Penn State Punishment Open Thread (part 2)
To view (part one) click here: http://mgoblog.com/mgoboard/penn-state-punishment-open-thread
I decided to continue the original thread because it is over 300 replies. Also the B1G is holding a press conference to release their sanctions and penalties at 11am.
Everything from the original thread is in regards to the NCAA press conference at 9am.
So far here is what we know:
$60 million sanction - will be paid out $12/year over 5 years.
- Money cannot be taken from academics or other sports. (Meaning most likely it's going to have to be privately funded).
- Money goes to child abuse victims, prevention, awareness, etc.
Vacation of wins from 1998-2011 (112 wins)*
- Joe Paterno record now 298-136-3; fifth on FBS all-time list
- Mike McQueary is now the last PSU QB with a winning record
Four-year postseason ban
Reduce 10 initial scholarships and 20 scholarships each year for a 4-year period
Players may transfer and play immediately at other schools
Athletic department on probation for five years
No "Death Penalty"
Also, Penn St. has had one recruit (Ross Douglas) decommit.
Here is the Mod's (from part 1) note to all:
I'm not trying to censor anyone. Instead, this is an open place to discuss your thoughts. Keep it clean. I'll review the thread later and be very unkind to posters who decide to be jerks.
The $60 mil is to be paid over 5 years, so $12 mil per year. Last year they had profits of $30 mil.
The fine is imposed on the University, and they are going to have to find some way to pay it. Maybe from tuition money. Maybe from their $1.7B endowment.
There is going to be a bake sale. Cathy McGloin makes the best snickerdoodles.
I'm sure they are considered current. The hockey team has a page on the Penn State athletic website. They will play their first varsity game in two and a half months, and have several incoming freshmen who signed letters of intent.
Delete.
- We support the NCAA sanctions.
- No BTCG for four years.
- No bowl revenue for four years (~$13m).
I should've refreshed, before I sent...someone had the details posted.
$73 million for child abuse victims, prevention, etc.
It's AWFUL it had to come to this, but that is a lot of money and it's good that it's not going in the pockets of the NCAA or other B1G schools.
while serving on the jury for a trial, I was totally taken aback at the level of service these people do for our community. I cannot imagine helping kids to recount what happened to them, and then help them heal in the horrible situations on a daily basis.
I am ex-military, my service pales in comparison to what they do.
Hopefully the $73M gets to the clinics these people run, and helps children who could not otherwise afford to get the counselling and support they need to recover and move on.
as to the reasoning stated by the B1G. They said that since PSU is ineligible for the post season they won't get their Bowl money but last year when they passed out OSU's punishment the B1G specifically said they WOULD get the bowl money. Umm, huh? If you want to take their bowl money and put it in a fund because of what happened that's good and fine but their reasoning was because they can't go bowling and following that logic OSU should have had their $ pulled as well...
...the answer may be in this article. Link
In a nutshell, according to this, there is no rule in the Big Ten which prevents teams either on NCAA probation or under a postseason ban from collecting their share of the conference proceeds from bowls. That would, of course, make this portion of the penalty imposed by the conference on Penn State a real financial penalty in addition to the NCAA fine, and under these circumstances, I totally agree that they should not benefit financially from the bowls.The precedent then is that, while there is no rule, it is their money and they don't necessarily have to give you any if you're a member institution in serious trouble.
B1G says "the NCAA has punished you and you can't compete in the post-season. As such we're not going to give you a slice of the bowl money." In OSU's case it was "the NCAA has punished you and you can't compete in the post-season. Despite this we're still going to give you your slice of the bowl money."
If the B1G had come out and said "Because of the circumstances surrounding the post-season ban of Penn State the B1G will not allow PSU to get any of their bowl money. Instead that $ will be earmarked for..." I would have been fine with that but that wasn't their reasoning. It seems to me like B1G is just piling on when they've already set precedent that NCAA post-season sanctions have no bearing on us giving you cash they did just that. I thought it was total BS that OSU gets the cash when they announced it and now it makes even less sense.
Smu is also in a shell because of the rise of the Big 12, had SMU been added to the Big 12 I doubt it would have taken this long to bounce back.
In addition, SMU took an extra year off voluntarily. They decided that a really strong football program competed with their goal of being a religious institution of higher education and dialed the football back. SMU is really bad example for this kind of thing given that they self imposed and opted to scale bak for other reasons.
Alabama is a much better example. They suffered for awhile, but they rebuilt. PSU is looking at least 7 years of having no functional depth chart, but they'll eventually rebuild.
They decided that a really strong football program competed with their goal of being a religious institution of higher education and dialed the football back.No offense, but that's a load of hoo-ha (unless you're being sarcastic). By April of 1987 (penalties were announced in Feb) more than half of the team had transfered away, and plus they still didn't have a full-time head coach. The acting president said that the only way they could have played in 1988 was with walk-ons and a handful of athletic scholarship players and returning players, and cited a concern for placing those players into a situation where they faced "an undue risk of serious injury"
But in subsequent years, when SMU did have a football team, they made it harder to be competitive by keeping their admissions standards for athletes quite high.
So in short, SMU's decline can be attributed to any/all of several factors:
*The stigma of having gone through the death penalty
*Raising academic standards for football players
*Being denied entry into the Big 12 when the SWC folded
*Being a small school, with a small fanbase, that perhaps could never have won in the first place if it didn't cheat
PSU will have to deal with the stigma issue but not the others.
My wife is an SMU alum and she'll be the first to tell you that "high admission standards" and "SMU" don't belong in the same sentence. Now as for their grad programs - yes, those are very good but their undergrad programs are quite easy to get into (no harder than TCU and possibly even easier).
It's relative here. In a football context, high admissions standards means not taking anyone who meets the bare NCAA minimum.
No offense, but that's a load of hoo-ha (unless you're being sarcastic).
No, it's not. SMU de-emphasized football when it returned. They stopped playing in the Cotton Bowl and only funded it at a fraction of the levels that it had received previously. They did the same thing that LIU and CCNY and a bunch of the schools in the point-shaving scandal in New York did.
Illinois, IU and Purdue, have before them a golden opportunity to rise up (OK, maybe not IU, where football has never really mattered) and become what the Iowas, Wisconsins, MSUs and even Northwesterns of the B1G World have become---competitive. A bit of a 'vacuum" will now exist that one of them could fill, as PSU is taking a hit that will possibly take decades to recover from.
We do have a couple of scholarships available, but even if we did not, NCAA is considering (and it seems likely they will do it) not counting PSU transfers against the school they transfer to this year. But they will count next year. So if you are currently at 85 scholarships with 25 new incoming scholarships and take a PSU kid, you have 86 kids on scholarship and 26 new scholarships. Next year, you can only take up to 24 near scholarships and cannot have more than 84 total.
with a full or nearly full recruiting class isn't likely to take many PSU kids. This probably benefits the mid- and lower-tier teams who still have a lot of scholarships to give.
Limits the choices for a lot of these kids, but it's better than holding the 85 limit fixed.
Could take some Seniors (WR/DT's) if there are any willing for depth/gone at the end of the season.
any school can take any player as a transfer this year, even if it causes the school to go over the 85 scholarship mark. However, next year, you'd have to compensate by taking fewer players. So if 2 transferred here this year, we would have to take 2 less next year.
Went back and forth on this for a while, and while arguments can be made that NCAA overstepped its boundaries, not everyone should be punished, etc....This had to happen.
Reading and hearing the Joe Pa worship and apologists on the internet these people really don't get it. These are not the most "extreme" of PSU football fans, that is the PSU football culture. It really couldn't have happened to a more deserving brainwashed fanbase. Time for them to wake up.
As per hero worship, sorry to the PSU apologists who gripe about other schools, but this is much less likely to happen at Michigan because we have a counter culture (ie--place values on academics, arts, community outside of football). Yes, I love football, but if it ever surfaced that such crimes occurred under Lloyd or BO, I would call them out as hypocrites, not defend them for "all the good" they did for the university, and rip them till the day I die. We would DESERVE all the shit we would be eating if our coach and administration harbored a pedophile for 14 years. They are "victims" of the same leardership they worshiped for decades, and that worship helped create the culture. The idea that the community had nothing to do with the environment that existed in State College is laughable. If there is not enough original thought or critical thinking on a college campus to ever question or criticize the head football coach then some outsiders (NCAA, Big Ten) need to come in and unbrainwash them.
Their continued "Us against the World" xenophobic mentality proves that they need these punishments, as well as some time to reflect on reality. Seriously, the guy was a football coach and had a statue of himself in front of the stadium while still alive. They put a halo over his head in a mural after he died. You really couldn't test the gods anymore than that fanbase did. Only fitting to see it all come crashing down.
Hell... I would call for the end of the football program if we had a scandal like UNC is having right now.
The athletic program should only exist if it serves as a benefit to the institution. It is just and apendage, not the main body. It can always be excised when it becomes an embarassment.
I never watched a single college football game before I came to Michigan. I went to Michigan because of its academic reputation. Football was just an added benefit.
One thing that's missed through all of this is the atheletes on other sports ultimatley get the biggest shaft because football revenue fuels the entire department. The whole AD will sputter and unlike the football players, they won't recieve an unconditional release.
You can say goodbye to any and all plans to upgrade ANYTHING until the football team starts making massive money. The football money isn't just about funding scholarships it's about keeping up the facilities. Take UM's football money away and while the basketball, softball, baseball (and God knows what else) are still funded they are also still playing in crappy stadiums and fields...
Everyone is losing in one way or another
but how many total scholarships are lost? Is it 90? 10-20-20-20-20. I keep reading 40 but that doesn't add up to me.
75 players on scholarship this year. 65 for the 4 years after. PSU may never take more than 15 in a class. Everyone at PSU may transfer and play right away or they may leave the team and remain on scholarship at PSU.
It's technically 80 scholarships (maximum 65 instead of 85 for 4 years from 2014 through 2017), but they can only have 15 incoming freshmen on scholarship in 2013 instead of 25, so that's why some people are saying 10, but it's not technically true--they could still offer 85 scholarships in 2013 if they give their extra 10 away to walkons who were on the team in 2012.
If Jerry Sandusky hadn't been a part of the 2nd Mile Charity, it would be one of the groups that would be getting money from the fines.
and any semblance of a decent recruiting class for the next few years and gets curbstomped as a result, this is still probably better than any other gig he could get at the moment. I'm assuming he could be a coordinator somewhere, but right now he doesn't even have the appeal of being a former Penn State head coach to a smaller school. Plus, I don't think anyone is looking for a HC at the moment.
He's going to take his $1 million salary to do a job where he has pretty much no accountability for the on-field performance? I'm shocked I tell you, shocked.
If I were Bill I would take more opportunities to sleep in.
I've been reading through some Penn State blogs for the last few minutes. Wow, those people are absolutely delusional. It's shocking how few people there seem to believe what the Freeh report says, they seem to think it was a libelous attack against JoePa and Penn State football.
Reading BSD just makes my blood pressure peg out. No mention of justice for the victims or how maybe, just maybe, Joe Paterno let the institution down. How many countless young men suffered at the hands of Jerry Sandusky while Paterno and the PSU leadership looked the other way, and all the PSU faithful are worried about is that their Saturday morning tailgates won't be the same for the forseeable future. Selfish pricks, the lot of them!
I originally felt bad for Penn State, that the fanbase was a secondary victim in this whole affair, but after reading the fan comments, its easy to see how the whole culture of Paterno worship over there in Happy Valley was just an enabler for this whole ugly mess. The mentality needs to change over there, so just burn the whole fucking thing to the ground.
The Freeh report was nothing more than that - a report. Freeh had no supoena power and gave the report just on what he could get his hands on. We were pretty outraged about the Freep report that was based on some info they could just dig up so I can understand a bit how they would be pissed off about everyone just saying "Freeh report = truth." The fact is the Freeh report is no more "fact" than Three and Out is - it's a report written based on information available but without any supoena power.
Honestly, it's probably more damming than the actual truth but the truth is quite likely still very, very ugly...
Freeh did have unfettered access to the internal communications at PSU, and it is the emails that proved most damning. His report was far more throrough than any NCAA report would ever be. The current PSU president is leading them in a positive direction with the Freeh report and accepting the NCAA sanctions, doing what is responsible to come clean about the past and accept the consequences, but the Nittany Lion fans want to burn him at the stake. Their idea of leadership is still protect PSU and its reputation at any cost.
That brings up another popular topic on BSD that just gets me.
First, without subpoena and perjury power, interviews don't mean jack. But BSD folks still insist that without inteviewing JoePa, Shultz, Curley, and Spanier, the Freeh report means nothing.
These people have already lied to a prosecutor and grand jury (especially about not knowing the 1998 incident - that is clear from the emails), why would they all of a sudden provide the whole truth to some NCAA investigator? Hard evidence like emails are MUCH more important than an interview where they are likely to lie to cover their asses.
Second, BSD is under the delusion that if Curley and Shultz are not found guilty during the perjury trial, NCAA will have an egg on its face.
If we have found out ANYTHING during the whole steroid scandal over the last 4 or 5 years is that it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to find ANYONE with a decent lawyer to get a guilty verdict in a perjury charge. All you have to do is put "I don't recall" or "to my best recollection" on all of your answers and it is impossible to be guilty of perjury. Hell, Rafael Palmeiro wagged his finger at Congress and said "I did not take steroids" and they couldn't even bring the perjury charges against him when he failed steroid tests.
I fully expect Curley and Shultz to be found not guilty in their trial and Spanier will probably be spared as well.
That does not mean that what NCAA did today was not justified.
Can we have a serious conversation about adding ND, Pitt, or Missouri to the B1G to replace PSU? PSU has been a B1G flagship since they joined (multiple BCS games, conference championships, national brand, etc.) but they will not be anymore. Although they have been a member for 20 years that is not enough time to entrench them into the B1G as a team we can't get rid of.
To me these penalties are worse than a 1 year "death penalty" because most players could just redshirt the year they suspend play. But by limiting them to 65 scholarships and only letting them sign 15 each year over the next 4 years Penn State is now an FCS school playing in the B1G. Couple that with the financial hit they are taking and likely enrollment and other academically related issues that are coming up(loss of research funding, etc.) I don't think they represent the B1G brand anymore.
If we pick up ND then perhaps we can get the B1G-Pac12 scheduling agreement back since ND and USC/Stanford can hook up to play through that.
ND has shown no interest in joining the Big 10 since they turned the conference down a decade ago. They've decided that football independence is a core part of their program and many of their idiotic alumni/fanbase think that joining the Big 10 is tantamount to the end of their program's claim to be a "national program." ND's not happening.
But with the trend towards the super conferences and ND moving non-football sports to the Big XII you can't tell me that if the B1G offered they wouldn't seriously consider it. They have to view playing teams like Minnesota, Indiana, and Northwestern in a better light than playing Iowa State, Kansas State, and Texas Tech. Although I am not a ND alum.