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?"

Will Miami Scandal Signal the End of ACC Football?

Was this guy's stolen money worth it Miami? 

Ever since I heard about the Miami allegations, I've been in a daze. The worst part will be the wait to find out what happens. It's been more than a year since the allegations at North Carolina, and they still don't know what kind of sanctions they're going to face, but they suspended a ton of players, Butch Davis was fired, and their athletic director is going to step down. In other words, a lot of bad stuff has happened at UNC, and this Miami scandal is much bigger than North Carolina's. The Shapiro story doesn't so much show a renegade program, but a program that purposely looked the other way, and that's bad enough. One of my friends thinks Miami is going to get off easier than Southern Cal, but I think he's in denial. The process needs to be played out, but I'll come out and say I believe about 80 percent of what Shapiro is saying, and even if only a quarter of what he said is true, it's still the worst story about a program in more than 15 years (Alabama).

What I think will happen: 2 year bowl ban, about 35 scholarships reduced over a 3-year period, and a ban from TV for one year. I hope it's not that bad, but a part of me thinks the sanctions could be much worse. If I were working at Miami, I'd suggest voluntarily giving up going to a bowl game this year so that future football players aren't penalized. The biggest tragedy of all? Just as Shapiro was out of the picture, and the Hurricanes landed a great coach in Al Golden, and a lot of optimism was building around the program, none of it will matter. I think Golden sticks around for one season, proves his worth this season, and then leaves for Penn St. when Joe Paterno retires after this season. Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but if I am, it's a result of the hangover I'm still feeling from reading the Yahoo! story. It's enough to make any college football fan sick to their stomach, and I'm not naive enough to think things like this aren't happening all over the country. Let me put it this way, does your school have millionaire alumni with outsized egos with a large interest in athletics? Yes, it does. You should be worried too.

Now to the question I asked at the beginning. Will this Miami scandal signal the end of ACC football? I watched the 30 for 30 documentary on Southern Methodist and everyone mentioned how the SMU scandal had the effect of destroying the Southwest Conference. If Miami is penalized the way I think it's going to be, and North Carolina also gets hit hard, then we're talking about a conference with some severe limitations. Throw in the fact that Florida St. and Virginia Tech have been mentioned as possible candidates to join the SEC, and the ACC looks like a radically different conference.

There has been speculation about the six current BCS conferences combining into four super conferences, with the Big East and Big XII being dismantled. But the Miami situation puts the ACC in a very fragile situation. It could be that the Big XII, with Oklahoma, Texas, up-and-comers Oklahoma St., and middle-tier Missouri and Texas Tech survives to expand to 16 teams, and the ACC and Big East are forced to join one of the four remaining conferences. Imagine if Florida St. joins the SEC, the banner program for the ACC would be Virginia Tech, and then who? A rebuilding Miami would be years away from being competitive again, so the second banner team would be Georgia Tech? Maryland? Boston College? And who would they pick up? USF? Pittsburgh? Syracuse? In other words, the ACC would be in the same category as the Big East, by far the two weakest conferences of the six BCS conferences.

The repercussions for Miami will last a long time. I think it's going to be a much harsher repeat of the mid-90's when the NCAA imposed a one-year bowl ban and a reduction of 24 scholarships over two years. Who's to blame? First and foremost, the Miami administration for chasing money and enabling a booster like Nevin Shapiro, then Shapiro for just coming into the consciousness of Miami athletics, and then all the players who knowingly broke the rules and disregarded Randy Shannon's warnings to stay away from Shapiro. The NCAA is going to put the "U" in for extended nap time, let's just see where the dominoes fall for the rest of the teams affected by Miami's inability to monitor itself.