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?"

Joe Paterno is not Jerry Sandusky

Let me be clear here. Joe Paterno was disastrously wrong for his lack of action in dealing with Jerry Sandusky. It's funny to hear all these talking heads who make a living out of talking about sports all day, suddenly make grandiose statements about really serious matters to the extent that Paterno is as "morally culpable" as Sandusky. On one hand, Sandusky has been found guilty of sexually abusing multiple young boys through such actions as physical touching, oral sex, and anal sex. Joe Paterno did none of that, in fact, he seemed to do very little of anything. But there's a big divide between Paterno and Sandusky.

Paterno isn't around to answer the hard questions.

If Paterno was the kind of man I think he was, I don't think he would do nothing if he had been sat down and told by someone, "Look Joe, Sandusky is raping kids in our locker room, in our showers. He's using our university as his personal stomping ground to molest young boys. We've seen it, we've heard it from other people. He's using his non-profit to groom his next victims. There are kids right this second in danger of being molested by Sandusky. I think this has been going on longer than anyone can even imagine." I could be wrong, but I'd like to think that if the message had been that clear to him, that he'd see the whole thing through.
Even after the Freeh Report came out yesterday, I'm still as unclear about a lot of things as I was at the beginning, and I can't be the only person. There are a lot of questions in that report that have been left unanswered.
For one, Mike McQueary, then a Penn State graduate assistant, was not interviewed in the Freeh Report despite making repeated offers to be interviewed by investigators. This is huge because it is McQueary who first reported to Paterno that he had seen Sandusky molest a boy in the showers. What exactly, and in what terms, did McQueary tell Paterno? Then, from Paterno's discussion with McQueary, what did he tell AD Tim Curley and VP Gary Schultz? Let's stop here. This is the point in which Paterno should have been screaming like a banshee to get Sandusky investigated and prohibited from ever setting foot on the Penn State campus.
Instead, he went up to his "superiors," and let them handle it. In that instance, Paterno was no longer an effective leader. Sure, he could probably still run a football program, but he couldn't properly respond to a situation outside of his narrow scope. It should come as no wonder, but the man was nearly 75 years old at that point. Paterno should have been laying on a beach somewhere in Florida, or playing bingo, or tending to a garden, but not coaching college football.
The most damning piece of evidence is in an e-mail exchange between Schultz and Curley in which Curley says he had spoken to Paterno, and decided against going to the authorities for what McQueary had reported. What was that conversation, and what did Paterno say? Again, the Freeh Report does not make that clear and falls short in answering key questions. It leaves us assuming about many things.
What happened here? I may very well be an idiot, I may very well be a complete and utter fool, but you mean to tell me that four highly educated men all knew that Sandusky had been having sex with a 10-year-old boy in the same locker room where Penn State football players prepare to give their blood, sweat, and tears for their university and they decided to do nothing? It just doesn't make sense.
Listen, if you've read this entire thing it's my hope that you don't think I'm defending these guys. That's not the case, they turned a blind eye to a really horrible situation. My point is, did they know exactly what they were turning a blind eye to? Something happened here, something very tangible happened that resulted in the failure to report Sandusky, and the Freeh Report didn't find those answers. If everyone knew exactly what was happening, then I can't think of anything we can hold as sacred anymore. It just doesn't make sense.