Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/83706
Freeh or the NCAA is that the incident was investigated by the Penn State Po- lice, the Department of Public Welfare, and Centre County Child and Youth Services before District Attorney Ray Gricar declined to press charges for reasons that have not been revealed. Furthermore, the truth about the next report, in 2001, of Sandusky shower- ing with a boy is still unresolved and continues to be part of the legal process. It wasn't until late in 2008 that a third incident sparked the in- vestigation that eventually led to San- dusky's arrest and conviction. So Em- mert's timeline is off-base. However, the fundamental question is this: Why did Emmert and his Exec- utive Committee unanimously believe that vacating 112 football victories since 1998 – or even the wins from 2001 or 2008 – was so vital that the measure needed to be included with the six other sanctions? Does the pun- ishment even fit the supposed crime? NCAA policy dictates that the vacat- ing of victories is only to be done when a team is deemed to have re- ceived a competitive advantage by breaking rules. The penalty had been applied 41 times previously in all di- visions of NCAA football for major in- fractions according to a document on NCAA legislative action found on the organization's website. Among the colleges that have been forced to va- cate victories are four from Division II, including Cheyney, as well as Divi- sion III Hobart. Penn State now heads the list of 11 programs in the Football Bowl Subdi- vision to have wins vacated. Alabama is a distant second, with 29 vacated wins in four seasons: 1993, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Certainly, when Emmert and the NCAA Executive Committee decided on this particular penalty, they didn't care that the players on those teams had never broken any eligibility rule and that almost all of them had graduated. What's more, few of them had even met Sandusky. Nor did Emmert and company care that Penn State was previously one of fewer than two dozen schools that had never had a major NCAA infraction in any sport and that the football team had been one of the leaders in graduating its players – in the 80 percent range by the NCAA's own statistics in the past decade. So, why vacate the victories? ESPN's Don Van Natta Jr. summed it up succinctly in covering Emmert's news conference: "The erasure of Penn State's wins over 14 years was seen as a direct censure of Paterno." Instead of being recognized as the winningest coach in major college football with 409 victories, Paterno is now fifth following the vacating of 111 wins. Additionally, he is all the way down to 12th on the list of all-time coaching victories in all divisions. Emmert and the 17 other members of the NCAA Executive Committee can claim all they want that the vacating of Paterno's victories was based, like the other sanctions, on the lack of in- stitutional control. They did that in the first sentence of the news release announcing the punishments: "By perpetuating a 'football first' culture that ultimately enabled serial child sexual abuse to occur, the Pennsylva- nia State University leadership failed to value and uphold institutional in- tegrity, resulting in a breach of the NCAA constitution and rules." Speculation is what Freeh and Em- mert do best, so here's my specula- tion: This was a very personal attack on Paterno and his legacy, engineered by Emmert and others inside and outside the NCAA because of private and professional resentments, jeal- ousies and past confrontations with Paterno, who had often attacked the integrity of the NCAA and its rules and policies. Paterno was the bright beacon shin- ing a light on the hypocrisy within college football – everything from the cheating on the field and in academ- ics to the financial greed spurred by the plethora of postseason bowl games to the inconsistent and fre- quent penalties on individual players for fanciful violations of the NCAA's many trivial regulations. Vacating those 111 victories was the NCAA's way of desecrating Paterno's grave. I doubt that it would have had the courage to do it to his face.