Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

Some of my friends own sports teams.

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

when's the next fantasy draft?

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

When you limit an institution's responses to a crisis to only those that are fair to all individuals, you are almost certainly not really solving the problem. They have to make the punishment for the coverup MUCH more painful than the punishment would have been for the crime alone, or every AD in the world will have to agonize over whether to make the phone call. Make the fucking phone call or you lose your program, everybody is properly motivated. Make the fucking phone call or you lose your job, you get the kind of McQueary buck-passing that caused this mess. If you haven't caused McQueary to lean over Paterno's desk and say "Fuck you, I'M making the phone call" you'll never stop child rape.

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

I think it was Patton Oswalt who suggested a more fitting solution would be to turn the statue to face the other way.

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

Howard Stern says "paint it yellow."

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

You don't need a draft for that. You just need to extend eligibility.

But doing that is now going beyond PSU and punishing the entire Big Ten. OSU is already bowl ineligible. Michigan still sucks. The Conference will blow. (And it's already got a bleak enough future, as Urban Meyer is going to trounce every other team in it for the next decade due to his far superior recruiting.) Like it or not, the fairest penalty for PSU, balancing the interests of all the innocents in its program and conference, is simply rebooting PSU's entire football program. (Create a positive from a disturbing negative. [Frankly, getting rid of Joe for any reason was a step in the right direction already. Even if this scandal hadn't existed, he was ruining the program by hanging on as long as he had.])

An organization is only the people in it. Paterno's gone, his legacy destroyed. McQueary will never work again, Curley and Spanier face likely felony convictions, and all staff who enabled them have been or are being fired. We don't need a grand symbolic zero tolerance statement that would have no detrimental effect. All we need is a complete top to bottom termination of all coaching and athletic dept staff.

The school should also gracefully agree not to go to a bowl this year.

(And Carnegie Mellon? WTF planet did you float in from? Temple, perhaps. Maybe Pitt. Hell, give the team to Northwestern... apropos given it's a Big Ten school. But CMU?)

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

the guy who has completed his junior year and may be close to graduating by the end of his senior year is impacted as to his education by the "opportunity" to switch schools. there is no harm-neutral way to do it.

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

No, I wanted to give it to the nearest nerds. They'd improve the music played by the marching band.

Hank's half right. There are certain sports I probably shouldn't comment on, and college football is one of them. I think of Paterno as a sympton of the whole thing - this is not a sport we should be proud of.

I have a next door neighbor who was a big deal in college football and failed to make it in the pros. He has two sons he drives endlessly to play football, one an anemic little guy totally out of his element - his Dad will have to give up on him when he gets to high school, because he ain't making JV - and the other one a pretty good player who is already a big deal in High School and who may well be capable of failing in the pros like his dad, except that he's developed some arrythmia that makes it dangerous to play (which isn't stopping his dad from pushing or the school from playing him).

The rot begins there, Paterno and the pederast are just one ugly little boil on a body riddled with leprosy.

Yeah, I shouldn't comment on college football. Except that I am stuck watching that asshole next door abuse his kids for the sake of it, and so, over the last ten years, have gone from finding it an occassionally enjoyable thing even if I'm not into it to finding it pretty repulsive. Cancel all the programs and put the resources into hockey and baseball.

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

Seems like the NCAA has made a reasonable start.

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

Overkill. Worse than the death penalty.

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

which part? The money is nothing. The bowl ban isn't that extreme. The vacation only takes away a dead guy's legacy- it's harsh, but doesn't impact the school's future.

There were some pre-announcement opinion pieces that argued the NCAA is intended to keep a level playing field for how programs recruit, and that it has no business touching this issue. I have no idea if that is baked into the mandate or powers of the NCAA, but acting here is directed at how a program is ran- they covered up horrible things to keep the program strong, and thus kept recruiting strong.

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

I agree with most of that, except that McQueary is the wrong person in this hypo. He was a low-level grad school, assistant coach. That guy, at any big time program, *never* makes the phone call. The AD needs to do it. And you're right, he needs to have absolutely no choice.

I'm happy with the punishment. I think whenever there is a big time punishment they should let the kids transfer if it was all coaches, staff, or administrators who were at fault.

TM

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

Vacating wins makes no sense to me. They should reserve that for games played with ineligible players.

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

Why? If it came out earlier, Paterno can't recruit like he did and wouldn't have won anywhere near the games that he won (if he even survived the fallout from his buddy being exposed, fired, and arrested as a pedophile). How do you count how many games he would have lost? And it's really only his legacy that is being punished. Who gives a shit how many total wins a school has besides only the most rabid fans?

TM

Re: Paterno and Penn State
 

I dunno. It seems to me like vacating wins isn't a way of saying "You would have lost" -- even with ineligible players, who's to say that? -- but rather that the game was flawed from a fairness perspective. Saying Paterno's recruiting would have suffered is a bit too attenuated for me. Every NCAA violation has a potential recruiting effect. Is vacating wins a first-line punishment as a general matter?

It's not that it seems excessive. I was okay with the death penalty. It's that this particular punishment has little logical relationship to the crime.