NCAA misses mark
Throughout the entire Jerry Sandusky-Penn State scandal, I have been preaching caution. Sexual abuse is an emotional issue. There is a tendency to want revenge or justice right away. But the wheels of justice sometimes turn slowly.
For once, however, the NCAA’s wheels of justice turned quickly. Just 11 days after the release of the Freeh Report, an investigation commissioned by Penn State, the NCAA threw caution to the wind and hammered Penn State with draconian sanctions, including a $60 million fine, a four-year postseason and bowl ban and a reduction of scholarships each of the next four years.
The NCAA’s actions may have been satisfying to those seeking retribution against Penn State for allegedly allowing Sandusky to continue to prey on boys. But was justice served?
Answering that question with an all-out attack on the NCAA’s hypocrisy is too easy. If I cited all the examples of problems with the NCAA’s crime-and-punishment system, the list might be longer than Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”
The NCAA is like a giant piñata. Regardless of which direction you swing the bat, you have a good chance of hitting the target.
Instead of attacking the NCAA’s record, I’ll focus primarily on the NCAA’s actions regarding Penn State. I won’t dispute, as some have done, the NCAA’s right to sanction Penn State. But I will question the motives behind its actions.
The NCAA wanted to send a message. The message is that athletic programs have grown too big. In many cases, the football and basketball programs overshadow the universities. Many coaches seemingly have more power than university presidents.
That’s a worthy message. But Penn State was the wrong school to use as an example.
There is no doubt that football plays an enormous role at Penn State. There is also no doubt that former coach Joe Paterno held tremendous power, as was evident in 2004 when he basically told Penn State president Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley to get off his property when they came to his home to suggest he resign.
The disconnect I heard between the NCAA’s message and Penn State’s situation, however, is when NCAA president Mark Emmert repeatedly referred to the athletic culture overwhelming the academic culture. Emmert referred to Penn State’s athletic culture going “horribly awry” and said athletics are not just about fair play on the playing fields, but about reflecting higher academic values.
It’s difficult to do, but put the Sandusky case aside for a moment. The Sandusky situation is not indicative of the true nature of Penn State’s athletic program. The truth is that Penn State is a shining example of how an athletic department and football program can reflect, and even enhance, a school’s values.
The New America Foundation (NAF) compiles its own Bowl Championship Series rankings every year. Using data related to graduation rates, including comparing the team’s graduation rate to the school’s overall graduation rate, the NAF ranked the top 25 teams in the BCS standings. Guess which football team ranked highest in the NAF’s Academic Bowl Championship Series? Yes, it was Penn State.
Eighty percent of Penn State football players graduated within six years. When players who transferred to other schools or left early to play in the NFL are excluded from the “dropout” rate, the Nittany Lions’ graduation percentage rises to an outstanding 87 percent.
Furthermore, there is no gap between the graduation rates of white and African-American football players at Penn State. According to the NAF, this is very rare for a Division I football team.
In his statement affirming he will remain at Penn State, senior quarterback Matt McGloin refers to current players being punished for “going to class, graduating, being involved in the community and playing football.” Those are the “core values” McGloin says he has learned in the Penn State football program.
The core values expressed by McGloin would seem to be the values Emmert and the NCAA want to exist in intercollegiate athletic programs. So, with all the renegade, outlaw programs where athletes receive improper benefits and aren’t required to regularly attend classes, why single out Penn State as the example of what’s wrong with college athletics?
The simple answer is that Penn State, like the NCAA itself, is an easy target. Who wants to speak out on behalf of a university that, at best, allowed a suspected sexual predator to continue to enjoy privileges on its campus? Given the horrific nature of Sandusky’s crimes, who could express outrage at NCAA sanctions against Penn State (even the vindictive move to vacate all of Penn State’s wins since 1998, thereby saving the NCAA the embarrassment of Paterno ever having been the all-time victory leader among coaches at BCS schools)?
So, after failing to control schools that make a mockery of the term “student-athlete,” the NCAA uses the Sandusky situation to flex its muscles and try to show athletic programs that the NCAA is in charge. But the NCAA’s efforts may be in vain.
The NCAA isn’t the top power in college athletics. The most powerful force is money. As long as money pours into the coffers of NCAA schools because of their athletic programs, big-time football and basketball teams will remain extremely powerful. For example, the additional money that’s going to arrive with the new playoff system for Division I football will provide football programs with more revenue-generating power, not less.
The opportunity to make more money is why schools are switching leagues more frequently than people switch lanes on the turnpike. The system is out of control and the NCAA finds itself powerless to do anything about it.
But the NCAA could punish Penn State. Without even conducting its own investigation. And few outside of the Penn State faithful would complain.
The NCAA based its sanctions largely on the Freeh Report. As Emmert mentioned during his news conference, Penn State has accepted the findings of the Freeh Report.
Of course it did. Penn State wants to put the Sandusky affair behind it as quickly as possible. That’s why the Freeh Report was accepted. That’s why the university consented to the NCAA sanctions.
For Penn State, this is all about damage control. The goal is to get anything related to Sandusky over as quickly as possible so the university can move forward.
But the Freeh Report isn’t gospel. In a previous column, I cautioned against leaping to conclusions based on the Freeh Report. It is a comprehensive report that contains a lot of evidence; however, for legitimate reasons, it does not contain testimony from Curley, vice president of business and finance Gary Schultz and Paterno. Spanier also disputes the conclusions reached in the Freeh Report. We have not yet heard from the defense, so to speak.
What if Curley and Schultz are found not guilty in their criminal trials? What if Spanier presents evidence to the Board of Trustees that, contrary to the conclusions of the Freeh Report, he wasn’t aware in 2001 that Sandusky was being accused of sexual abuse?
There’s a reason the wheels of justice sometimes turn slowly: to make sure we get it right. It our legal system, that’s called due process.
But the NCAA doesn’t care about due process. It cares about sending a message. It cares about public relations. The NCAA felt the need to do something and saw an opportunity to send a message – regardless of whether or not justice was served.
Ron Opher Says:
Eric,
The way I came to understand the NCAA sanctions are that they were by consent decree – meaning that they were negotiated with Penn State administrators.
Obviously, the NCAA had far more leverage in this situation, so it wasn’t exactly an arms-length transaction. There may have even been a fair amount of begging for mercy involved, as reports are leaking that the NCAA was leaning toward a 4-year “death penalty” but that they also did not want to risk a legal challenge to their authority to act under these circumstances.
As you pointed out, a consent decree also lets Penn State “move forward” instead of doing legal battle with the NCAA and dragging this out further, which in a perverse way, would have tied their fortunes to how Curley and Schultz (and perhaps Spanier too) will fare in court.
That would have been untenable.
Whether those so-called leaders are found guilty of a crime or not, it is abundantly clear that they did an incredibly poor job and deserved to be dismissed from their positions.
This is not just about “public relations” or “wheels of justice.” This is about disagreeing with how things used to be done and choosing new sides with new priorities and new loyalties.
I presume you are aware that there is a large contingent on the academic side of the coin at Penn State that has been (mostly silently) at odds with the athletic department. They did not have the gravitas to have a significant voice on the Board of Trustees or in the university president’s office.
What we are now witnessing, in my view, is a dramatic power shift where the academicians can say “I told you so” and are relieved if not downright ecstatic (even as they must wrestle with their consciences about what it took to put them in this position) that they have wrested control of the decision-making at Penn State away from those who were far more sympathetic to making decisions through the prism of what’s best for the football program.
Now, with the combination of new voices in leadership and the weakened influence of the football program, I would expect a different set of priorities with different outcomes.
This actually can put Penn State at the forefront of changing how academics and athletics interact at the administrative level – where Penn State failed – while continuing to be leaders in how academics and athletics interact in the classroom in terms of graduation rates.
I’ll finally point out that I should hope that athletes’ academic standards leading to those stellar graduation rates were not also the product of undue influence by the football program and its supporters. But if they were, I would assume that’s about to be a thing of the past given the power shift I described.
Posted on July 26th, 2012 at 10:30 pm
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Posted on July 27th, 2012 at 9:35 am
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Posted on July 27th, 2012 at 9:42 am
Eric Fisher Says:
I think you missed my point. The NCAA’s goal of restoring balance between athletics and academics is a worthy one. But why try to make that point at Penn State, one of the universities where football players go to class and graduate?
The reason they chose Penn State is because they could flex their muscles and not receive much backlash. As I wrote, the goal of Penn State and its Board of Trustees, many of whom should resign, is to move forward. They want all of this behind them as quickly as possible. They were going to accept the Freeh Report, regardless of what it said. Other than trying to avoid the death penalty, they were going to accept whatever punishment the NCAA handed down.
They even accepted having their wins vacated from 1998-2011, which I’ve heard described as vindictive even by critics of Penn State football. Granted, that sanction has no real effect on the school. The purpose purely was to punish Paterno by making sure he never officially held the wins record. But the university doesn’t care about that. It cares about “moving forward,” and will agree to anything that accomplishes that.
As for changing the atmosphere, it’s not going to happen across college athletics. There will be no sweeping move that will get high-profile football and basketball programs under control as long as the money — enormous amounts of money — is there. Why do you think all those schools switched conferences last year? To have a better chance of making more money through television revenue and the postseason bowl/playoff system. The NCAA can’t reverse that trend.
Football will also always be big at Penn State. The university and surrounding community grew, in large part, because of football. On game days, twice as many people are in Beaver Stadium as live in State College. Whether it’s healthy or not, the identity of the community is intertwined with the football program. It will always be that way.
As for the professors upset with the football program, I remember one of their colleagues saying last year that if it weren’t for the football program, they might not have jobs at Penn State, and certainly wouldn’t be making the salaries they receive. They should remember that while being thankful they’re not at a university where players don’t go to class regularly and academics are not a priority, resulting in constant battles over eligibility (which the academics generally lose).
The NCAA is a semi-toothless tiger that saw an easy and willing prey that wouldn’t fight back. The NCAA based its sanctions largely on the Freeh Report instead of conducting its own investigation. I’ve already detailed the problems with the Freeh Report, which mixes evidence with conclusions and, for legitimate reasons, doesn’t have “the other side” of the story.
As for the insinuation in your final paragraph that the graduation rates might be due to the influence of the football program, you’re simply dead wrong. The players graduated because Paterno made them go to class. Unlike what happens at many major football programs, Paterno benched players who were academically eligible but whose classroom performance didn’t meet the standards he set for the football program, which are actually higher than the university as a whole.
Posted on July 27th, 2012 at 10:19 am
Ron Opher Says:
Eric,
I’m not sure I get your point even now. I’m not trying to defend the NCAA as being all that’s right about college athletics or trying to say they do a good job.
In fact, they are nearly always political, most often sanctimonious and too often hypocritical.
Nevertheless, I’m not sure what you wanted them to do with Penn State staring them right in the eyes.
If you wanted them to wait on sanctioning Penn State, I can’t agree with you on that one. Whatever Curley, Schultz and Spanier have to say, it’s not going to change the fact that their actions/inactions resulted in a very lengthy period of time where Jerry Sandusky was allowed to use PSU facilities to continue to abuse children. If there’s any doubt about that one, they’d still be on the job at PSU. Just because the criminal proceedings and civil suits haven’t resolved doesn’t mean that there’s not enough credible information to now sanction the school as an extension of how those 3, plus Joe Paterno, were dealt with by their employer.
If you want them to look into what goes on at other schools that you suspect of being non-compliant, they supposedly do that all the time in the regular course of their work.
We also don’t know that the NCAA might not take a different stance as time goes on in terms of de-emphasizing the “gotcha games” it has played in the past with small-potatoes things like prepaid phone cards and athletic wear and tattoos and moving into taking a long, hard look at the bigger picture and what’s going on a few flights up from the playing field.
I will agree with you that money has a lot to do with the decision-making everywhere. But I can’t give Penn State a pass or even a delay just because the whole system functions less than ideally.
I like your idea about sanctioning coaches – if the athletes get punished for the “sins of their older brothers,” I think punishment should travel with coaches, too. But I don’t know if that would violate employment law – which is a state-by-state issue…probably too thorny an area for the NCAA to wade into, unless every coach were under contract with the NCAA while paid for by each school (how’s that for a groundbreaking concept?). There’s also the issue that sometimes the coach is not the root of the problem – or at least not acting alone.
I want to also go on record saying that I don’t agree with vacating Paterno’s wins. I can see the logic that if PSU officials acted the same way but somehow Centre County, State DPW or the Attorney General blew the lid off this sooner, that Paterno may have been dismissed years earlier or that the football program would have been sanctioned or at least tarnished to a point where arguably the players they would have recruited or the staff they would have had might have been different and not as good at winning games.
While I can see the logic, I think it’s too far of a leap to change the records of the games retroactively (though I know the NCAA, IOC and other sports governing bodies do that relatively frequently, especially in amateur sports). I’m more thinking that the records should stand and people can smirk about them or be proud of them as the case may be, just like they can formulate their own opinions on Barry Bonds without MLB telling fans how they should view Bonds’ statistics.
I also think it premature of you to call me “dead wrong” in suggesting there’s a possibility (not a likelihood, mind you) that the academic success of Penn State football players might be overstated. When an administration acts as it did to suppress information about a pedophile on the loose for 10+ years (even if you assume that they did the right thing in 1998, which is debatable) with the result that they protected their jobs – along with the image of the football program and the university for that length of time, forgive me if I might wonder whether professors might have been pressured to give passing grades, re-tests or whatever it took to get some players who might have been on the margins to be able to graduate (or meet the GPA standards of getting onto the field). Going to class is a start, and a commendable one at that, but we all know that alone can’t – or shouldn’t – assure you a passing grade.
If I’m the only one who wonders these things, so be it. The way I look at it, Penn State brought this scrutiny upon its own glass house. Now’s not the time to start throwing rocks on Penn State’s behalf at the NCAA or at other colleges and universities.
Posted on July 27th, 2012 at 4:58 pm
Eric Fisher Says:
My point is not that the NCAA doesn’t have the right to sanction Penn State, as some have asserted elsewhere. My point is that if the NCAA was trying to issue a warning to schools where the athletics program overshadows and overwhelms the academic program, they picked the wrong program to use as an example. Many former and current Penn State players took umbrage, and rightfully so, at NCAA president Mark Emmert’s repeated references to academics and academic core values.
Furthermore, the sanctions won’t be effective in attempting to get big-time football and basketball programs under control. The system is out of control, and the amount of money involved virtually assures it will remain out of control. How many of those fabulous freshmen basketball players at Kentucky do you think went to class or did their work after the first semester was over? Punishing Penn State was easy because the university wouldn’t fight back. It was an attempt by the NCAA to look like was doing something — anything — to gain control over college athletics. That’s a public relations maneuver; not a real attempt to gain control of college athletics.
Finally, I continue to argue that the Freeh Report is not gospel. It draws assumptions and conclusions using inferences and speculation, not just the evidence. The NCAA could have used the evidence form the Freeh Report, but it should have also conducted its own investigation, as it does in every other instance before issuing sanctions. In a report by the “Chronicle of Higher Education,” a member of the Freeh Group agrees with me, saying the document was not “meant to be used as the sole piece, or the large piece, of the NCAA’s decision-making.”
Posted on July 27th, 2012 at 8:00 pm
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[...] Paterno family intends to appeal the NCAA sanctions against Penn State. On the one hand, as I’ve written previously, the Penn State administration and Board of Trustees seems to want to put the Jerry Sandusky [...]
Posted on August 6th, 2012 at 11:45 am
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Posted on September 1st, 2012 at 11:03 am
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Posted on September 9th, 2012 at 12:35 pm