If the ‘credible sources’ are correct the NCAA will be announcing ‘severe and unprecedented’ penalties to Penn State athletics tomorrow.   While I have long thought the football culture around here needed to change and think that the past leadership should be criminally charged, when I hear about the NCAA wanting to impose sanctions to punish the university it always seems wrong.  I have thought a lot about why it ‘feels’ wrong and have gone back and forth between thinking my gut feeling was correct.  I like to trust my instincts but I had a hard time developing a rational argument for why I feel this way.

At first I was thinking the NCAA was overstepping its bounds because this is more of a failure of leadership than a failure to abide by NCAA policy.  I will be very interested in what infractions are cited in support of the penalties and if Penn State has the guts to appeal.  The problem to me is that I don’t really like this argument.  While the problem was indeed more a problem of leadership it was enabled by the athletic department and a lack of control from our leadership.  Thus, in that regard I feel the NCAA should be involved.

However, even after dismissing this argument, I still just felt like the NCAA should butt out of this.  Today I think I finally figured out why I feel this way.  Hopefully I can articulate my feelings in this post.

First, I have never been a fan of the NCAA or how college athletics seems to overshadow academics at some of the nation’s best universities.  The entire system needs to be blown up.  And in some regards I feel shutting down PSU football for a year might actually be a good thing in the long term.   However, the real problem I have with the NCAA getting involved is the stated mission of the NCAA.  According to their web site:

Founded more than one hundred years ago as a way to protect student-athletes, the NCAA continues to implement that principle with increased emphasis on both athletics and academic excellence.

Besides wondering if the NCAA really has the interest of student-athletes in mind, they are supposed to be protecting them from abuse by universities.  Again, while they seem to be more about enabling universities to abuse student-athletes than anything else, there were no abuses of NCAA athletes in this situation.  The NCAA is not here to protect coaches or children, or to punish coaches or universities that do not protect children.  The judicial system does that.  Hopefully, the judicial system will continue to punish the people that committed these crimes.

In my mind, the real problem with the NCAA getting involved is that in many ways they are acting like the PSU leadership, overstepping their bounds to preserve public perception.  They seem to be all too willing to continue to enhance the public perception that they are an organization that oversees entire universities not just the athletic programs at universities.