NCAA out of bounds with Penn State sanctions - (The country) At 9 today, a crime took place masquerading as a farce. NCAA President Mark Emmert, a man who this year called Joe Paterno "the definitive role type of what it really way to be a college coach," levied a number of unprecedented sanctions against the football program Paterno built, the Penn State Nittany Lions. Emmert determined the entire program had to suffer due to the role the late Coach Paterno, as well as other leading school officials, played in covering the tracks of serial pedophile Jerry Sandusky. That collective suffering will mean a $60 million fine, a four-year post-season ban and also the vacating of wins from 1998-2011. He explained piously, "Programs and people must not overwhelm the values of higher education." It's not "the death penalty," also known as no more the football program, but it is life with no chance of parole.
Emmert sounds righteous. He's also dead wrong. His decision will obviously gut Penn State athletics. It will likewise produce a siege mentality among PSU alumni creating a rush of donations that, I bet, can make in the difference per week. It's a farcical public relations move that distracts the public from actually holding to account those accountable for protecting Sandusky. Former FBI director Louis Freeh said that the root of the issue was the "culture of reverence" for football. Penn State did more to confront this culture of reverence if you take down their statue of Joe Paterno on Sunday than Mark Emmert did today. Contrary, Emmert strengthened that culture of reverence by deciding to grab the spotlight and bathe the NCAA in the saintly glow. But that's only some of the reason Mark Emmert's decision ought to be opposed. That's just the farce. We have the crime.
Today marked a stomach-turning, precedent-setting and lawless level within the history of the NCAA. The punishment levied by Emmert was nothing more than an extra-legal, extrajudicial imposition into the affairs of the publicly funded campus. If permitted to stand, the repercussions is going to be felt far beyond Happy Valley.
Have a take a step back in the hysteria and just think about what happened: Penn State committed no violations associated with a NCAA bylaws. There have been not a secret payments to "student-athletes," no cheating on tests, no improper phone calls, no using cream cheese instead of butter on a recruit's bagel, or any of the Byzantine minutiae that fills the time-sheets that justify Mark Emmert's $1.6 million salary.
What Penn State did was commit horrific violations of civil and criminal laws, and it should pay every possible price for shielding Sandusky, the child rapist. For this reason there exists a society with civil and criminal courts. Instead, we have Mark Emmert inserting himself in a criminal matter and serving as judge, jury and executioner, in the type of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. As much as I can't stand Goodell's authoritarian, undemocratic methods, the NFL is a private corporation and the approach to punishment was collectively bargained with the NFL Players Association. Emmert, heading in the so-called nonprofit NCAA, is intervening with his personal judgment and cutting the budget of the public university. He's no right, and each school under the auspices of the NCAA ought to be terrified he believes he is doing.
Speaking anonymously to ESPN, a former prominent NCAA official said, "This is exclusive which kind of power hasn't been tested or tried. It's unprecedented to possess this extensive power. This has nothing to use the objective of the infractions process. Nevertheless, somehow [the NCAA president and executive board] have taken it on themselves to become a commissioner and to penalize a school for improper conduct."
Or as Yahoo! Sports' Pat Forde said succinctly, "Emmert seems going to go where no NCAA president has gone before."
Emmert justifies this by saying Penn State "lost institutional control" of the football program. Tragically, the opposite is the situation here. There is a lot control a serial child rapist was able to have his tracks covered for -- at least -- thirteen years. He's instead using this canard of "institutional control" to warrant an abrogation of public budgets, public universities and, most critically, public oversight.
The discussion you should be having is how to organize the outrage of the Penn State campus and the people of Pennsylvania to expel the entire Board of Trustees. Just like the statue of Coach Paterno came tumbling down in the name of turning the page at Penn State, the board should follow. We should be talking about how to push for any full investigation of Governor Tom Corbett and the own extra-slow-motion investigation of Sandusky when he was the state's attorney general. Former Governor Ed Rendell, like a board trustee during Sandusky's continued presence on campus, ought to be subpoenaed as well. But instead, we get the maiming of Penn State's athletic budget for the grand purpose of turning Mark Emmert and the NCAA into something they've no right to become. Private, unaccountable actors have no business cutting the budgets of a public campus. Today's move by Emmert didn't bring justice to any of Sandusky's victims. It didn't help clean house at Penn State. Instead it was extra-legal, extrajudicial and stinks to high heaven.
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