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.
It's a dick move on the academic side to kick them out at this point. I know I've said this in other threads, but look at things like the Penn State Hershey Medical Center and the like. Basically mid state PA is not that heavily populated and the state has spent the last decade building all the treatment around PSU. PSU brings in specialists and gives them access to labs in exchange for having them spend a few days at smaller centers doing treatment. Penn State Hershey for example just built a cancer center (you used to have to drive ot Philly or Baltimore to reach a decent one) and is working a children's cancer center now. This is all possible due to the CiC money that PSU now gets a piece of it. Kicking PSU out messes up a lot of that. It would likely force over expansion of Pitt's medical center (which is more of a west side of the state power) to cover the midstate.
We don't need them to be good in football. Michigan, Ohio, Nebraska, and Wisconsin will represent the B1G fairly well. Iowa and MSU also have their up years. PSU as a bottom feeder is no problem. The only reason they ever got a lot of press nationally is because of their massive fanbase that travels well. Well we just added Nebraska and got a new one of those.
If Penn State made a fuss over the penalities or goes for defiant to the end, I'm fine with kicking them out. They agreed to these sanctions though. When we let them in it was for better or worse. They have a lot of research, medical treatment, and other projects going on though and it doesn't seem right to screw all those things over just due to football. PSU football got hit and we can move on.
If we kick PSU out due to the fact they now suck at football all we do is prove we're just as insanely football centric as we criticize PSU for being. Football does not drive the bus in the B1G and never should.
You are right. The rise of Wisconsin and the addition of Nebraska more than covers PSU athletically. My concern is that PSU might be hard up to find the research money and highly qualified researchers you mention because of the scandal. In my mind this scandal hurts them in all facets of the university. I can see applications and enrollement drop at PSU especially in out-of-state student populations. PSU will be hurting from this not just the football program.
That's likely two years out roughly given how slow the federal government tends to move on this. The FBI and Department of Education are still active on this and it could awhile (Most Clery Act issues take about 2-3 years to handle, unless the school does a plea deal earlier on). The Clery Act violations could end up doing unpleasant things to PSU's endowment, accreditation, and ability to get research funds.
If any of those happen I would hope that they'd be telegraphed out in advance to give people on the research side at PSU time to find new landing spots (and let places like the Hershey Med Center align with a new university). If PSU hits a rock bottom and drags the other 12 CiC members down in terms of ability to get grants, then I'd support remove them so 12 other programs don't suffer heavily. We're all going to suffer a bit likely since PSU is toxic right now, but an official bullet to the head from the federal government would be a whole new level of suffering.
Anyway that is supposedly unlikely. My understanding is that when Spanier was still President and being rather defiant, PSU was on track to have a bullet put in their head on the academic side. The DoE telegraphed that fact to the Trustees and Spanier was removed and replaced with a guy who was cooperative. Unless PSU backslides, rumor central within the CiC seem to think the DoE will curtail furture research expansion of PSU while attempting to avoid destroying exsisting infrastructure.
The CiC process for this is that you get put on probation and then booted if you fail to recover. For example Nebraska just loss AAU status, but it's no big deal since they're expected to regain it in short order. If they fail to do that I'd imagine we'd look at probation followed by expulsion over a multiyear period. Give everyone a chance to wrap things up as opposed to a bolt out of the blue expulsion.
Not only do you write tremendous prose regarding your nuptials, you answered all my questions on this issue. I didn't even realize that there was a DoE investigation going on.
Why did Nebraska lose AAU status, anyway?
Although basically it was an accounting problem involving which kind of federal grants do and do not count towards the AAU dollar figure. From my understanding, if Department of Agriculture grants were part of the AAU formula, they would have been fine. There was also an issue about the number of faculty involved in different professional associations. Here's a NYT article about the issue.
Nebraska is a smallish state U in a farming-ranching state with modest resources and small population. Ag is a huge part of NU's mission, the AAU doesn't value that sort of research. and let's face it, there aren't many schools like NU in the AAU. Look at how few are represented west of the Missouri river--offhand, just Texas, Arizona, and Cal. Nebraska has certainly made strides in growing other research and is no slouch--think we're around #100--but the state is too sparsely populated and has nowhere near the resources to compete with most AAU schools.
It sorta ticked me off at first, but really we probably don't fit into that club. And it's kinda funny that right after bringing us in, a few of the B1G schools--supposedly Michigan and Wisconsin--voted against us, so AAU membership can't be too big of a deal.
You can't tell me Dantonio ins't licking his chops to get after some Eastern OH, Western PA kids. Before I saw MSU regressing towards 6-6, 7-5 seasons but now I see them as having 8-4, 9-3 seasons.
The most frustrating part of these sanctions is that had to occur to teach people not to cover up child rape in the interests in football. The fact that one of our rivals might gain a recruiting advantage is nothing.
with full remaining eligibility. This is at least one good thing out of this mess. It will be interesting to see whether PSU stars like TB Silas Redd and others stick around or hit the trail.
My understanding is that the $13M is the estimated lost revenue over 4 years, not per year.
More than the loss of direct ticket revenue (I'm guessing they'll still be close to selling out their games, though they've lost some pricing power), I'd think they'd be stung by lost auxiliary revenues. Walking around town in a Penn St. football jersey is a tad less appealing than it was a year or two ago.
I would not be surprised to see their ticket sales drop precipitously in 2013. They won't have a good team, they won't be headed to a bowl, and some of their fans think their university sold the program out.
This year, they're in the clear because people already paid for tickets, but I'd bet there will be a lot of no-shows.
The comments on BSD are absolutely astounding. Total delusion.
That place is just plain sick. They're a giant advertisement for total elimination of PSU football and they don't even realize it. Every President/Chancellor in the B1G supports the NCAA. Other members of the NCAA voted to give Emmert the ability to be judge, jury, and executioneer (an expansion of power that could haunt those schools later). Yet to BSD is all lynch mob mentality. Their Board of Trustees are weak for refusing to fight this. It never occurs to them that a rational human being might read the Freeh Report and think "We deserve this." It never occurs to them all Paterno had to was tell McQueary "We're going to drive down to the police station and you're going to tell the officers what you saw."
with opinion on the penalties. Will he be shouted down from within this time?
Reading the threads on Black Shoe Diaries is a mostly depressing experience, as their fans react with denial, shock and anger. And then I saw a comment that made me crack up laughing: the observation that the Nittany Lions should still be able to defeat Ohio U. in the first game and thereby break the school's 108-game losing streak.
Their punishment isn't all that bad considering a bunch of children are going through a lifetime of pain.
I agree, obviously, but this is punishment being applied to those who are left behind after this mess. This was an error in judgment /inaction by leadership, and leadership has been replaced.
You can at least acknowledge that.
But it just might be a severe enough penalty to deter schools in the future from covering up criminal behavior.
Because the legal system doesn't have mechanisms to address this already? If you get busted doing this, there's pretty good chances that you won't be around to feel any effects from NCAA action.
"If you get busted"
The legal system had double (or more) standards even if you do in fact get busted.
My answer is thus no. The legal system in the US (and most other countries) is a joke.
I learned this watching The Wire.
This punishment is worst than the Death Penalty. After 4 years, they'll have a MINIMUM of 20 kids on that team as a walk on. Odds are more than that as kids in each class the next four years transfer/flame out. Penn State is dead for the next decade.
Kids who dreamed of playing B1G football but couldn't can now always go to PSU.
This is a huge boon for Ohio, opening up more recruits and weakening their division at the same time.
I agree with all of the penalties, but I think they should have be barred from playing football this year, in addition to everything else. Making those kids go out there and play is bordering on cruel and unusual punishment.
Think about it.
The amount of hate, and vitrol, and garbage that is going to be spewed at these kids is going to be unlike anything we've ever seen. Everywhere they go, Penn State is going to be accosted, shamed, and trashed. Most of that hate will be directed at the program, but it's the players who will bear the brunt of it.
The boos will be deafening, and all of the anger people have toward Joe Pa, and Sandusky will be wrongfully directed at the football team as a whole.
They're going to have to hire armed guards to protect the team on the road.
Penn State fans also might want to think about taking a year off from attending any road games. I shudder to think of what will happen to anyone wearing a PSU jacket in front of the wrong group of drunken fans. Imagine what will happen when Penn State wins a road game.
It could get really ugly out there.
No douIbt the PSU players and fans will face abuse this coming season from opposing fans, but I do think the sanctions the NCAA levied will go a long way in helping to ameliorate the feelings of anger and perhaps hatred most fans would otherwise feel toward PSU football. Fortunately they only have five away games this year, and Ohio State, which has the most psychotic fans in the B1G, is a home game.
I think the NCAA grossly overpunished Penn State. This is because it simply does not match reponses in other cases.
Roman Polanski is a famous and highly paid Hollywood dirctor, but he works in Europe. This is a because he raped a little girl and was convicted of the crime. He fled to Europe and makes movies there.
Hollywood not only pays him massive amounts of money, but they demand over and over that the conviction be set aside because he makes such good movies. None of us movie watchers complain about this or demand that the movies be burned and the studios be shut down.
JoePa simply covered up some child rape, no rape himself. For that the NCAA is destroying a man and a legendary sports program, and harming a bunch of current students who nothing to do with any wrong-doing?
This is simply unfair. Hollywood gets a pass, but a football program is ruined.
You're spot on. You absolutely convinced me.
I totally forgot that 2 wrongs make a right.