A Gut Check for the NCAA

Ohio State received severe sanctions from the NCAA because several of its football players received free tattoos. In light of that, what is the appropriate sanction for Penn State, which looked the other way for 14 years while young boys were being raped. More and more commentators are coming to the conclusion that the daeth penalty is the only reasonable sanction for Penn State's football program.

Joe Paterno tells us from the grave that this is not a football scandal. But the Freeh Report shows otherwise. The Report documents how the Penn State higher-ups wanted to report the allegations of sexual child abuse to the authorities, but Paterno talked them out of it. This demonstrates the unreasonable power of the football program, which reportedly brings in $50 million a year to the Penn State coffers. Similar allegations coming from any other university department would have been dealt with by reporting to authorities, but the football program could not afford a black mark.

An NCAA official was quoted in today's paper as saying there is no specific NCAA rule governing what happened. We will see if the NCAA has any guts at all.