Spencer Hall, the greatest living sportswriter and the author of the single best piece ever written about college football, has reacted to the NCAA’s neutron-bombing of Penn State precisely as I myself would have.
Read this, and know that I concur in every particular. There is something to be done here, but the NCAA is basically jumping on the pile and indulging the mob – and doing something I thought would be impossible; they’re actually making me feel pity for the football organization at Penn State.
This isn’t about punishing Penn State. Penn State football was permanently damaged already. This is the NCAA taking a shit on the corpse and seeking applause and approbation for doing so – and, much like the NFL, asserting that it is the great and powerful Oz and in no way whatsoever throwing stones from a glass house.
ETA: I don’t know what they’re doing down there at Florida that makes sportswriters, but this post at Alligator Alley also nails my thinking with accuracy and precision: the NCAA is trying to make this go away for themselves as quickly and loudly as possible, and in doing so is simultaneously shining their own ass, protecting themselves from any tangential connections, and setting a disturbing precedent for massive intervention with minimal process.
EATA: Jon F. Morse, stalwart Kansas State partisan and outstanding chronicler of college football at the less hype-ridden levels of the game, has the definitive breakdown.