The NCAA dropped the hammer on Penn State today. Through a bit of administrative magic, Joe Paterno’s lifetime win/loss record will no longer show any of his wins since 1998. That is 111 fewer wins, dropping his total at Penn State from 409 to 298, and his place in history, for total wins, from 1st to 12th.
The university (and, to some extent, the taxpayers of Pennsylvania) must pay a $60 million fine, to go towards helping victims of sexual assault, and hopefully Sandusky’s victims. The athletic department will be on probation for five years (whatever that means), and they will have fewer scholarships to go around for the next four years. Also, no bowl games.
Current players may transfer their scholarships to other schools. I hope enough of them do so to cause the school’s athletic department, to paraphrase from Romney, to self-death-penalty.
The Big Ten will announce its own decision on punishment for the school later today.
The obvious question is: Is this enough? I freely admit that I am not a sports fan. I enjoy watching games, but I have never gotten caught up in the sort of fanatical devotion to teams, players, and coaches that characterizes much of sports, both here and around the world. Most athletes and coaches (the vast, vast majority, I’d say) are just folks with an aptitude for a particular game. Most fans are folks who enjoy the entertainment, the camaraderie, and (for lack of a less-pretentious term) the esprit-de-corps of being part of a team’s fandom. Some athletes, fans, and coaches, however, let it go to their heads. And some teams get so good that winning becomes more important than anything in the whole world.
Teamwork and camaraderie, both the kind found between teammates and that between fans, is part of the glue that holds society together. Taken too far, though, it becomes the sort of in-group mentality that starts wars. (I’m not exaggerating.) When winning the game, or protecting the team, becomes more important than enforcing the law, there is a problem. A very, very big problem.
SMU lost its entire football program for a year because players were getting paid. Penn State gets fined and loses some of its scholarships for a massive cover-up of child rape.
SMU might have had a famous, legendary coach in the mid-’80s, when it got the death penalty. I have no idea. But even I, an almost-total non-football fan, have known who Joe Paterno was for some time.
The real punishment for Penn State is that, despite keeping its football program, it loses its legacy. Penn State is no longer the home of the greatest football coach in college football history, even if it took the stroke of an administrative pen to make it so.
I still haven’t answered my own question: Is it enough?
The answer is that I don’t know, and even if I did, it is not for me to say. What happens to the Penn State football program from this day forward has no impact on my life at all. Living in a world where winning football games, and protecting the legacy of a legendary coach, is deemed more important than stopping a known child predator–that has an impact on the lives of every person living in the United States today. How we address that is also not up to me.
The question of whether it is enough can be answered by two groups of people. The first group consists of the victims of Jerry Sandusky, and all victims, past, present, and future, of crimes such as his. They don’t have a direct say, however, in how Penn State’s football program, all other college football programs, and all athletic programs will conduct themselves in the future. Will these schools risk their own glory–and the bottom line–to do what is right? Only time will tell.
The second group, which can affect the future of athletics, is the fans. In particular, the fans who defended, and continue to defend, Joe Paterno even after the facts were known. These are the fans who want to preserve JoePa’s legacy and focus on the good he did, as if winning a lot of football games can make up for, in effect, facilitating child rape. Perhaps that is a loaded analysis, but I have yet to hear a compelling argument for why I should care about anything else Joe Paterno did with his life, ever.
To the fans who supported Joe Paterno and Penn State, what happens next is up to you. College athletic programs exist at their current colossal scale because fans buy tickets to games, watch games on television and pay-per-view, buy merchandise, and build whole lifestyles around college athletics. Is the thrill of watching “your” team win worth the cost of looking the other way when crimes are committed? The choice is yours.
