Breaking now on MSNBC:
The NCAA will not suspend the Penn State football program.
The school will be fined $60 million, be banned from bowl games for 4 years, lose some football scholarships, vacate all wins from 1998 to 2011, and be placed on 5 years probation.
Personally, I feel the program should have gotten the so-called death penalty (and I'm a college football fan).
What say you?
6:59 AM PT: From the comments:
I think this is worse than the death penalty. (16+ / 0-)
This is the irrelevance penalty.
Giving them a one- or two-year death penalty—and that would have been all it would have been, there was no way they were going to suspend the program indefinitely—would have allowed them to come out of the other end, call themselves absolved, and recruit another strong class. The fans would see a good football team in five years, and nothing would change institutionally.
But fewer recruits, $60 million fine, no bowls for four years... that's a strong punishment. The strength of a college football program is in its recruiting, which is based on exposure, facilities, and coaching staff... and this hurts all three of those. When top-tier high-schoolers in Pennsylvania get an offer from Penn State and an offer from a top-flight football program like Ohio State or Michigan, the other option is going to look a lot more tempting now since they'll have bowl games and a shot at the National Championship (if a non-SEC team ever wins it again). If coaches get a better offer, they'll be out the door in a heartbeat. $60 million will put a pretty big dent in their facilities and training.
This penalty will make non-Big-10 BCS teams less likely to schedule them (since officially 14 straight 0-12 seasons won't be good for strength-of-schedule numbers, and they'll be weak for the foreseeable future), meaning no national TV for non-conference games. And their being a joke on the schedule will mean that their conference games probably won't get the top-channel scheduling either... better make sure your cable subscription has ESPN8:The Ocho and the Big 10 Network, Penn State fans.
This will pull them down from a top-tier program to a second- or even third-tier one, for at least the better part of a decade. For a college football program—where it's more about pride than money than the pro teams—humiliation can be a fate worse than the death penalty. The NCAA has ensured that Penn State's program will be a joke until 2020.
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." --Dom Helder Camara, archbishop of Recife
by JamesGG on Mon Jul 23, 2012 at 08:32:46 AM CDT
Thank you, JamesGG, for your excellent analysis. I agree. This may be worse.