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"We're happy right now for our players – our student-athletes who are here – and our football program. They're a resilient bunch of kids." BILL O'BRIEN PennStateNews athletics 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 left its original penalties intact and others arguing that those penalties should never have been imposed in the first place. But on Penn State's campus, there wasn't a lot of rhetorical crossfire. Nittany Lion football players may have kept the celebration brief, but others were more effusive, including O'Brien, who called the NCAA's decision "tremendous news. " "We're happy right now for our players – our student-athletes who are here – and our football program," he 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. 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 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 both 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 the team was still going to be able to

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