That doesn’t really mean much, so far as I am concerned. The NCAA doesn’t control everyone who compiles a book of records. A game doesn’t get unplayed or unwon.
Would this significantly change any BCS rankings over the years? Would some team suddenly have the “right” to bitch about being passed over for the championship game, now that they’re undefeated?
No. The wins are vacated for PSU, but the outcome of the games remain the same.
nm
Wow. These are very severe penalties. A $60 million fine (a year of football revenue) to go to programs that fight child abuse or assist victims, all the wins since the initial abuse allegation in 1998 are vacated, a reduction of 10 to 20 athletic scholarships a year for four years, and a four-year bowl ban, which means that any Penn State player can transfer to another school without having to sit out a year. Penn State says it won’t fight the sanctions, and the Big Ten will impose some additional penalties. On first glance I think that’s very satisfactory, and maybe better than not allowing the team on the field.
OK, I was just curious. Thanks for the info.
The demotion of Paterno in the record books, like the removal of the statue, is an appropriate gesture, but not much more than that.
The period of restricted play is a penalty, but insufficient for the message that was required. Too many people in central Pennsylvania will go forward thinking they have just been unjustly persecuted, but still having a football identity–maintaining the core of the problem. Reports today from State College are talking about people “pulling together” around their team.
They should have had a couple years off entirely, then a very gradual rebuilding under limits.
Eh, it’s a start.
It doesn’t help that a lot of PSU fans – or, at least, the ones I see around Harrisburg and the surrounding area – don’t have any connection to the university other than the fact that they’re fans of the football team. ISTM that they don’t make the connection between the Nittany Lions and Pennsylvania State University. In their minds, it would be as if the NFL forced the Steelers or the Eagles to shut down, and that’s why the NCAA dropped the hammer as badly as it did, to clean up a very corrupt culture.
This is a couple of years off. More likely ten. Players won’t stay and they won’t come to PSU. Losing 10 scholarships a year for four years is simply devastating to any ability to field a competitive team. The core of the current team is going to transfer out. The fine is to be paid without taking money away from other sports at the school.
I think that is exactly what the NCAA has failed to do here, at least failed to do decisively.
They have taken the “death penalty” off the table for all cases; how could it ever not “impact far more student-athletes than those at the [targeted] program”? Incredibly lame rationalizing. They could have just said, “we’re too chickenshit to hit a major program that hard again.”
The sad part is that the Penn State situation, more than any other that’s ever happened or been imagined, is the one that really needed a shutdown.
I don’t think anyone’s really going to argue that something had to be done with Penn State. It’s a corrupt culture that enabled criminal behavior that went on because The Program had to be protected at all costs. And I mean ALL costs.
That being said, the penalties were just handed down, what, 132 minutes ago (as I type this). A whole culture this corrupt is going to take a while to get cleaned up. Give the sanctions time to work.
I don’t think the NCAA can (or wants to) punish people for being irrationally attached to a football team. The NCAA wanted to punish the school and the team for the conduct of its leadership and the people in charge of the team, and I’d say they are doing that. Some fans are dumb or crazy and will never accept that their team did anything wrong. I think that’s a pretty small minority of people in this case because the crimes are so awful, so I’m more concerned about setting an example to other schools and athletic departments than fans.
I am extremely underwhelmed by these sanctions. The fine and the “vacating” of wins are basically nothing, so far as I’m concerned. So the sole substantial punishmentis the four-year ban on postseason play.
The problem is not that they’re too afraid to penalize a school, but that the death penalty unfair penalizes other schools as well. The SMU death penalty not only knocked its football program into the stone age, but destroyed the old SWC as well. Taking Penn State’s team off the field would be a huge, huge blow to the Big Ten; they wouldn’t be able to play a conference tournament game this year, and their scheduling would have to be revised with a month’s notice (or have a bunch of byes on some team’s schedules, with some teams playing X games and others playing X-1).
I feel something like this is a more appropriate punishment in that it allows them to field a team, but their competitive disadvantage will be so great as to essentially prevent success for the duration of the penalty.
The vacating of wins is pretty much the only thing they could do to make a statement about Paterno’s coaching record and I think I like the message it sends. Why does the fine not matter? It’s a year’s worth of football revenue that won’t go to football, the school, or for that matter the big legal settlements the school is going to have to pay over the years.
No, it isn’t. They will have a football team on the field.
Sure, they’ll be bad, attendance will be down. But everyone around them will be able to say that it’s “just” because the NCAA was so harsh and unfair. The diehard fans will take it as a personal affront and challenge. It’s a very different message than the one they needed.
Evidently so. It’s a shame. Paterno enabled Sandusky; the fans enabled both of them.
This is probably the wrong message, but the football fan in me is curious. Just how bad will the scholarship losses be? What’s the maximum scholarship players they’ll have in the next 5 years, and what’s the minimum? Say, in 2015, are they going to be fielding a team with just 45 players on scholarship? The rest would be walk-ons, I assume. They’ll get a handful of blue-chip recruits who want to rebuild the program or are legacy recruits, but for the most part PSU will be scraping for players like Temple or Marshall would normally get.
The players that end up at PSU are surely going to be cannon fodder. It’s one thing for a school like Temple to play at PSU once a year and be cannon fodder, and then it’s over since they’ll play Buffalo, Akron, and Bowling Green later in the season. These PSU players are going to be going against Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio State, and Iowa level players almost every week. The scoreboard is going to look ugly, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see an increase in injuries because the players will just be too small, weak, and slow to compete. Yikes.
That’s a good point. Talk about punishing the innocents. 
I am proud that by not being a college football fan, I have taken a stand against child rape.