There's nothing new here.
If anyone out there thinks that the horrific events unfolding at Penn State are unusual, uncommon or without precedent, you were probably born during the Clinton Administration. True, none of the past scandals involved pedophiles but they were nevertheless symptomatic of the hold that college sports has over the American landscape. Stories like this are never about the actual incident (or in this case, many incidents). Students with exceptional skills will continue to drive drunk, beat up their girlfriends and take money for work not performed. (Hell, I did that for 37 years and never made the papers once!)
No. The real story is how the institution deals with the issue. It's about how the situation gets handled or doesn't get handled. It's about morals vs. money, about reputation vs. doing the right thing. It's about protecting the institution vs. protecting the victims. On every level Penn State and its administration went the wrong way and no penalty from the NCAA, the courts or the public will seem too severe.
This isn't about pro sports. People who get paid to entertain, including politicians, are going to get a pass once in a while. Celebrity has perks. Some of those perks include reporters routing through your trash, following your children around the playground and interviewing your college girlfriend to find out how good you were in the sack. If that sounds like a fair trade for getting a good table at a fine restaurant, go run for someone or for something. Entertainers are also going to get into trouble and their peccadilloes, unlike yours, will make the news. Their rise and fall stories are interesting but not indicative of anything. Lawrence Taylor's predilection for underage hookers or Tiger Woods' adventures with cocktail waitresses are titillating stories but hardly an indictment of pro football or the PGA tour. College sports however is an entirely different can of worms.
Let's start with the "college" part. No college, with the possible exception of Brigham Young, was ever founded to be a sports mecca. Universities were created to: 1) Meet chicks/guys, 2) learn to drink dangerous quantities of cheap alcohol, 3) eat the kinds of foods you will spend the rest of your life warning your children about and, if there's time, 4) learning something. Prior to 1869 there was no college football. The first game, Rutgers - Princeton, was attended by fewer people than you might see in the waiting room of your dentist's office. Colleges were fine without big time athletic programs. With most colleges and universities charging $40, 000 to $50,000 a year, (before you buy the first blue book) it's hard to understand why any school needs the headache of a Quintin Daley or Lawrence Phillips. More about Mr. Daley in a moment.
Schools must learn to live without both the revenue and the scandals. True, many schools have, at least on the surface maintained a "clean program". As a matter of fact, Penn State before Jerry Sandusky and his affectations was just such a program. Show me a clean program in big-time college sports and I'll show you a program that has yet to be caught. Unlike the pros, college reputations matter. Southern Methodist University in Dallas received the so-called death penalty from the NCAA for paying players and 25 years later it is still a black mark on its escutcheon. (SMU was so desperate to be known for something else they agreed to be the home of the George W. Bush Library. Now that's desperation.)
The University of San Francisco, having given the world Bill Russell, was justly proud of its basketball program. However, when a series of recruiting incidents culminated with the criminal assault of a female student by one Quintin Daley, the hottest pro prospect in the country, the Jesuits who run USF didn't hesitate. They offered to honor all basketball scholarships if a team member wished to stay, wished bon chance to the others and padlocked the gym for three years. The squeak of sneakers on a hardwood floor went unheard from 1982 to 1985. As a person who rarely has anything nice to say about the actions of the RCC, the decision by Rev. John LoShiavo took real courage.
Penn State must suspend its football program. Either you are a proud university with an impressive record of academic achievement or you are a punch-line school that is nothing more than a feeder operation for pro football. Yes, thousands of innocent restaurant owners, vendors and athletes will be punished for a crime in which they never took part but there is a bigger issue here. The football program at Penn State was used as an excuse for the most vile crime the human mind can contempalte...violation of a child. Jerry Sandusky was given free reign to molest kids at will exclusively because he was attached to football. He used his football access as bait. Outsized crime requires outsized punishment. Penn State must melt down the Paterno statue and the football program he represented.
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