Mark Emmert has a problem. Actually that’s putting it mildly. A problem is what is the answer to 2+2 or
which tie do I wear to a press conference?
Emmert is faced with a disaster of
epic proportions as well as a PR nightmare regardless of what he chooses
because the biggest scandal in college football history has just landed on his
desk. Actually it had been on his desk
he had been busy trying as hard as he could to let another entity (local law
enforcement) deal with it. Regardless, try
as he might to avoid it for this long but everyone knew eventually he was going
to have to weigh in on the Penn State catastrophe orchestrated by sexual
deviant Jerry Sandusky and cohorts at the university.
See for those of you who don’t know, Mark
Emmert is the president of the NCAA, one of the weakest, most dysfunctional, bi-polar
outfits in the country. He’s the leader
of a consortium that rarely sees eye to eye with the fans and puts dollars
first while claiming everything they do is for the good of the student
athlete—from standing firm against a real playoff, to denying athletes the
opportunity to increase their personal revenue by paying them higher stipends, to
not allowing them to transfer when their coaches violates their universities’
trust. So if we want to say the office
of the NCAA president is in it for the greater good, I’m truly sorry to tell
you this but that ship sailed long ago in the dead of night and only daydreamers and fools occupied the
decks as it headed for the iceberg.
But for all the failings the
president has had, and all of the decisions he and others that came before have
tried to avoid or showed absolute prejudice in favor of the “money-maker “
institutions, this whole fiasco with Penn State
can give him the opportunity to make people not look at the NCAA as the
joke it has become. But I have a feeling
Emmert won’t make the obvious choice and will attempt to pass the buck as he
has done in the past.
For nearly eight months former FBI
Director Louis Freeh and his team pored over countless documents, interviewed
hundreds of individuals and read numerous emails pertaining to the child
molestation charges. Freeh linked every
person who claimed to not have known anything, from Joe Paterno to University
President Graham Spanier and many individuals in between in some way to
covering up various aspects of the sordid Sandusky affair. Freeh’s report read like a graphic horror
novella and for many of us, it was more than we wanted to believe. Paterno, who once stated he could never
retire leaving football to the likes of Barry Switzer and Jackie Sherrill ended
up being worse than two of college football’s most notorious repeat offenders. Actually, worse is an understatement.
And as Freeh read the report, word
for word, line by line, the luster that once engulfed the legacy of Jo-Pa
slowly faded until it was nothing more than a fuzzy haze barely visible to even
the staunchest of defenders. He
explained how Paterno knew about the investigation into Sandusky’s disgusting
behavior as early as 1998-99 just before Sandusky was allowed to retire and
keep an office just feet away from Paterno.
We found out that Paterno had shared emails with higher ups regarding
Sandusky and how they all decided to make sure he was treated humanely despite
the fact the man was raping children
on the campus of the school. That
statement alone should have Emmert not wondering if he should employ the Death
Penalty, rather it should have him deciding how soon and how long it should be. Some have chimed in regarding what
punishments should be levied against the school, the most recent being Alabama’s
Nick Saban. Saban stated he thought that
if the school were to maintain a program this season, they should levy a tax on
top of the regular ticket price. That tax,
he suggested, would go to the victims to help them heal and help them
financially, but it seems more like it is penalizing the ticketholders while
the actual perpetrators are so far, getting off scot free.
If there was ever a reason to
completely destroy a school program this is it.
There are no mitigating circumstances that can be produced and there is
no reason to invoke the student athlete as an excuse to keep football alive
this year.
So here is my quick and unflinching
solution to the imbroglio:
We all know the students had nothing
to do with it but the people that were in charge did. The students are smart enough to understand
that they are not being punished and should be reassured of that by being
allowed to transfer immediately and be able to play this year.
Scholarships should go next—all of
them. They could be reinstated by 25
percent every year so that by 2016 they should be back at 100 percent. It may seem drastic but hell it’s nothing
compared to being penetrated in a shower by someone you trust and being
betrayed by people you would hope had your (the victim) best interest in
mind. They did not. All they apparently cared about was the money
coming into the program and the wins they would tally as the university looked
to make Paterno the winningest coach in FBS History.
I would love to say that I think the
school gets it by removing Paterno’s name off the child development center but
it wasn’t their decision. It was self
proclaimed idolizer and CEO of Nike Phil Knight who made the painful but correct
decision to change the name in order to begin the healing. It’s too bad the university cannot do the
same thing and remove the statue next to Beaver Stadium.
This would set a precedent like no
other in the history of the NCAA. I
doubt there will ever be anything like this happening again but what this does
is set a precedent for even the most mundane of cheaters. It puts real power back into the hands of the
president’s office and places real fear in the larger programs across the
country that have basically been acting with impunity since the destruction of
Southern Methodist University in the late ‘80s. Their infractions pale in comparison to the
scandal at Penn.
This is lack of intuitional control
at the highest level and to the very definition. There is no alternative other than to dissolve
the program immediately in order to start healing. The victims and their families deserve that
much.
I hope Emmert has the stones to do
what’s right, otherwise he’s putting these victims through the same hell all
over again.
