This may be the only thing I write on the Penn State/Jerry Sandusky business, so pay attention and don’t skip bits.
The thing about Joe Paterno is that he was the symbol everyone pointed to for college football done right. Longevity at one school, giving back to the school, graduating his players, never a whiff of NCAA trouble, and winning games (two national titles in the 80s and then a Rose Bowl berth in their first season in the Big Ten, the dawn of the modern age of expansion). Penn State in the Paterno era was supposed to be proof that big time football and academic quality (Penn State’s an AAU member) were compatible and complimentary.
Except the lesson of the Sandusky affair is that Joe Paterno was bigger than Penn State University, and they suffered by it. Most people in the football world thought Joe could have gone ten years ago, and probably should have – that the game had passed him by, that it wasn’t working anymore, that he was just too old to be effective as a head coach. But when the legend becomes bigger than the team, you get what we had at Florida State as well – Bobby Bowden hanging on too long in pursuit of Bear Bryant, of Eddie Robinson, of Joe Paterno.
They said it about Bear Bryant in the late 60s, after a couple of 6-5 seasons, and he came back to win three more titles (and arguably should have been four), but he did retire after two or three down years, when he famously wished out loud on television that he could get through to Linnie Patrick, when he lost to Tennessee in 1982 and told a drinking buddy in the hotel room after “I can’t coach ’em anymore.” He put it just that bluntly at the presser: “There comes a time in life when you have to hang it up, and that time has come for me as football coach at the University of Alabama.”
Five weeks later he was dead.
He was friends with Paterno, was the Bear – they played one of the greatest bowl games ever on New Year’s Day 1979 and Alabama staged the goal-line stand that is perhaps the most iconic of all Alabama plays, and they made a deal for a ten-year home-and-home series that produced some epic matches. And I think Paterno knew deep down that if he ever gave up the game, he wouldn’t be alive to see his successor’s first game. That’s why he stuck around too long. He wouldn’t go, and nobody would make him go, and…
The word “cult” gets thrown around too casually in this sort of thing. Every fan base has its fanatics – hell, if they caught James Franklin with a dead girl and a live boy I’d probably need the coroner’s report and the DNA evidence – and it’s not like Ol’ Joe was leading his followers to the big vat of Flavor-Aid. The administration of Penn State chose to protect Paterno, and what he might have known, and what he might have done, because they willingly decided he was bigger than the school. Maybe they looked down South and saw some of the nonsense at Auburn and Alabama and decided that University president vs football coach was a losing bet, I don’t know. But irrespective of their reasons, they chose Paterno over Penn State.
Now they’ll pay. They’ll have to. Joe’s dead, Sandusky’s going to die quickly in prison – they are the only ones left with direct culpability to pay the price, to shed blood for the mobs, to be on the wrong side of what Spencer Hall deftly nails as “the Nancy Grace point.” Their careers are done. They will face civil and probably criminal liability. The ones who looked the other way are going to get the wrath of the American gods – media, lawsuits and moral outrage.
So what happens to Penn State?
In a way it’s already happened. Paterno’s dead and disgraced, the administration is done for, the very phrase “Penn State” now evokes something completely other than peach ice cream at the dairy and Linebacker U. Now people are saying “the NCAA should do something!” Other people are saying “you can’t punish the players for something the coaches did, especially when the coaching staff’s been replaced and the new guy took an absolutely thankless spot.” And still other people are saying “if SMU can get the death penalty for paying players they should shut down Penn State!”
First things first: SMU was a special case, the lowest of the low in a conference rife with corruption, and the application of the death penalty not only permanently crippled Mustang football, it effectively led to the destruction of the Southwest Conference (another step toward the modern era of expansion). The NCAA Committee on Infractions has passed up the opportunity to apply it to USC, to Miami, they threatened Alabama with it for far less but didn’t pull the trigger – there is a growing sense that they’ll never do it again.
More to the point, most NCAA penalties revolve around paying players, recruiting infractions, cheating on the field – things that affect the integrity of the contest. Which is more or less the role of a sanctioning body. Major League Baseball couldn’t have banned Pete Rose for, say, cheating on his wife – it’s completely orthogonal to the game on the field. But if he’s gambling on baseball – which has the potential to impact the integrity of the game on the field – the hammer can be brought down, and twenty-plus years on Pete Rose is still banned from organized baseball.
The horrors visited by Jerry Sandusky on his victims, however outrageous, were orthogonal to the game on the field. While this is a scandal made possible by football – thanks to the outsized presence of a legendary coach – it’s not, strictly speaking, a football scandal. Now, if the NCAA wants to make a prima facie case for lack of institutional control, well, the infamous “LoIC” is a fact and it is indisputable. But it’s not a lack of institutional control that affected what happened between the white lines, which means the NCAA is probably on thin ice to get involved here.
And it shouldn’t. The NCAA is busybody enough without extending its reach to something like this. If it does, it’s only because they too have slipped beyond the Nancy Grace point and are joining the baying pack of hounds. Realistically, Penn State is going to be a radioactive for football purposes for quite a while – they’re going to have trouble recruiting anyone who isn’t a livelong fan, they’re not going to be attractive as a TV opponent, the Big Ten is not going to want them as the face of the conference. And I think ultimately that means the Big Ten will be the one doing the sanctioning, as it’s always arrogated to itself authority over non-sports matters. The Big Ten requires its members to all belong to the AAU. They have academic and library consortia. They view themselves, quite frankly, as a sort of Midwestern Ivy League – and as such, they probably have much firmer ground and precedent on which to lower the boom.
I suspect that you’ll see conference probation for a while, of some sort. Penn State won’t be going to any Big Ten-affiliated bowls for a while, won’t be eligible for championships in football, will have some symbolic “probation” slapped on there, and will almost certainly turn over every single individual above “head football coach” in the line of command all the way up to the Board of Trustees. And then, we wait. Time has a way of inflicting its own punishment, and the Nittany Lion football program will be admitted into civilized company again when the public is good and ready to accept it. Self-cleaning.
Oddly enough, the people I feel most bad for are those hardcore fans, the ones who put their trust and belief into a program and a legend for years and years. I know how this works. I’m from Alabama. But as a wise man one said, “put not your faith in kings and princes, for three of a kind will beat both.” When the legend is bigger than the program, both are doomed.