4um: Shutting down Penn State football not the answer

This might not go over well in Korea or editorial boards around America, but can we lay off Penn State for a minute?

Please folks, take a deep breath before somebody calls for the entire school to be bulldozed. We’re all disgusted by the sexual-abuse scandal, but the torches and pitchforks are getting out of control.

Major newspapers, websites want the season cancelled. Joe Scarborough, normally a voice of reason, called for the football program to be shut down for a year on his MSNBC show.

The Korea Times has even weighed in, saying the NCAA should immediately hit Penn State with the death penalty. It somehow resisted the temptation to call Joe Paterno the Kim Jong-il of college football.

The main thing all that would accomplish is punishing a whole lot of innocent people. Which brings up the obvious qualifier:

The agonies of Jerry Sandusky’s alleged victims far outweigh whatever is inflicted on players, fans and alumni. But that 99 percent has been caught in a hell created by far less than 1 percent of Penn State people.

The school has become an international symbol for shame. A degree is suddenly a ticket for ridicule.

People whose hearts belonged to Penn State two weeks ago are suddenly ashamed to be associated with it. Cheering for their team is now seen as cheering child molestation.

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum is a Penn State graduate. He said fellow alumni and strangershave been engaging in “group therapy” since the scandal broke.

“They just want to talk about it because they are so hurt by it,” he said while campaigning in Iowa. “It is so personal. You feel betrayed that something like this could happen.”

The initial outrage sparked a student riot. Now even the knuckleheads are attending candlelight vigils.

Santorum says the Nittany Lions should bypass a bowl this year. That makes sense considering bowls are supposed to be celebrations, and nobody feels like celebrating. Bypassing next season is another matter.

High-minded folks think it will send the proverbial right message. They see Paterno as a mere fall guy for a corrupt system. They say it’s too early to move on.

They should realize Penn State can’t move on. There are years of criminal and civil trials ahead. Every time Sandusky takes the stand it will remind people from San Jose to Seoul that Linebacker U. was allegedly Pedophile U.

The people who let it become that have already faced justice. Penn State’s Board of Trustees has fired the president and football coach.

The athletic director and overseer of campus police have been arrested. The grad assistant who supposedly walked away from a horrid shower scene is a national pariah. If there are other guilty parties, they will hopefully be held accountable.

Critics think everybody at Penn State is accountable. By supporting the football team they supported the monster that allowed a Sandusky to roam free. There’s no doubt officials wanted to protect the athletic program, but they reacted like most in child-molestation cases. They went into denial and damage control.

We’ve seen it thousands of times in churches and boardrooms. Not that I expect the critics to buy that excuse.

“Clearly the PSU program is totally out of control and has been for well over a decade,” said an editorial on Diverse Issues in Higher Education website.

Actually, Penn State is one of four schools to never have a major NCAA violation. It won’t this time, either. The NCAA manual may be 10,000 pages thick, but nowhere in there is a rule against assistant football coaches showering with 10-year-old boys.

That’s because such things are patently obvious. The Sandusky cover-up didn’t spring from our football culture, it came from our culture.

Slapping Penn Sate with the death penalty is not going to make the next pedophile think twice before taking a boy into the training room. It won’t make colleagues less likely to turn away.

It also won’t make the next Nevin Shapiro any less likely to throw a party for recruits on his yacht.

What is the reformers’ plan to get things under control? Take money out of football? Pay players? Make them all have 1600 SAT scores?

Then there is the matter of money. Penn State football generated $72.7 million last year, with a $53.2 million profit. In ivory towers, that is proof business had encroached on academic purity.

In the real world, that pays for baseball, track, lacrosse, swimming, gymnastics, hockey, tennis and women’s fencing.

We rail at the injustice when the NCAA imposes sanctions on schools like USC. Reggie Bush and Pete Carroll are making NFL millions, while the innocent players left behind are penalized.

In this case, the (alleged) bad guys are not getting away. Yet we still want to hammer the innocent athletes left behind? We’re OK that everything Penn State has been irrevocably tainted?

Whatever pain players, students and fans endure is nothing compared to what Sandusky allegedly inflicted. But all this righteous outrage is only producing more victims.

At the beginning of this week, it was safe to say that many of the people following the Jerry Sandusky story figured they knew exactly what they thought of Mike McQueary, a Penn State assistant coach of whom they'd probably never heard one week prior.

Perhaps it felt like a fully formed opinion. It was strong enough, after all. McQueary was the guy who said he witnessed the rape of a 10-year-old boy in 2002 and did nothing more than go tell a football coach the next day.

By Tuesday, that image began to change shape. That day, purported fragments of emails sent by McQueary surfaced in which he maintained to friends that he did, in fact, go to police to tell them what happened -- and that he didn't leave the sordid scene involving Sandusky until he "made sure it was stopped." A source corroborated that latter portion of McQueary's account to ESPN.

On Wednesday, another shape shift. Wednesday was the day on which both the Penn State campus police and the State College police said they had no record of any such conversation with McQueary. For that matter, there was no mention of McQueary contacting police in the grand jury's presentment of the case.

And with that, it is official: Public ignorance has become the currency of the Sandusky scandal. Not willful ignorance, although surely there have been ample amounts of that, but a more ordinary, everyday, lack-of-basic- information, we-just-don't-have-it-yet type of ignorance. It is terrifyingly obvious that many people are operating off shards of factoids and little else, and drawing broad conclusions based upon those shards, and generally not knowing very much with absolute certainty, because the case so far doesn't allow for that.

And now, a history lesson, meant not as a parallel but only as a reminder. In March 2006, a woman told police in Durham, N.C., that she had been beaten and raped by three members of the Duke University lacrosse team during a party at which she'd been hired to perform as a stripper. Slightly more than a year later, after the accuser changed several key details of her account in subsequent interviews, charges against all three athletes were dropped by prosecutors who said the men were "victims of a tragic rush to accuse" by an overreaching (and soon disbarred) district attorney.

Those are the bookend facts of the Duke case. But it was what came in between the initial accusation and the ultimate legal finding that bears recalling here. All questions of the lacrosse players' guilt or innocence aside, the story quickly morphed into a national referendum on the Duke lacrosse team, on the culture of the sport in general, on the insularity of athletes at a big-time sports university. It was a story of entitlement and rampant disregard, of arrogance and power.

It was a story that wound up being wrong in several very particular ways. Still, the public had its answers. It had its opinions, formed early and very concretely. And when the gray edges eventually encroached on what many wanted to see as a black-and-white case, it got very messy and stayed that way. It remains so.

Back to the now. Did McQueary go to the cops? Maybe. Quite possibly. Or perhaps not at all. Perhaps McQueary is trying to revise history. Perhaps the campus police kept no record of the unhappy conversation. Perhaps there was no conversation. Perhaps there was.

What we don't know about this story could fill a book. And, probably very soon, it will.

So there is something to be said for caution here, for moving carefully toward final judgments. I don't know what happened to Mike McQueary, although Wayne Drehs' brilliant piece on McQueary's situation lays out a possible scenario that might help explain how the story got to where it is … if indeed the story is where anyone thinks it is just now.

But the problem with Drehs' reporting, for some, is that it casts far too much gray area on a story they'd rather see in black and white. They want villains, not humans. As I said a minute ago, many people had made up their minds about McQueary by the start of this week. Joe Paterno, too, and Gary Schultz and Tim Curley and Graham Spanier.

It's that kind of a story. It is precisely heinous and despicable enough to demand a sort of instant accounting. But to what extent? Of how many? And on what basis of fact?

The scandal involving Jerry Sandusky and Penn State might not travel the same path as the Duke story did. It is not the same story. It certainly might not be subject to a legal reversal on the scale of the Duke case.

What the stories share, though, is a strikingly similar sort of venal public response, a certain "they're all guilty as sin" quality that permeates so much of the national conversation. If nothing else, recent history suggests that at least a modicum of restraint today might prove wise later on. Here's hoping it doesn't get lost in all the shouting.

NCAA punishment is unlikely for Penn State

As the anger and outrage over the Penn State child sex-abuse scandal intensifies, so do cries that the football program needs be shut down next year or beyond. Many are calling for the NCAA to enact its so- called "death penalty."

But while the arguments are widespread and impassioned, there is no precedent for that based on the criminal allegations, and it seems unlikely the NCAA has the authority to act.

"No, I don't think they do," former NCAA executive director Cedric Dempsey said. "I'm not sure that it's an NCAA issue. I don't see how it would have any control over that."

University of Oklahoma law professor David Swank, a former chairman of the NCAA infractions committee, was even more definitive.

"This isn't an NCAA matter — at all," he said. "This is a matter of criminal law. There are no moral turpitude rules in the NCAA manual. There are rules that deal with how much financial aid you can get but no rules dealing with criminal (activities). It would be really inappropriate under these circumstances to take any action."

Swank said he understands the seriousness of the alleged crimes and the emotions they have generated, and he called the situation "very upsetting." But, he said, "It's something that involves the criminal justice system and then probably the civil system, but not the NCAA. You've got a problem of criminal law. The NCAA rules deal with something different from what we have here."

Last week, NCAA president Mark Emmert said the organization "will defer in the immediate term to law enforcement officials." He added that, as the judicial process runs its course, "we will determine whether association bylaws have been violated and act accordingly."

The NCAA has handed out the "death penalty" to Division I universities three times, but not since 1987, when it shut down the Southern Methodist football program for a year and canceled all home games the next year for major recruiting violations. The university then decided to cancel the road games, wiping out the schedule for a second season. It took several years for the program to recover.

SMU was considered a "repeat violator," having been placed on three years' probation two years earlier for recruiting violations. Penn State's situation appears vastly different.

"The NCAA," Swank said, "should stay out of it totally."

What would have been the reaction had this event happened in the School of Chemistry?

My guess is no, and since only the AD has been charged w/a crime, I suppose the NCAA would have to sanction all of the sports programs. And should the charge against the AD be tossed (perjury is a charge of last resort), the NCAA would be left to fumble around with a unprecedented "lack of morals" charge, which could open a Pandora's box to coaches who cheat on the wives, or those who file their taxes late? Interesting times ahead, and hopefully the guilty will be pay dearly for what they have done.

EDIT: Schultz was also charged w/perjury, but his position - vice president for finance and business doesn't involve the NCAA.

Thanks Jim. We're fine here in town, and in time the whores in the MSM will move on to their next pool of blood. I can see from the tone of yesterdays and today's articles, their claws are already retracting. I don't wish what happened here on anyone. My youngest daughter is in Princeton, NJ, and has PSU alum licence plates on her car. It's become a target for mindless oafs who are guided by the MSM and their own personal biases. She isn't alone. I fully expect some of these young men and women to become victims of violence, or to deal some out if attacked. I know I certainly will should anyone say something to my face, or in any way denigrate members of my family. To indict a 125 y/o University for the actions of what seems to be a handful of the most elite, speaks more to the character of the finger pointers, than 99.9% of the kids here. In short order their Universities could very well become a target, and I for one will be the very last to throw a rock, even in jest.

You do realize that this is not just a local matter in your area? This is national. Those lawyers are not finished just yet. You can bet that members of the Board of Trustees and those in the higher ups were well aware of this despicable dirty laundry going on. A pimp can also be a member of the school administration regardless of their position. And believe me, just when you think that grand jury report was a shock to read, watch and see what happens when those victims start testifying and dropping names under oath. People are going to scramble like cockroaches.

The current BoT needs to be voted out come Spring (I believe that's when the alum vote). Anybody connected to the current administration - including the two d'bags BoTs, who just appointed themselves President and AD - need to be sent packing. Their lack of leadership would put the odds of this happening at near 100%.

I would politely dissent on this one. Those who have appointed themselves as interim vice president, and president, etc. etc., and all those involved in this scandal need to be served subpoenas and deposed under oath! Every damn one of them before they leave town. It's called abandoned ship before it sinks and loose lips sink ships and nobody wants to talk at this time. Isn't that interesting? And as for your police force, nobody is gonna talk until they have been served subpoenas.

You'd be asking that our Governor's appointed AG, the same Governor/AG that allowed Sandusky to roam free from 2009-2011, to issue the appropriate subpoenas. Knowing what you have learned so far regarding this matter, what odds would you put on this happening?