(09-09-2014 03:00 PM)goodknightfl Wrote: (09-08-2014 04:30 PM)perimeterpost Wrote: These harsh penalties were levied against Penn State to rid it of its culture that worships and idolizes football. Well done NCAA, you really showed them. Mission accomplished.
These penalties were put in place to appease the public. They had little to do with Penn State. The NCAA initially had no intention of doing anything until the out cry got loud. This is and always was a legal and civil issue, and the NCAA has no standing in either.
Agree 100%. The viewpoint you express is definitely the minority viewpoint but I believe it is the correct one. Aside from the fact that Sandusky was formerly employed by the football program, this had nothing to do with football. There were no allegations of academic cheating by team members, no illegal gifts received by team members, no illegal recruiting activities, no fraud nor rules broken by members of the football team so I don't see that the NCAA should have been involved in what had a lot to do with criminal law and nothing to do with the current football team.
As to "lack of institutional control", the cover up was to protect the reputation of the University, not the reputation of the football program and the lack of institution control was at the highest levels of the University, not just the athletic department.
If Sandusky had been a faculty member in one of the professional schools would you have advocated, for example, having the certification of the Engineering School revoked, or perhaps the Law School such that graduates could be prevented from taking the state bar exam? In both of those hypothetical cases both the students as well as the institution are being punished which is essentially what the NCAA did.
This was a legal matter from the outset IMHO and NCAA jumped in because they felt public opinion required it. By jumping in they sought to avert negative publicity of doing nothing while gaining positive publicity by being punitive as well as creating the opportunity to levy fines. They should have been called for a dead-ball foul (piling on).
Now that Sandusky has been in jail for a while and Paterno has been dead for a while and the media has milked all it can from it and has moved on to some new tragedy, the NCAA no longer is enjoying basking in that emotionally popular wave of provided by the "court of public opinion". Instead the NCAA now finds themselves facing a series of civil suits in the "cold objective environment of a court of law" where the law and not emotion is suppose to prevail. Just a guess but I suspect this rather sudden change in direction by the NCAA may be because they are somewhat uncomfortable with pending lawsuits they are facing and they really, really want to make these suits just go away so they are furiously bargaining and cutting deals in order to forge out of court settlements before these cases start going to trial.