“SMU got the death penalty for paying players. What the NCAA did is not enough for what happened at Penn State. These were boys, they knew, and they did nothing.â€
“You are punishing people who had nothing to do with what happened. You are destroying small businesses and making students pay for something they didn’t do. The NCAA is wrong.â€
There you have it – polar opposite views on the NCAA’s decision to impose monetary fines, scholarship limits, bans on post-season play, and stretch it all out for four years. Generally speaking, the poles have it wrong. In fact, in
this case, the poles missed the issue.
The NCAA recognized that it was dealing with more than the inaction in response to continuing reports about Mr. Sandusky’s showers of horror. The criminal convictions of Mr. Sandusky, the civil recoveries that await the young men who were his victims, and even the terminations of coaches, athletic directors, and university administrators only scratch the surface of the problem. What Mr. Freeh recognized in his report and the NCAA has attempted to address is this question: How do you fix a culture so that misconduct does not occur again? The exit of the
perpetrator, his complicit colleagues, administrators, and trustees is no guarantee that violations of NCAA rules or the laws of the land will not happen again. Indeed, the reaction of the local business people gives us a taste of what we are dealing with – football is everything in State College, PA.
Those who knew about Sandusky have been banished through termination (jobs and life). Those who see the football program as their lifeblood have this reaction: You are ruining us and we did nothing! The second half of that compound sentence is key to understanding why the community will feel the pain of what some would describe as a few who lost their moral and ethical compasses in the name of preserving the football program. “We did nothing.â€Â The local prosecutor declined to pursue the Sandusky matter.  The trustees did not even live up to the basic duty of a board member of asking the president what happened with an issue he had raised with them months before. “All deference to football†was the community motto. Nor was the Sandusky tragedy the only situation in which the judgment of Penn State officials with regard to football was conduct was questionable.
In 2005, Dr. Vicky Triponey, the vice president for student affairs, troubled by Coach Paterno’s wishes to keep problems with players quiet, wrote to senior administrators, “I am very troubled by the manipulative, disrespectful, uncivil and abusive behavior of our football coach.”
In 2007, about two dozen Penn State players forced their way into a campus party. The result was a melee with six of the football players facing criminal charges. The kinds of charges that make their way into the news. Read more: http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/colleges/163319246.html?page=2&c=y#ixzz21UuJrCnd
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2007/09/14/student_affairs_loses_leader.aspx
Two of the players were convicted of assault. Yet, not a one of them ever missed a single game. Dr. Triponey witnessed interference from Mr. Paterno and other university officials in the discipline process in what was already a public case. She was outraged and wrote an e-mail protest to Penn State’s president, yes, the one who got the boot after the Sandusky charges emerged:
“I would respectfully ask that you do something to stop this atrocious behavior before this team and an entire generation of Penn State students leave here believing that this is appropriate and acceptable behavior
within a civil university community.â€
Dr. Triponey, vetoed and out-manuevered, left Penn State. Her academic career was quite nearly destroyed by Mr. Paterno, who once referred to Dr. Triponey on a radio show, a PhD who was a vice president as, “that lady in Old Main.” When a coach is mocking the university administrators, you have trouble. And when a university’s student disciplinary officer resigns following a dust-up over discipline for football players, it is akin to an auditor leaving after management protests the auditor’s findings. There are troubles.
Yet, the community chose to continue to offer its deference in the name of the business interests and all that the Nittany Lions brought to State College. They were all living to preserve a myth. Penn State’s football program suffered from the same sort of imperialism that grips too many academic administrators, fans, alums, and, yes, the symbiotic (think: dependent) businesses. It’s a sort of deal with the devil that they want to continue to believe is a deal with angels because so much good comes from it for the town, the students, the reputation of Penn State itself.
Deals with the devil always end badly because, well, the devil knows no limit on evil, and Sandusky was evil writ large. If you are beholden to a master, you do the master’s bidding, including the task of remaining silent even as innocents are harmed. Ah, therein lies the rub. The punishment may be more fitting than the poles are willing to acknowledge. The punishment for innocents being harmed is that those who claim innocence are also harmed, and in their minds, unfairly and unjustly.
The NCAA has done what courts, prosecutors, and free markets do to companies all the time. For example,  folks still tell the Barometer that it was but a few bad apples at the audit firm, Arthur Anderson, who were responsible for Enron. Nonetheless, the whole firm went down. Those who worked for Anderson and were nowhere near Enron, nay, not even near Houston, lost their jobs. Why? Ask any of them and although they cannot tell you what went awry at Enron, they can tell you all about the drivers in their culture that impaired the judgment of so many. Yet, they lived with the culture because they all benefited from the the conflicted, but well compensated, auditors who were also doing lucrative consulting for the clients to whom they were giving their financial imprimatur.
So it is with the innocents of State College. They knew, but they lived with it because so much was at stake economically.  Would you sell your soul for …….? The NCAA is trying to send the signal that we are all accountable for the actions precisely because we enjoy the benefits. The Faustian bargain of riding on the coat tails of an athletic program is one risky proposition. Rich pay-outs and risk walk on the same side of the street. State College now grasps the risk side of the years of high pay-outs. That reality is difficult face and economically brutal, but innocence is not an accurate counter to the harshness of tbe NCAA’s penalties’ ripple effect. When you make your gains through the success of others, you also share in the losses of their staggering missteps.
