T1B

It's on that last score where I'm now wavering regarding my earlier feelings regarding the necessary severity of the sanctions. I felt they should have received a two-year death penalty. However, thinking about the way such a penalty would have also affected all those rank-and-file people (the hot dog vendors, parking lot attendents, ticket counters, stadium ushers, local bar owners, etc.), I've come to the conclusion that no, a death penalty would've been too much and that this is more of a proper punishment.

Van wrote:Mgo, those moneys tend to pay for their other sports more than for the football program. Besides, they're still free to raise funds for the football program, and I'm comparing it to the total cost of a death penalty. They're attempting to say that the $60 million represents the gross profits of one year's worth of football operations. Well, does that include TV monies and all ancillary monies? It surely doesn't include all the monies that would've been lost by those people whose incomes are at least partially dependent on Penn St football.

PSUFAN wrote:

It's on that last score where I'm now wavering regarding my earlier feelings regarding the necessary severity of the sanctions. I felt they should have received a two-year death penalty. However, thinking about the way such a penalty would have also affected all those rank-and-file people (the hot dog vendors, parking lot attendents, ticket counters, stadium ushers, local bar owners, etc.), I've come to the conclusion that no, a death penalty would've been too much and that this is more of a proper punishment.

Well...how do you like that?

I'm not exactly sure why ANY punishment is appropriate for the people you mention, but that's now an academic matter.

A Death Penalty was simply off the table - far too disruptive not only for PSU and the peons you mention, but for the rest of the conference.

MgoBlue-LightSpecial wrote:Regardless, a $60 million dollar hit is substantial

Cross Traffic wrote:ESPN just showed a telling video that some at PSU still don't get it. Students CRYING over the sanctions.

Van wrote: 12, 879.

PSUFAN wrote:I've got two kids that are more precious than life itself to me. I think of what I'd do if anyone showed such a callous, blatant disregard for them as Joe showed for that kid that moment...he cared more about Tim Curley's weekend than he did that kid. I can't get past that statement.

PSUFAN wrote:Tonight Emmert was interviewed on NPR, and he said that they considered the Death Penalty, but decided against it because it was "too blunt" an instrument, it would harm too many innocent parties.

mvscal wrote:McQueery isn't off the hook either. How the fuck can you just walk away from seeing some sick pervert assraping a young boy at your place of work? That singular act of moral cowardice will be the defining moment of his entire life. If he had any decency he would pen an apology and then suck on a .357.

Cross Traffic wrote:ESPN just showed a telling video that some at PSU still don't get it. Students CRYING over the sanctions.

M Club wrote:Some folk with reasonable perspectives:

http://deadspin.com/5928385/i-hope-u-al ... punishment

Van will no doubt read those tweets to point out their relevance to USC while Terry will post a quote-by-quote breakdown of their relationship to Catholic SAT scores in rural upstate NY.

some idiot wrote:Ill put money down that the NCAA is ran by a bunch of mvscals.

Van wrote:Recall the big to-do over Kennedy being elected president? That was Huge News, the idea of a Catholic president.

Yes, the influx of Mexicans into our country has tilted the percentage a bit towards Catholics, yet keep in mind that last year more Asians than Mexicans arrived on our shores. Most of them aren't Catholic.

And, as someone already pointed out, I wonder what the number of practicing Catholics really is? I'm talking people who really get after it, as opposed to those who just pop in to make the obligatory appearance on the required occasions.

What do you suppose their number is? I'm guessing that if you remove the illegal aliens and their grandmothers with the rosary beads and if you also remove drunk Irishmen (redundant, I know), the real number is probably something like, oh 12, 879.

MgoBlue-LightSpecial wrote:So the last time PSU officially won a game...Mike McQueary was the starting quarterback.

Ivan Maisel wrote:STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- I have to admit, I expected NCAA president Mark Emmert to march out in military uniform, epaulets gleaming, and pronounce that he should be addressed as Generalissimo.

That press release Sunday, in which the NCAA announced that it would hand down punitive and corrective penalties to Penn State on Monday without its Committee on Infractions ever calling a meeting to order, sounded like the worst form of administrative justice. As anyone who has ever followed an infractions case knows, the NCAA may not use due process, but there is a process that evolves in due time. It can make the tortoise look like the hare -- ask USC. But the NCAA president is not a commissioner. He doesn't wield the imperial power of a Roger Goodell.

The announcement Sunday indicated that the NCAA would ignore its own rules -- not just the procedures but the entirety of the rulebook. Generalissimo Emmert had created his own shopping mall of justice -- a Banana Republic and a Gap. There was all the enforcement that came before Penn State, and there was Penn State.

You can read the hundreds of pages of the NCAA manual from now until the Nittany Lions run onto the field to play Ohio on Sept. 1, and you won't find a single rule that Penn State violated in this case. If that doesn't mean anything, why have a rulebook?

But then His Excellency spoke Monday morning, and it became clear why the NCAA came down so harshly so quickly on Penn State. Emmert and the university presidents who form the NCAA's executive committee saw this case as unprecedented. They saw that it had nothing to do with rules infractions. They saw the model of intercollegiate athletics as we know it at stake.

"There remains a sense of urgency in resolving this case, period," Emmert said. "It wasn't driven by the fall semester or the upcoming football season. The timing was simply that, following the work of both the criminal investigators and the Freeh report, the information was there. There was no compelling reason to delay the process."

"It was a unanimous sense," Oregon State president Ed Ray, the chair of the executive committee, said Monday. "We needed to act, and we needed to act quickly and effectively."

Every 20 years or so, university presidents rise from their slumber and reassert that they are in charge of the balls and the shoulder pads. In the early '90s, they reacted to the SMU death penalty by overhauling the NCAA structure. And now, in a visceral reaction to the Penn State scandal, the executive committee has leveled the harshest penalties short of the SMU case in NCAA history.

The presidents felt as if they are at war with an alien culture in which football made the decisions and the university kowtowed to it. That is antithetical to everything that the NCAA model represents, and a little too close to the truth for presidents to stomach. The smart ones live with the hypocrisy every day, secure in the knowledge that athletics unite the university community and create a spirit that builds buildings and fills laboratories.

When that hypocrisy resulted in a pedophile remaining at large, the university presidents didn't like what they saw, especially in the mirror. They lashed out as if they had been attacked.

As statements go, a $60 million fine, 40 scholarships, a four-year bowl ban and 112 vacated wins is right up there with the Magna Carta. The presidents put down new stakes on their property line. They are in charge. The importance of that principle supersedes any other consideration. If the Penn State players want to play in a bowl, they can leave their coaches and their classes and their friends and go somewhere else. (This case may be unprecedented, but as usual in the NCAA model, the current Penn State coaches and players are the victims of their predecessors' actions.)

Moreover, the culture the presidents attacked at Penn State no longer exists. What is left of Penn State is not a combatant. Former president Graham Spanier has been fired and disgraced. Former vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley will be on trial for perjury. Joe Paterno's memory has been stained, a scar bandaged in chain-link fencing where his statue once stood. The university will be in hock for millions in liability payments to the victims abused on its campus and because of its failure to see what is in plain view in hindsight.

It remains possible that the Freeh report didn't come down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets. The NCAA famously doesn't have subpoena power, yet it acted before the three central figures in the Penn State case who are still living have the opportunity to defend themselves -- and speak publicly -- in court. The Paterno family maintains that the whole story has not emerged.

The principle that the presidents are defending, that they are in charge, is worth defending. Nothing would have been lost if they had waited long enough for the remaining avenues to be explored.

Emmert and the presidents didn't care to wait. Let's hope that their impatience doesn't get in the way of their intentions.

M2 wrote:

MgoBlue-LightSpecial wrote:So the last time PSU officially won a game...Mike McQueary was the starting quarterback.

and Sandusky was still coaching for PSU.

Weird shit.

Ivan Maisel wrote:You can read the hundreds of pages of the NCAA manual from now until the Nittany Lions run onto the field to play Ohio on Sept. 1, and you won't find a single rule that Penn State violated in this case.

Papa Willie wrote:Here's something I brought up at CF: You might see a few more of these guys want to stay. Why?

1. With everybody else bolting, there is sometimes an advantage of being the big fish in a little pond.

2. Think about how the media is going to be stuffed up PSU's ASSES at each and every game! They're going to be getting more coverage than ANY other program.

3. With all that media attention, you might just see one of their players bust loose and win the fucking Heisman (IF that were to be allowed).

PSUFAN wrote:Fitting...

If there is one inconsequential sanction in this, imo, it is the vacating of wins.

Bucmonkey wrote:Half this board will be dead or collecting SS before PSU is a relevant football program again.

Van wrote:

Ivan Maisel wrote:You can read the hundreds of pages of the NCAA manual from now until the Nittany Lions run onto the field to play Ohio on Sept. 1, and you won't find a single rule that Penn State violated in this case.

Nonsense. Penn St's actions met the requirements of at least a half-dozen LOIC definitions previously posted by the NCAA.

BSmack wrote: Those wins were not vacated to punish JoePa or PSU. They were vacated so that the NCAA wouldn't have to live with the shame of a pedo-enabler having the all time record. In the grand scheme of things, so freaking what.

MgoBlue-LightSpecial wrote:

Van wrote:

Ivan Maisel wrote:You can read the hundreds of pages of the NCAA manual from now until the Nittany Lions run onto the field to play Ohio on Sept. 1, and you won't find a single rule that Penn State violated in this case.

Nonsense. Penn St's actions met the requirements of at least a half-dozen LOIC definitions previously posted by the NCAA.

He's right, the problem is, it doesn't matter at this point. What's done is done. A lot of people raised Maisel's very point -- that PSU didn't violate any specific by-laws. The only question was whether the NCAA would go outside the scope of their standard operating procedure and punish PSU. Personally, I didn't think they would. You didn't think they would either, but for different reasons...something about having an "out" and choosing the path of least resistance. Essentially, unprecedented events led to unprecedented action on the part of the NCAA.

Bucmonkey wrote:Half this board will be dead or collecting SS before PSU is a relevant football program again.

I felt the NCAA would take the easy road and do nothing,