If one is not familiar with college football, the penalties that the N.C.A.A. and Penn State agreed on as punishment for the school’s role in the Jerry Sandusky child-sex-abuse case will come as a surprise—not because of their harshness, but because of what was available for the N.C.A.A. to take away. There is a financial fine, one that adds up to the gross revenue of the football program for a single year. How much is that? Sixty million dollars. Another penalty for Penn State is that its players will be free to transfer to other schools, and to do so without losing any years of eligibility to play football. Pause a moment, right there: Would students in any other area be constrained from transferring when and to where they wanted to? In other words, the school is being punished by being forced to treat its student-athletes like student athletes, and not like indentured employees.
Those aren’t the only penalties. No bowl games for four years, no matter how well the team does in the regular season (a reminder that bowl-appearance decisions are arcane anyway); just fifteen new scholarship spots per season, rather than twenty-five, and a cap of sixty-five (since scholarship totals, for football programs, are something like employee head counts); five years of probation; an ethics monitor for five years (shouldn’t there always be one, for any program of this size?); and the vacating of all wins from 1998 to 2011. (Sara Ganim, at the Patriot-News, has a roundup.) Why 1998? That was the year of the first set of allegations that Joe Paterno, the football coach, and Graham Spanier, the university president, chose to overlook.
The win-record change has the effect of removing Paterno from the position of winningest—a strange word—coach in Division I football history, knocking him down to seventh place. If that seems horribly cruel, then one has placed too much emphasis on college football. They are just numbers in a record book. Which number hurts more? Two hundred and ninety-eight, the number of wins now credited to Paterno (down from four hundred and nine); or forty-five, the number of sexual-abuse and child-rape counts on which Jerry Sandusky was convicted?
On its own, Penn State, this weekend, took down the statue of Paterno that stood outside its football stadium. There, too, it is telling that the penalty was even available. Who gets a statue of himself put outside the place where he still works? Paterno’s players walked past a monument to the man who was, in effect, their boss. The same could be said of university administrators.
That is why the N.C.A.A. had every right to do what it did. The N.C.A.A. has been, and is still, a mess; their enforcement efforts have been haphazard, the culture they preside over distorted by money. If there was ever a moment when they’d be forced to confront that, it was this one—“A horrifically egregious situation,” as Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, said in his press conference. Football, and the weight placed on it, as the Freeh Report into Penn State’s role in the Sandusky case found, led university administrators to cover up the rape of children. It was, as Emmert said, “too big to challenge.” Ed Ray, the president of Oregon State University and the chairman of the N.C.A.A. executive committee, spoke of a “conspiracy of silence.” I wrote last week that the “death penalty”—no football at all for a number of years—would have been appropriate. These penalties certainly are. (Emmert said that the death penalty alone would not have been enough.) At the press conference, Emmert was asked why there wouldn’t be a hearing: there wouldn’t, he said, because Penn State had agreed to everything.
But are the innocent being hurt? Who, and what does being hurt mean? Again, the players have been given more freedom than ones at other schools have. (And maybe they should have it, too.) The N.C.A.A. is considering waiving limits on scholarship numbers for schools that accept them. (It should certainly do so.) Another sanction, if it can be called that, is that players who stay will keep their scholarships even if they don’t keep playing football. None of those who do play will be in another bowl game. They will also not be playing for a program with an awful crime buried beneath it. The sixty million dollars, according to the agreement that the university and the N.C.A.A. worked out, cannot come from what are, tellingly, called “non-revenue sports.” The money is not supposed to come from academics, either. Where it will come from isn’t clear. Future football revenues? Or the endowment, which is over a billion and a half dollars? (Alumni gave more than two hundred million dollars to the school last year.) It will be paid in five annual installments of twelve million dollars, will go to programs that help victims of childhood sexual abuse and also prevent it from happening. Alumni can still come and cheer for the Nittany Lions in Happy Valley.
“There is nothing in this situation that anyone can feel good about,” Emmert said at his press conference. “This is an awful place to be.” But it may get Penn State to a better one. There won’t be any bowl games; maybe, now, there will be other goals.
Photograph by Abby Drey/Centre Daily Times/AP Photo.