Sports above all else leads to huge Penn State penalties

By Christine Brennan, USA TODAY

Unprecedented atrocities demand unprecedented action, and that's exactly what the NCAA did Monday.

NCAA President Mark Emmert didn't give Penn State's football program the so-called death penalty, but he might as well have. Clearly wanting to make an example of Penn State in this run-amok era in big-time college sports, the NCAA essentially decimated the Nittany Lions' football program for the next decade in the wake of the reprehensible Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal.

Emmert's actions were stunning and appropriately devastating for Penn State football. And his words resonated far beyond the Happy Valley campus to a much broader audience. It was as if he were speaking to every university president, conference commissioner, bowl official, football coach, booster and football fan in America when, time and again, he spoke of the Penn State scandal as a "gut check," asking, "Do we have the right balance in our culture?"

We all know the answer for years has been a resounding no. But, perhaps, what Emmert's NCAA did Monday will begin to force everyone in college football to reassess just how out of control big-time football has become on the nation's campuses. It was just last year that Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee, when asked if he would fire coach Jim Tressel in the midst of a growing scandal involving his football players, uttered the immortal words: "I'm just hopeful the coach doesn't dismiss me."

Set against this backdrop, the magnitude and depth of the NCAA's action against Penn State must have turned the heads of even those in the most insulated and untouchable of college football programs.

That's clearly what Emmert was hoping. "Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people," he said Monday. "These events should serve as a call to every single school and athletics department to take an honest look at its campus environment and eradicate the 'sports are king' mindset that can so dramatically cloud the judgment of educators."

Now the NCAA is saying that if the school won't do that, it will - to which we all should say: It's about time.

"We cannot look to NCAA history to determine how to handle circumstances so disturbing, shocking and disappointing," Emmert said. "As the individuals charged with governing college sports, we have a responsibility to act."

Clearly, Penn State's anemic leaders could not be trusted to make any of the correct or tough decisions against their football program, so Emmert did it for them, basically ensuring that Penn State football will be a shell of its former self for the next 10 years.

He fined Penn State $60 million, which amounts to one year of gross revenue for the football team - all of it going to programs that will serve the victims of child sex abuse. He banned Penn State from bowl games for four years. He took away dozens of scholarships. He told any football player who wants to transfer that he can do so right now and immediately play wherever, which certainly will further gut the Nittany Lions roster. He is sending an academic-integrity monitor approved by the NCAA to watch everything Penn State does for the next five years.

And he vacated 112 wins from the football team from 1998-2011, in the process taking away Joe Paterno's title as the winningest coach in big-time football. For his major role in enabling the actions of a child rapist in Penn State's football facility for 13 years, Paterno deserved to have those victories stricken from the record.

Paterno lied, deceived and covered up Sandusky's awful behavior for so long simply because he was the venerable head coach at one of the most powerful football institutions in America. There are many others coaching major-college football today with the same kind of power. No one is saying they are wielding it in the devastating manner Paterno did, but we also don't know that they aren't.

If the NCAA is truly interested in finding out, the remarkable Penn State punishment won't be the end of the story. It will be only the beginning.