If you read any of my previous posts, you might guess that I’m not a huge fan of the NCAA penalties placed on Penn State. As someone that teaches vibrations regularly it’s interesting to watch the pendulum swing back and forth, never seeming to reach an equilibrium. In this case, the NCAA wanted to flex its muscle to show the world that it has more power than it actually does. People (not me) had been saying that penalties it has handed out in the past are too weak, so it needed to stand up and grab some headlines by overreaching its bounds. What happened at Penn State had nothing to do with exploiting the student-athletes the NCAA is there to protect. It has now deemed itself a watchdog for anything remotely related to collegiate athletics.
Regarding the specific penalties, the only one I have a real problem with is the fine. Sixty million dollars is a lot of money. While I’m glad it will be put to good use, I wonder if it will come only from the athletic department. I sure hope so because it’s now going to be even harder to argue against state budget cuts that are always proposed. Tuition was already going to increase because of this indirect loss of state funds.
Another thing I keep reading about is the need to change the culture and the organizational structure that led to this situation. The thing is the organizational structure is not what caused the problem. PSU has much the same organization structure as any other university. It’s not like back in the day at Auburn where the football coach (Dye) was also the athletic director. It’s also not like a former coach or player (here here NU, UM, et al.) is the athletic director. People seem to have the impression that PSU’s organizational structure somehow gave Paterno, et al. too much power. While I agree entirely Paterno had too much power, it was not the organizational structure that gave it to him.
That brings me to the culture. The football culture here is as distorted and twists as it is at most major universities. It does not seem any worse than it was a UM; although it is certainly worse than it was at Cal (Berkeley). I would think it’s actually not as bad as many other schools (Texas, TAMU, UF, FSU, Auburn, Alabama, LSU, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Oklahoma, USC, Miami, et al.). These schools seem to have cultural issues at least as serious as PSU. Ultimately, it seems to me to be more a cultural issue of our society.
So why did this tragedy happen at PSU and not someplace else? Mostly it was just bad luck and could have happened at any number of schools. We brought someone (Sandusky) on campus (as a student-athlete) that happened to be a very clever sociopath. Unfortunately he was also a good player and coach, and smart enough to not get caught during his early years. (Note, I’m assuming he did not become a pedophile in his later years and had been abusing children for much longer than we know.) The other piece in the puzzle was that we hired a coach that would turn into an arrogant old man that had nothing else to do besides coach football and, thus, wouldn’t retire. I also believe Paterno truly felt that he was the only person good enough to coach the PSU football team.
The problem was he was just hear for so long (current students may have grown up with their parents and grandparents idolizing him) that he slowly turned into a dictator. Unfortunately there was never really any good reason to get rid of him (until the end). Sure he had some losing seasons but then you’re basically firing someone for not winning games. PSU alumni and administrators thought he had sacrificed too much for the university to fire him for not winning. It’s really hard to fire a legend unless they do something bad. Unfortunately, very few people knew about the bad things he did until the end. He did do a lot for the university by living a very modest life, earning a modest (relative to other coaches) salary, and donating much of his endorsement income back to the university. However, I will stick by my early Facebook comments that in the end he will have cost the university more than he gave it. His “I’m a simple man trying to teach young athletes to be good people.” was probably true to start. However, as the years wore on, I think that was more of a front to continue to garner alumni support. I read someone suggesting we have term limits on football coaches. That’ll never happen but you have to be mindful that at some (tipping) point a coach has too much power.
The thing that people outside PSU don’t seem to see is that the culture changed the minute Paterno was fired and this new culture was cemented when he died. The NCAA punishments are not going to change the culture. In fact, I worry that they’ll make it worse. There will be even more of an ‘us against them’ attitude that will insulate the university from the world. Maybe forcing the football team to be terrible will help change the culture of the blindly devoted PSU alumni that are the ones that really enabled this mess. Unfortunately, its hard to punish such a large group of people, most of whom had nothing explicitly to contribute to the situation. What I would like to see is the university try to pay this fine by using a true supply and demand system for ticket prices. The alumni are still likely going to fill the stadium–for most of them it’s a tradition that won’t end because the team stinks–so let the ticket prices climb until profit is maximized. Then the people that truly enabled this situation will be penalized.