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Penn State lauds revisions to NCAA penalties O'Brien calls decision 'tremendous news' for Nittany Lion football program M AT T   H E R B Penn State didn't play a game last Saturday, but its first bye week of the season was the best week this program has enjoyed in a long, long time. On Sept. 24, the NCAA announced that it was going to ease the sanctions it levied more than a year earlier in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the release of the Freeh report. Citing the positive reviews that Penn State has received from former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who has been serving as an independent athletics integrity monitor, the NCAA returned many of the scholarships that the program was set to lose in the coming years and left open the possibility that its postseason ban will be lifted in 2014 or '15. The news touched off a national debate over the propriety of the sanctions, with some fans and commentators charging that the NCAA should have let its original penalties stand and others arguing that those penalties should have never been imposed in the first place. But on Penn State's campus, there wasn't much disagreement. Coach Bill O'Brien called it "tremendous news," and his enthusiasm was echoed by administrators, athletes and students alike. "We're happy right now for our student-athletes who are here and our football program," O'Brien said. "They're a resilient bunch of kids. We're happy for our people here at Penn State and the people who have worked extremely hard to implement the recommendations of the Freeh report. We're just trying to take it one day at a time and working as hard as we can and continuing every single day to try to do the right thing." The Nittany Lions are still going to pay a stiff price for the charges that high-ranking university officials mishandled allegations of sexual misconduct against Sandusky. They've already lost 10 scholarships and will lose five more in 2014. Moreover, they won't be going bowling this season under any circumstances, the | MATT@BLUEWHITEONLINE.COM second year in a row they've been forced to sit out the postseason. But some of the words that were tossed around immediately after the sanctions were levied, words like crippling and devastating, may no longer apply, as the duration and intensity of the penalties have been significantly lessened with the changes that have been made to the original consent decree between Penn State and the NCAA. The biggest change is to the number of initial scholarships Penn State will be able to offer in the coming years. The Class of 2014 will now have 20 members, up from the 15 that the coaching staff had been planning to recruit. And starting in 2015, the Nittany Lions will once again be allowed to sign 25 players per year, just as their Football Bowl Subdivision peers are permitted. The Lions' scholarship roster will be capped at 75 players next year and 80 in 2015, but after that, they will be allowed to carry a full complement of 85 scholarship players. Those revisions to the consent decree will help Penn State overcome the numbers problem it was facing in its recruiting efforts. The Lions' most recent class showed that they were still going to be able to recruit highly sought-after players, but they weren't going to be able to sign enough of them to field an elite team. "It was difficult in that you were only going to be able to take one kid in the class for [a particular] position, O'Brien " explained. "That was tough. As far as recruiting, we always felt from the day we walked in here that once we were able to get a young man and his parents here on campus, that the place sold itself. It's just a place where you can get a fantastic degree and a place where you can play in the Big Ten, which is a fantastic football conference with great coaches and great players. We have a beautiful 108,000seat stadium here and a great football facility. As far as just recruiting the individual athlete, that was never diffi- O C T O B E R 2 , 2 0 1 3 11 cult here. It's the numbers that were the difficult part. " The NCAA did not ease up on its other sanctions. Penn State remains ineligible for postseason competition until 2016, the $60 million fine still stands, and the 112 victories from 1998 to 2011 that were vacated have not been restored. However, the NCAA said its executive committee "may consider additional mitigation of the postseason ban in the future" if the school continues to receive positive reviews from Mitchell. When the penalties were handed down in July 2012, NCAA president Mark Emmert called them "corrective and punitive. University officials responded to the " demand for corrective action by implementing nearly all of the 119 recommendations contained in the Freeh report ahead of the Dec. 31, 2013, deadline. In his first annual report, which was released on Sept. 6, Mitchell said the university had cooperated fully with his staff. He said Penn State had produced more than 47,000 documents in response to requests aimed at assessing the implementation of various changes to university policy, from restrictions on the use of facilities to revised background checks for new employees. "The amount of resources, time, and energy devoted to these efforts has been notable," Mitchell said in his report. "We have been impressed by the professionalism of those leading this undertaking and their open and forthright communications with us. " But while Mitchell's reports have received ample scrutiny in the Penn State community, the national commentary following the NCAA's decision to relax its penalties was focused elsewhere. In the 14 months since the NCAA announced its penalties against the Nittany Lions, much of the attention has shifted from Penn State to the NCAA itself. It botched the Miami investigation by breaking its own rules to gather testi- BL UE W HI T EON L I N E . COM

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