While I was unhappy to learn that the NCAA did not chose the “death penalty” for Penn State, I admit I was much pleased to learn that they had come down on Penn State’s athletic head with a brick. Just how heavy a brick? A fair sized one, I’d say. Penn State got:
A $60 million fine, with the money going to an endowment to benefit the welfare of children. A four-year ban on postseason play, including the Big Ten championship game, bowls or the playoffs coming in 2014. A reduction in the maximum allowance of scholarships offered to incoming players from 25 to 15 a year for the next four years. The vacating of all victories from 1998-2011 [this is the length of time Paterno was enabling Jerry Sandusky to rape boys, and seems like poetic justice to me], which strips Paterno of his title as the winningest coach in college football history … Paterno, for the record, loses 111 wins and now ranks 12th with 298.
Wonderful. I think it is delightful that Paterno’s legacy is now as compromised as his morals. Saint JoePa protected Jerry Sandusky after he was caught in the act of raping a child by Mike McQeary, and nothing can ever, EVER excuse that callous indifference to the fate of the children Sandusky continued to rape for a decade after Paterno could have stopped him.
Of course, not everyone thinks that the NCAA was fair. Some people seem to think, like Penn State freshman Maria Wolfeo, that the sanctions were “also punishing football players who had nothing to do with this. Actually, that’s not accurate. The players who signed on before the shit hit the fan “will be offered the opportunity to immediately transfer and begin playing for other schools”, so they won’t be losing anything but the rep for having played for Penn State – which is not all that and a pack of crackers nowadays. However, the athletic department, which can no longer offer any powerful inducements to athletes to choose Penn State, is in for a world of hurt.
Pablo Torre, a reporter with Sports Illustrated whom I assume knows a bit about football, said that:
this is the most severe, harshest penalty the NCAA has ever laid down … $60 million is a lot of money. It’s also approximately one year of revenue from Penn State football. The post-season ban is significant because that’s a huge deterrent for recruits. This is a crippling move for a program that’s obviously competing in an incredibly competitive conference – the Big 10 and in Division I football, generally. Joe Paterno’s win total is significant because he was the all-time winningest coach at 409 wins, now down to 298. And although the NCAA has, you know, this sort of weird time machine they climb into to impose that, that’s as much a symbolic gesture as anything. The scholarships, lastly, might be the most crucial for a coach. By reducing them down to 10 initial scholarships, and then 20 each year, losing by those amounts, that makes Penn State closer to a I-AA football team and really cripples that program.
Considering that kids were raped so that the Hallowed Football Program would not be impugned by scandal, the destruction of that Golden Calf suits me just fine.
Then there are the stupid goat blowing asshats who are defending Joe Paterno, and thus symbolically defending the patriarchal hegemony, tooth and nail. Those people are vile.
Take for example this festering anus Anthony Lubrano, a member of the Penn State Board of Trustees. Lubrano was “one of the harshest critics of the Board as a non-member after it fired Joe Paterno last November in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal”. He was so incensed by JoePa’s dismissal that he campaigned to become a trustee on the promise he would move heaven and earth to keep on excusing Paterno’s enabling of child rape. Lubrano was so committed to this cause that he even “purchased television time and included as part of his campaign a “Joe Paterno tribute”.
But that was before the Freesh Report, you say. Wouldn’t the FACT that Paterno knowingly protected a child rapist and left him free to rape more kids, wouldn’t that at least rattle Lubrano’s worship of the coach?
Nope. The pus bucket is doubling down on his defense of JoePa and Penn State’s cover up. Lubrano is “outraged” that Penn State is being treated so harshly! All it did was facilitate child rape! No biggie! In his opinion the trustees should have fought for Penn State’s precious football department, and is disgusted that “we rolled over and played dead. They (Board members) want to put Paterno behind them.”
Golly. How tragic that a school was punished for enabling child rape. Who could ever have expected consequences for abetting child rape? Certainly not Joe Paterno and his cohorts at Penn State! Woe, woe – poor Joe Paterno and the football program!
I wonder if Lubrano would be as outraged about the punishment if he were the one who was raped? Or is that something that could simply NEVER happen to him?
Must be nice.
Here, here.
One thing I’ve really appreciated about the NCAA’s ruling and statements is that they have flat-out said that the penalties are also there to diminish the “too big to fail” perspective of football programs. They don’t like football being so large in some schools that it rules them. I believe they’ve even said that they’re going to look at how they can diminish its power over administrations overall.
I did read that SMU got the “death penalty” and that Penn State’s punishment is harsher, but I will be the first to admit that I know practically nothing about football. And you know what? I’m okay with that right now.