Monday, July 23, 2012

Now the penalty has been administered: Thoughts after the fact

Well now the penalty has been administered. It is in part as follows:
Loss of revenue for this year equaling $60 million which will be paid as a
fine and go into a trust fund for victims of child sex abuse.
Vacating of wins from 1998 thru 2011 which means the loss of 111 wins which
takes disgraced coach Joe Paterno out of the record books as winningest
coach in NCAA history.
Bowl ineligibility for 4 years.
Reduction from 25 to 15 scholarships a year for the next 4 years.
Further possible individual sanctions on individuals after the criminal
investigations are over.
5 year probation for the entire athletic department with Academic Integrity
Monitor of NCAA's choosing appointed.
Players allowed to immediately transfer without losing a year of eligibility
if they do so.
Mention of compliance with Section 5.0 of the Free Report but not sure what
this means.

What do I think? This will definitely hurt them for years to come and I
don't think they'll recover real quick after the 4 years are up on bowl
ineligibility and scholarship loss; but the death penalty would have been
fitting for a program as corrupt as this football program was under Paterno.
Yes some innocent athletes would have gotten hurt but they knew something
could happen when they chose to go there, especially within the last year.

This school should not even have a football program until it can prove that
it has cleaned up its act and that will be a tall order for them to do that
to everyone's satisfaction. It took SMU about 20 years to recover from the
death penalty and hopefully it will take Penn State as long to recover from
this one post penalty. We'll just have to see though.

Suffice it to say, the only way to root out corruption of this kind is to
demolish and rebuild from the ground up and this was not done here. Only
time will tell if the penalties administered were harsh enough. I wonder if
it was even though some of this stuff was severe.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

My thoughts before the bombshell that is Penn State

I won't speculate here about what will happen to Penn State and its badly
tarnished, irreparable football program. We'll find out about that tomorrow
morning early. What I would like to talk about are my thoughts headed into
this huge announcement.

I think whatever Penn State gets they will deserve. Whatever they get in
the way of punishment will be Joe Paterno's legacy. From what I am hearing,
he died at the right time because he might have ended up in prison as well.
E-mails can get you into trouble years after they are written even if you
think they are gone permanently. Let that be a lesson to us all to be
careful what we say in cyber space.

Do I think a lot of football programs will be mad at Penn State? Yes I do,
especially in the big 10 as they may not be able to have a conference
championship due to possibly only 4 teams being eligible in the leaders
division. This would mean they would have to go back to the old format.
Since everything in college sports seems to be about the money, there are
programs that might lose some money and they won't be happy.

There's speculation that Penn state will be kicked out of the Big 10. It
would serve them right if this were to happen and quite frankly I hope it
does. They deserve it as that program has ruined so many lives. At least
some of the kids in the program now are being allowed to transfer out with
eligibility prohibitions being waived by the NCAA. That's a good thing
because at least they will be able to salvage something from this mess that
they did not create.

I will have more thoughts in about 8.5 hours when the announcement comes
out.