Monday, July 23, 2012

NCAA levies heavy penalties on Penn State

This from the Boston Globe:
Pennsylvania State University was fined $60 million as college sports’ governing body penalized the school for its handling of a child sex-abuse case involving assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. It avoided the stiffest punishment, a shutdown of the football program that was at the center of the scandal.

The school also was stripped of all its wins from 1998 through 2011, barred from postseason games for four years and lost 20 total scholarships annually for four seasons, according to a release from the National Collegiate Athletic Association. The postseason ban matches the longest in NCAA history, according to the NCAA’s database as cited by ESPN.

“One of the grave dangers stemming from our love of sports is that the sports themselves can become too big to fail, indeed, too big to even challenge,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said at a televised news conference. “The result can be an erosion of academic values replaced by the values of hero worship and winning at all costs.”

The discipline announced by the NCAA avoided the so-called death penalty against the program where Joe Paterno, the coach who won a record 409 games, became a focus of the scandal. Paterno’s record will also lose the victories he recorded as coach from 1998 through last season.

The NCAA statement said Penn State’s leadership had perpetuated a “football-first culture that ultimately enabled serial child sex abuse to occur.” Emmert said Penn State had agreed not to appeal the penalties...
The NCAA also shut down the University of Kentucky basketball team for the 1952-53 season; the basketball team at the University of Southwestern Louisiana for two seasons from 1973-75; the men’s soccer team at Morehouse College in 2004 and 2005; and the men’s tennis program at MacMurray College for two seasons from 2005-07...


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good response but not sure how taking away wins means anything, not even symbolic in purpose.

Current Penn state football players are the ones who get screwed on this deal. THe ability to immediately leave and play else were is meaningless at a time when no scholarships are available anywhere else, teams are already established and the ability to apply and get enrolled at a university which probably starts classes in three weeks is impossible.

Actually the entire sports program is on the skids now that the cash cow has been put down. With the significant reduction in revenue and lose of scholarships, one can't help wondering how womens' field hockey, volleyball, etc. will exist.

Richard Day said...

I thought the same thing, but Mike & Mike were reporting some NCAA chatter that they might waive the 85 scholarship limit for this particular circumstance. Then any school that picked up a Penn St player would have to move back within 85 next year. I haven't heard if this has actually come to pass.