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Title: Shutting down Penn State football not the answer
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URL Source: http://aol.sportingnews.com/ncaa-fo ... -state-football-not-the-answer
Published: Nov 17, 2011
Author: David Whitley
Post Date: 2011-11-17 22:58:10 by christine
Keywords: None
Views: 3515
Comments: 66
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? None of that would have controlled a Sandusky. 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. Should all those athletes go down the drain for a couple of years? 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? Once more for emphasis: 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. There have already been far too many of those at Penn State. Poster Comment: I concur.
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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 8.
#5. To: christine (#0)
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Penn State Scandal: The Rose Bowl Right To Embrace the Nittany Lions http://bleacherreport.com/articl...ght-to-embrace-penn-state
#11. To: christine, 4 (#8)
November 18, 2011 Penn State: Danger in the unknown We know. We think we know, anyway. But what if what we know isn't enough? 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.
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#8. To: Eric Stratton (#5)
Here's another opinion that is compelling to me.
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#14. To: christine (#8)
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End Trace Mode for Comment # 8.