In a fairly dramatic press conference, NCAA president Mark Emmert and Ed Reed, chairman of the Executive Committee and president of Oregon State announced sanctions which Penn State has agreed that the NCAA is imposing in response to the criminal acts of Jerry Sandusky and his four immediate superiors. The sanctions will damage the football program without a doubt but the team was spared the death penalty supposedly because the Executive Committee and Emmert believe that the sanctions being imposed were more damaging to the Penn State than losing an entire season. Let's look at the sanctions and see.
1. Penn State must pay a $60 million fine, which will go to fund research into the prevention of child abuse as well as compensating the victims.
2. Barred from post-season play for four years, which presumably will also include the Big Ten championship game.
3. Scholarships are reduced by 20 total over 4 years, and 10 per year initial scholarships each year for 4 years.
4. Placed on probation for five years, which unlike most probations has some teeth in it. Penn State has specific requirements with which it must comply including the implementation of all recommendations in Chapter 10 of the Freeh report, which deals with compliance and integrity, the hiring of an independent integrity monitor and host of other matters dealing with compliance and reporting.
5.Vacation of all wins since 1998, effectively dropping Paterno from number one in career wins to number six and making Bobby Bowden's day in the process.
6. All players are allowed to transfer and play immediately without having to sit out a year as is normally required.
The sanctions are significant but contrary to what Emmert kept repeating they are far from being unprecedented. Basically, the NCAA went back to its playbook from the sixties and the seventies when the SEC and Southwest Conference (you remember that outlaw conference don't you - the one that gave birth to the only imposition of the death penalty). In fact, Emmert didn't go far enough even in keeping with his apparent desire to not impose the death penalty. He failed to ban Penn State from appearing on TV and from receiving any proceeds from conference TV contracts. The Big Ten has yet to announce its sanctions so that may be coming but I doubt it.
I would have preferred the death penalty along with the rest of the sanctions, as Emmert and Reed both indicated that the Executive Committee's deliberations made it clear that had the committee voted to impose the death penalty it would have also imposed additional sanctions. In my mind, that would have been an even larger statement and coupled with the scholarship reductions would have crippled the program for probably the next ten years or longer.
