they should make it last at least four years, so the really competitive athletes at the school would transfer out. Also, the school couldn’t recruit first class high school athletes, who would know they’d have little or no chance to play against top teams and eventually make it into the pros.
I appreciate how everyone is weighing in on exactly how hefty a penalty / burden the “death penalty” would be on Penn State in this instance. My response is – good. Fuck them.
One thing I do wonder…how is it that Sandusky has been tried and convicted, but Curley and Schultz are still awaiting trial? Is it because they were continuing their cases pending the outcome of Sandusky’s?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about college athletics in my life, it’s that the fans will forgive any abuse, any outrage, any crime, so long as they can sit down and drink their beer and watch the gaaaaaaaaame.
Add to this the fact that the NCAA drop-kicked the whole concept of the “noble student athlete” decades ago and became a cynical money machine, and no, there’s no way IMO Penn State will get anything other than some token fine, which some “anonymous donor” will cover out of their pocket money.
Yep, I’m seeing this from a few other journalists. Unfortunately, the NCAA rules apparently do not cover this kind of activity (or inactivity).
The Paterno family needs to get with it, though. They are still claiming Joe had no knowledge at all about Sandusky’s behavior. Look guys, there’s no way to spin it at this point. Just admit he had a major lapse in judgment and move on. Joe himself admitted regrets about how things were handled.
SMU football, and it was incredibly impactful because football is an enormous revenue-generating sport. Read about it here, under Fallout.
Actually, the NCAA has never used the death penalty again on a D1 athletic program. It has only been used twice since SMU, a DII soccer team and a DIII tennis team.
As for the results of the SMU death penalty, they’re pretty well known. Have you heard much of SMU as a football program or even as a university since about 1989?
I wonder how he reaches that interpretation. These are the principles of institutional control for the NCAA. Point 8 (A head coach fails to create and maintain an atmosphere for compliance within the program the coach supervises…) in the list of acts likely to demonstrate a lack of control is interesting. The Freeh report brings up Paterno using his influence to get kids who deserve severe punishment a slap on the wrist so that they could still play football (see the footnote that begins on page 65 of the report). It directly ties that incident with causing the feeling in some people that they should not come forward with what they’d seen or knew. That looks to me like failing to create an atmosphere for compliance.
Unless all that’s moot and what the guy’s saying is that because raping children isn’t directly dealt with in the NCAA rules, anyone at Penn State could have raped as many children as they wanted and still played football.
Now I’ve been looking at the NCAA bylaws a bit and it just comes off as too vague to not be able to hit Penn State with a major violation. The list of unethical conduct, for example, deals mainly with cheating but starts the list of violations with “may include, but is not limited to”. And if you get hit with a major violation it appears the NCAA has the ability to use any of its enforcement options. I’m not sure why the NCAA lawyer expert zeroed in on institutional control specifically, but the bylaws are a vague 400 page document. I’m sure someone with a mind for it could find something in there that Penn State did wrong. If they want to. And who knows with the NCAA?
Nike is taking Paterno’s name off their corporate childcare center -
Death Penalty or no Death Penalty - I suspect Penn State is going to have a hard time finding advertising money in the coming years, not to mention recruits. If you were a high school senior looking to start your career - would you want to get in the middle of this?
I have a friend who has two daughters in HS, and one of the colleges they were considering was Penn State. Learning about Sandusky was almost the least of what upset him – it was the idea that there were privileged jocks walking around on campus not being held responsible for their actions. He decided it wasn’t a safe environment for his daughters, though OG knows I’m hard pressed to think of any college campuses as safe environments for daughters (if I had them).
There has to be a rule specifically banning rapping children for the NCAA? REALLY?
If they don’t impose the death penalty on Penn State it is a stain on all college football.
Well, yeah. Rapping children should have been banned a long time ago. It’s something to do with their affectation of the idioms and attitude of hip hop. It’s too old and worldly-wise. Doesn’t suit a child at all.