Penn State = Open sewer

[Virtual Bison]

Down goes Joe Pa! Down goes Joe Pa! Penn State takes out the trash. Will NCAA and MSCHE do the same?

N.C.A.A. Plans ‘Punitive Measures’ Against Penn State


The plaza outside Penn State's Beaver Stadium stands empty after workers removed a statue of Joe Paterno early Sunday morning.

By PETE THAMEL and ZACH SCHONBRUN
Published: July 22, 2012

On a day when a statue of the former football coach Joe Paterno was removed from outside Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, the N.C.A.A. announced Sunday that it would punish the university’s football program in the wake of a child sexual abuse scandal involving the former assistant Jerry Sandusky.

The university is bracing for what the N.C.A.A. is calling “corrective and punitive measures” that are expected to handicap the football program for years. While the specific findings will be released at a news conference at N.C.A.A. headquarters in Indianapolis on Monday morning, a person briefed on the sanctions said that the N.C.A.A. would issue a postseason bowl ban, a number of scholarship reductions and a stiff financial penalty. It is also expected that players in the program will have the freedom to transfer, essentially creating free agency for other programs to approach them.

The N.C.A.A. board of directors’ decision to go outside its usual process for dealing with infractions, forgoing a long investigation, and authorize sanctions based on the findings of an outside investigation is considered unprecedented. It is a pivotal moment in the presidency of Mark Emmert, whose two-year tenure had been characterized by the N.C.A.A.’s seeming lack of enforcement power in a long stream of rules-violation cases and the chaos of conference realignment.

“In a sense, moving out of that model is moving into a new world,” said Josephine R. Potuto, a law professor at the University of Nebraska and a former chairwoman of the N.C.A.A. Committee on Infractions.

The measures represent a significant change in the N.C.A.A.’s operating procedure in that it will punish a university for moral transgressions as opposed to violations of specific bylaws.

Just how severe the N.C.A.A.’s sanctions will be is unknown. ESPN and Yahoo both reported bowl bans of multiple years and significant scholarship losses, though neither specified.

In an interview last week with PBS, Emmert said Penn State had demonstrated egregious conduct in covering up Sandusky’s behavior for more than a decade. Emmert did not rule out invoking the N.C.A.A.’s power to impose the so-called death penalty to shut down Penn State’s football program. That appears unlikely now, as sources at multiple programs on Penn State’s schedule this year say they have not been informed that their games against the Nittany Lions will be canceled.

Sandusky, Paterno’s longtime defensive coordinator, was convicted last month of sexually assaulting 10 boys whom he had befriended through a charity he founded to work with troubled youths.

Whatever the penalties, Penn State is welcoming a poor recruiting class and a roster that the Big Ten Network recruiting analyst Gerry DiNardo calls “not one of their stronger rosters of recent years.” DiNardo added that the most significant action the N.C.A.A. could take is a multiple-year bowl ban that would give players the freedom to transfer.

“U.S.C. has had scholarship reductions, and they’re poised to win the national championship because their 75 are better than most programs’ 85,” DiNardo said, referring to overall rosters. “If you allow multiple classes of your roster to transfer, which is what a long bowl ban would do, that would be the most significant penalty next to the death penalty.”

There has been debate throughout the collegiate sports community on whether the N.C.A.A. is going beyond its jurisdiction to punish Penn State for actions not directly tied to its bylaws. In normal circumstances, the N.C.A.A. would wait for criminal cases involved in the situation to unfold, as Athletic Director Tim Curley and the vice president Gary Schultz face charges tied to the case.

Lou Prato, who has written several books about Paterno, said he wished the university had waited to take down the statue until the criminal cases played out.

“We have men waiting trial,” Prato said. “Everybody seems to think they know the full truth. They don’t. People are making judgments based on a lot of information put out there.”

The Penn State scandal led to the removal of the university’s president and the firing of its legendary football coach, Paterno. A report commissioned by Penn State’s board of trustees and compiled by Louis J. Freeh, a former F.B.I. director, found a series of failures all the way up the university’s chain of command that it concluded were the result of an insular and complacent culture in which football was revered.

Earlier Sunday, a work crew arrived before dawn and used jackhammers and a forklift to remove the statue of Paterno from its spot outside the Penn State football stadium. The statue, which was taken to an undisclosed location, had become an object of scorn after the release of the Freeh report, which detailed Paterno’s involvement in covering up child sexual abuse accusations against Sandusky for more than a decade.

Penn State’s president, Rodney Erickson, made the final decision about the statue’s removal.

“I believe that, were it to remain, the statue will be a recurring wound to the multitude of individuals across the nation and beyond who have been the victims of child abuse,” Erickson said in a statement. “I fully realize that my decision will not be a popular one in some Penn State circles, but I am certain it is the right and principled decision.”

In a statement, the Paterno family said the statue’s removal “does not serve the victims of Jerry Sandusky’s horrible crimes or help heal the Penn State community.”

The statue’s sculptor, Angelo Di Maria, said he was “hurt” by the removal of the statue but understood the decision.

“As reality sets in and I’m considering more and more of both sides, how can you argue?” he said.

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"Severe"??? How would this compare to, say, all Penn State admins getting ass raped in the showers?

NCAA hands out severe punishment for Penn State
By Eric Prisbell, USA TODAY

Penn State's football was given severe punishment for the school's handling of the sex abuse scandal involving former football assistant Jerry Sandusky.

NCAA President Mark Emmert made the announcement Monday morning that the program would be hit a four-year postseason ban and a $60 million fine.

In addition, the school will be forced to cut 10 scholarships for this season and 20 scholarships for the following four years.

The move essentially bumps Penn State down to the scholarship levels of schools at the lower Football Championship Subdivision.

The school will be forced to vacate all wins from 1998-2011, a total of 112 victories, and serve five years of probation.

Because of the length of the punishment, all current Penn State players and incoming freshman will be free to transfer to another school without penalty.

The totality of the sanctions will have a drastic impact on the school's ability to compete in football the rest of the decade.

The NCAA ruling represented a seminal moment for Emmert, the former University of Washington president whose 20-month tenure has coincided with an unpredictable and turbulent time in college sports.

The spate of high-profile scandals that came to light under Emmert's watch, including one involving alleged widespread booster payments at Miami, took a backseat when Sandusky was arrested Nov. 5. The graphic nature of what then were allegations of sexual abuse against children repulsed the public and soured the sporting mood when LSU played Alabama on the most anticipated Saturday of the sport's regular season.

Immediate focus centered on Paterno: How much did he know and when did he know it? Did his inaction enable a sexual predator to continue to prey on children, most from troubled homes?

Paterno was soon fired, famously by telephone, because of what Penn State officials deemed a lack of leadership exhibited after former graduate assistant Mike McQueary told Paterno in 2001 that he had witnessed Sandusky sexually abuse a child of roughly 10 years of age in the Penn State locker room showers.

When Paterno was ousted, more than 1,000 Penn State students flooded the campus streets, some chanting, "Hell, no, Joe won't go!"

University president Graham Spanier was fired. Two other administrators, athletic director Tim Curley, who remains on leave, and now-retired vice president Gary Schultz, continue to await trial on charges of failing to report child abuse and lying to a grand jury. Both have maintained their innocence.

Throughout the winter, the scandal continued to deepen as Paterno's legacy unraveled. When Paterno spoke with The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins in January --- what would be his final interview -- he appeared a weakened man, speaking with a rasp and battling lung cancer. Paterno told The Post that he did not know what to do when McQueary informed him of what McQueary saw in part "because I never heard of, of, rape and a man."

Three days later, Paterno was dead, his legacy clouded, if not forever stained.

In Bellefonte, Pa., last month, a jury of seven women and five men, including nine with ties to the university, found Sandusky guilty on 45 of 48 counts. He was convicted of sexually assaulting 10 boys over 15 years and faces life in prison.

The release of Freeh's report this month added a punctuation mark to the scandal and provided clarity to the tarnished legacy of major college football's all-time winningest coach. One page after another, all part of a nearly eight-month investigation that drew upon more than 400 interviews and 3 million documents, exposed Paterno as one of the senior university leaders who for years concealed information that could have stopped Sandusky from abusing more children.

Among the most alarming findings was that Paterno had been aware of a 1998 investigation of allegations that Sandusky abused a boy in Penn State's locker room showers. Paterno followed the case closely - Sandusky was not prosecuted --- but did not take action or alert the board of trustees. (The Paterno family had recently maintained that Paterno was not aware of the 1998 investigation at the time.)

Three years later, the Freeh report suggests, Paterno dissuaded Curley from having Penn State's administration report to authorities the allegations made by McQueary. And the report concluded that senior school officials did not demonstrate concern for the safety or well being of Sandusky's victims until after Sandusky's arrest.

The nearly 300-page report also added fuel to the debate over whether Penn State or the NCAA should shut down the Nittany Lions' football program for at least one season and whether the university should remove the bronze Paterno statue outside Beaver Stadium, which it did on Sunday morning.

The NCAA has imposed the so-called death penalty on a major college football team just once. And it has taken SMU more than two decades to recover after it was shut down in the late 1980s following a scandal that involved, among other violations, widespread booster payments to players.

But with Penn State's case, the NCAA confronted a scandal unlike any the association had ever seen. The wrongdoing, while egregious, did not reflect traditional violations of NCAA bylaws. And no obvious competitive advantage was gained by the cover-up of criminal activity.

Former NCAA investigators and infractions committee chairmen argued that the NCAA should leave the Penn State scandal for the criminal and civil courts. But Emmert, who recently said in a PBS interview that the death penalty remained on the table, felt compelled to punish Penn State with sanctions that would severely impact its football program for years.

And with the backing of the NCAA's executive committee and the Division I board of directors, Emmert bypassed usual investigation protocol and levied an array of penalties that will long be studied and debated in the college sports world.

Paterno's 409 wins and two national titles remain intact, but his statue is gone, his reputation is irreparably scarred and the program he built during a 61-year career, 46 as head coach, is left to deal with harsh NCAA sanctions and the pending rulings of ongoing investigations.

With the NCAA verdict handed down, Penn State still could face further punitive measures. The Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education are conducting investigations into the school's actions in relation to the scandal.

I heard about this.

I thinks its sad for the students at the school and all the athletes who were innocent of this stuff. I guess when the Joe Paterno turned a blind eye to this it caused the reputation of the entire school to be tarnished.