The NCAA has handed Penn State football most of its head:
The NCAA has slammed Penn State with an unprecedented series of penalties, including a $60 million fine and the loss of all coach Joe Paterno’s victories from 1998-2011, in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.
Other sanctions include a four-year ban on bowl games, and the loss of 20 scholarships per year over four years.
NCAA President Mark Emmert announced the staggering sanctions Monday at a news conference in Indianapolis.
It’s not enough — the sanctioning body should have gone all the way, to the “death penalty.”
Though the NCAA stopped short of imposing the “death penalty” — shutting down the Nittany Lions’ program completely — the punishment is still crippling for a team that is trying to start over with a new coach and a new outlook.
All this on the day after they took down Joe Paterno’s statue. But there’s some good news for the young scholar-athlete/goliards who now may want to pursue their educational goals elsewhere:
The NCAA also said that any current or incoming football players are free to immediately transfer and compete at another school.
At a time when “higher education” is being threatened by a bubble akin to the one that destroyed the U.S. housing market, Penn State might have partly redeemed its disgraced reputation by shutting down the program voluntarily. But that would have taken moral and financial courage — and courage is something that has been explicitly lacking on the part of university administrators throughout this whole sordid episode.