Ncaaoversteps bounds on Penn State

My first win as an NCAA-level head coach came on April 17, 1970. My Ursinus College baseball team defeated Western Maryland College. We won the game 11-2. I say we because I was just the head coach and I didn’t score the runs or pitch the game. I have other first wins as a coach, too. In October 1959 the Glenside Gorillas won my first football game for me, 61-0, over Southampton. My first win as any kind of a baseball coach came on May 21, 1960, as the Glenside Boys AC team trumped Weldon 3-0. I say “my wins,” but the players, not me, made those wins happen.

I recite all this because those wins will stand for all time. We all own them. No one can change the outcomes. The games are over and so, too, are the 112 contests Penn State football teams won between 1998 and last season. I understand how college athletics work; I was an NCAA college athletics director, at all three levels, for 18 years. It says here, in the land of common sense, that no NCAA decree can really change the outcome of what transpired over 12 years on the field. A win is a win is a win. It isn’t honest, it isn’t even prudent, but it sure is vindictive.

It’s clear that it was done to tarnish the legacy of Coach Joe Paterno. They didn’t want him to be the all-time winningest football coach so they took a bunch of his wins away — “vacated” them says the NCAA. But, in fact it also vacated the hard work and efforts of countless innocent players’ wins that were earned over more than a decade.

Penn State, itself, was quick enough to discard his legacy when last November, and lacking any hard evidence, it fired him three games short of the end of the season. Did that hasten his death? Who knows, but many suspect it did.

Paterno got the last laugh though, be- cause when he died he still had all 409 of his wins. (And, FYI, Coach Paterno was never comfortable with the statue. Didn’t want it, really.)

No doubt that Jerry Sandusky did deplorable things and, with any luck, will never taste free air again. The pedophile was found guilty in a trial (but please note that no one else has been tried so far) and awaits sentencing on 44 counts.

I was shocked, like all of you, at what transpired and I fully support the court’s findings. He broke the law and he has to pay the price. And if others enabled him to do so, they, the people who did so, (not Penn State the institution) need to be punished as well. As a lifelong educator and coach I am appalled that anyone would or could do what he did to young people and, frankly, I don’t get it. It has to be a sickness, doesn’t it?

Some say the games were overturned out of respect for the victims, yet one of them (Victim 4) has already come forward as being horrified that “his beloved Penn State” should be so punished. “Did they ask any of us who were the victims what we thought?” he said through his Harrisburgbased attorney, and of course no one did.

The NCAA was judge, jury and executioner and never even conducted its own investigation.

The $60 million “fine” may make sense (assuming that it ends up where the NCAA says it will) and the mandate that Penn State get its athletics house in order probably does too. But what doesn’t work is taking wins away from the players and the college and then dooming the football program to likely long-term mediocrity by removing scholarships and any post season incentives. Again, they are punishing the wrong people — including future students who are, today, in ninth or 10th grade.

Penn State President Dr. Rodney Erickson claims he had to accept the NCAA ruling as presented or face the “death penalty” (i.e., shut down football completely). The NCAA apparently said that it never made such a demand — and some members of the board of trustees have spoken out publicly and said that Erickson never asked for their input and simply rolled over. What’s really going on? More silence from Old Main.

The current players and coaches had no part in anything that went on there, yet they are going to pay the biggest penalty. The NCAA has totally over-stepped its bounds. No athletic infractions were found and there were no academic ones either. In fact everyone agrees that Coach Paterno and Penn State always ran a clean program — and that’s what the NCAA is supposed to be all about. The legal matters should be dealt with by the courts, not a bunch of people who regularly look the other way and exploit college athletes and happily bank the ridiculous amount of money that their big time sports events generate. Can you say “bowl games” or how about “March Madness?”

Not only have they crippled the university’s football program — and if you didn’t know, football almost single-handedly funds the rest of the athletics programs at Penn State — but they could ultimately ruin the economy of State College and the surrounding small towns and businesses that owe their economic survival to PSU football.

Maybe you won’t see it in 2012, but as the quality of play diminishes over the next four years, as it most certainly will, so too will the crowds. So too will the revenue, so too will the applications. The Valley is no longer “Happy.”

It was a heavy-handed, knee jerk move by the NCAA and one that it should have stayed out of. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Ted Taylor can be reached at ted@ tedtaylor.com.