NCAA heavily penalizes Penn State in response to sex scandal

The NCAA dropped the hammer on Penn State on Monday, crippling the university’s football program for years to come by delivering sweeping penalties in response to a sexual abuse scandal involving former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

The university was fined $60 million and its football team was banned from postseason play for four years, over which time it will also forfeit 80 scholarships. Players will be allowed to transfer to any other school without having to sit out a year of eligibility, which could result in player defections that further damage the program.

Additionally, all Penn State sports face probation for five years, and the football team’s wins from 1998 through 2011 have been vacated.

Joe Paterno, who was the winningest coach in major college history, was the head coach for 111 of those 112 victories, meaning his victory total is reduced from 409 to 298, now 12th all time.

The penalties were among the harshest in NCAA history and were significantly more severe than the two-year bowl ban given to USC in 2010.

“No price the NCAA can levy will repair the grievous damage inflicted by Jerry Sandusky on his victims,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said during a news conference at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis. “However, we can make clear that the culture, actions and inactions that allowed them to be victimized will not be tolerated in collegiate athletics.”

The NCAA said the $60 million is equal to the average annual revenue of the football program and ordered the school to pay the funds into an endowment to prevent child sex abuse and assist victims.

In addition, the Big Ten Conference banned Penn State’s football team from the conference title game for four years and said the school would not receive any conference bowl revenue — totaling about $13 million — during that span. The conference said that money would be donated to a fund for the protection of children.

Acting with uncharacteristic swiftness, the NCAA issued the harsh penalties after Emmert was given special approval from the Division I board of directors and the NCAA executive committee.

Emmert and the NCAA bypassed the tedious and often years-long infractions process, forgoing a formal NCAA investigation of Penn State in favor of swift action.

“It was a unanimous act,” said Ed Ray, chairman of the NCAA’s executive committee and president of Oregon State University. “We needed to act.”

Instead of conducting a lengthy probe of its own, Emmert said, the NCAA used the Freeh Report, an investigation commissioned by Penn State and conducted by a group led by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, to help decide the penalty.

The Freeh Report concluded that former Penn State President Graham Spanier, Paterno, Athletic Director Tim Curley and Vice President Gary Schultz “failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade.” Sandusky was convicted in June of 45 counts relating to sexual abuse of 10 boys over a 15-year period.

When asked if this process opened a “Pandora’s Box” for how the NCAA polices programs in the future, Emmert repeatedly stated that the Penn State case stood alone because of what occurred.

“An argument can be made that the egregiousness and the behavior in this case is greater than any other seen in NCAA history,” Emmert said.

Penn State President Rodney Erickson signed a consent decree that agreed with the sanctions and forbids the school from appealing them. The university removed a statue of Paterno from outside the football stadium Sunday morning.

“I think legally, Penn State has given up on an opportunity to challenge the NCAA, an opportunity that could’ve been historic given how the NCAA acted and given that the NCAA bypassed its normal process in this instance,” said Michael McCann, director of the Sports Law Institute at Vermont Law School.

The Paterno family, in a statement that decried the NCAA’s ruling, also criticized Penn State’s leaders, including Erickson, for not seeking a full hearing before the NCAA’s infractions committee.

One member of the school’s Board of Trustees, former defensive back Adam Taliaferro, posted his objection on his Twitter account: “NCAA says games didn’t exist…I got the metal plate in my neck to prove it did…I almost died playing 4 PSU…punishment or healing?!?”

Steve Morgan, who supervised the NCAA’s enforcement staff that investigated Southern Methodist University in the mid-1980s, said he felt Penn State’s decision to accept the sanctions might represent a need for closure.

“You know now the monster you have to deal with — the one you had to deal with on campus and the one you now have to deal with from the NCAA because of that — and you can begin to move forward,” said Morgan, an attorney at Bond, Schoeneck & King, one of the firms that represent schools and athletes in NCAA cases.

In a statement, Paterno’s family said the NCAA’s decision defamed Paterno’s legacy and is a “panicked response” to the scandal that led to his firing, the overhaul of Penn State’s leadership — including its former president, Spanier — and the conviction of Sandusky.

The penalties fell short of suspending Penn State’s storied football team from competition — the “death penalty” the NCAA imposed on Southern Methodist in 1987. SMU was banned from playing football that season because of years of improper benefits players had received, and the school elected not to play the next season. The program didn’t recover for nearly two decades, finally reaching another bowl game in 2009.

In 2010, the NCAA handed USC’s football team a two-year postseason ban and the loss of 30 scholarships over three years.

The NCAA hit USC with those penalties in response to allegations that star tailback Reggie Bush and his family had received improper benefits from would-be marketing agents, including living rent-free in a house near San Diego.

The Trojans will emerge from that postseason ban this fall with a team expected to contend for a national title. It is difficult to predict what the long-term effect will be on Penn State’s program.

“The death penalty would’ve been worse, because the death penalty shuts a program down,” said Jo Potuto, a former chairwoman of the NCAA Division I committee on infractions who is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Nebraska.

Students at Penn State crammed into in the school’s student union to watch the sanctions announced. Some gasped, some cried, and many covered their faces in disbelief.

“I think the biggest thing is that it’s punishing the wrong people,” said Joe McIntyre, a 2012 journalism graduate. “Paterno is dead. Sandusky is in jail. And the administrators who were involved were fired or are on leave. The football players had nothing to do with this.”

NCAA investigations can take years to complete, and the resulting sanctions often punish teams and players not involved in the violations that led to the initial investigation. In USC’s case, Bush had gone on to the NFL after his 2005 season at USC; the NCAA penalties were announced in 2010.

Emmert said the victories being removed from Penn State’s record dated to 1998 because that was when the first reported incident of Sandusky’s abuse took place. “That was the point of time that the failures began inside the institution,” he said.

Potuto said the decision to remove victories from the school’s record was highly unusual because in the past the NCAA has generally done that only when ineligible players have been used.

Penn State will keep nearly all the victories it earned when Sandusky was an assistant; he was associated with the school for 309 wins, only 19 of which have been vacated by the NCAA.

Mike McQueary, a former Penn State player who testified in Sandusky’s trial after witnessing him sexually assault a boy in the showers of the football building, was an integral figure in uncovering the scandal.

Paterno’s last official victory at Penn State now dates to 1997. The quarterback for that team was McQueary.

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