Penn State Has Been Hit by the NCAA Atomic Bomb

There used to be statues dedicated to Joe Paterno.

About three years ago I was having dinner in New Orleans with a group of sports administrators who were in town for a volunteer trip. One of them was a retired athletic director for academic advising at Penn State. She asked me, "Do you know what they call Penn State?" I had an idea where she was headed but I replied, "I'm not sure, what?" She said, "They call it Happy Valley. Do you know why?" I said, "No, why?" She said, "The name says it all. It truly is a very happy place." She went on to talk about the university and how wonderful people were there. She talked about how Penn State was one of the first schools to have a Life Skills department for its student-athletes. She even gushed about the football team winning the 1986 national title against Miami. The conversation was a pleasant one, but it left me feeling uneasy. I mean certainly, not everything in Happy Valley could truly be happy, right? Last November we found out that it wasn't, and today we found out that Penn State football as we know it is forever altered.
The sanctions destroyed Penn State's legacy and its future. Penn State football will be irrelevant for what may be up to a decade, if not longer. Joe Paterno is no longer the winningest coach in Division I-A / FBS history. The 60 million dollars that will go to external funds for victims of sexual abuse, which is a great sanction that benefits the victims of this tragedy, will not only take away from the football program, but also from all the other sports programs that football helps fund. The reduction of scholarships means that fewer young adults will have the opportunity to attend college and represent Penn State.
In many ways this was worse than the death penalty, because Penn State football will continue to exist as a shadow of its former self, and we will all be spectators to its fall from grace. We will all see the Michigans and Ohio States of the world demolish Penn State and we won't be left wondering if it was because of poor recruiting or coaching, we'll all know it was because of a child molester who lurked in the shadows of Beaver Stadium. Penn State's humiliation will be a years-long public spectacle.
I hope these sanctions serve as a warning to other schools that football cannot take precedence over an institution's academic purpose. That these sanctions will provide some kind of relief for the victims of Jerry Sandusky, and that administrators will think twice about covering up any crime, especially those as heinous as Sandusky's.
Yet I cannot help but look at the NCAA people as a bunch of hypocrites. It relied solely on the Freeh Report to dole out its sanctions, without conducting any kind of real investigation on its own. The organization harps on the importance of keeping football from becoming an institution's priority, yet year-after-year the NCAA stands to gain billions of dollars from multi-year football contracts leveraged by programs like Penn State. It also continues to punish innocent student-athletes that had nothing to do with crimes committed by men of higher authority who failed them. The NCAA is losing sight of itself. The money in college sports has become too great for the NCAA to keep pretending that there isn't an incentive for programs to cheat and sink to the lowest depths of humanity. The sad truth is that ethics, morality, and virtues don't stand a chance when there is money to be made. Penn State deserved a stiff punishment, but the NCAA needs to take a look at itself and wonder if it has become that monster it aims to punish.
I'm sure that there are people in Penn State who are hurting at their core. Like the athletic director told me a few years ago, Penn State was a happy place for a lot of great people, but now comes the self-reflection and finding out truly, what makes a place "happy?"