With this past weekend’s leaked emails from former Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley, not only is it clear that the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal is far from going away, but it also solidifies that Joe Paterno’s legacy is not just forever tarnished–it is forever disgraced.
Not only does the Penn State PR nightmare continue for the university and the entire athletic department, but now it could be facing possible NCAA sanctions for a complete and utter lack of institutional control.
Whether or not the NCAA will go after Penn State is yet to be determined, but as ESPN’s Colin Cowherd pointed out on his Monday radio show, the NCAA would seem awfully hypocritical if they don’t. It was the NCAA, after all, that hammered USC a couple of years ago because former running back and Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush’s parents took money and gifts from the program.
The NCAA made an example of USC because of their lack of control, stripping them of multiple scholarships and they deemed them ineligible to compete in bowl games the last two seasons.
So, if putting up parents of a player in a home closer to campus, so they can be closer to their son is lack of control, all eyes will be on the NCAA in the coming weeks to see their take on top administrators, including the former president, AD and Paterno for allowing a sexual predator to stay on the streets and have access to Penn State facilities (which is where a number of the Sandusky’s victims were assaulted).
The recent emails released to the public show that not only was Paterno and other top school officials aware of Sandusky’s bizarre behavior, but they also were going to turn Sandusky over to Child Welfare Services, based on former grad assistant Mike McQueary’s account of Sandusky molesting a young boy in the Penn State shower room in 2001.
Instead of getting Sandusky off the street and preventing him from hurting more children, the decision was ultimately made by the Penn State brass to brush the incident under the rug to preserve the Joe Paterno…I mean, Penn State brand.
USC never knowingly allowed a sexual predator to roam free among society, and they certainly didn’t give him the keys to their facilities to lure young boys, but that didn’t prevent the NCAA from arrogantly flexing their muscles to show the world what happens when your program doesn’t police itself to their satisfaction.
The NCAA backed themselves into quite a corner, and as more and more information from the Penn State scandal continues to leak, and former officials, including Curley and former president Graham Spanier face possible jail time, the sports world will be watching and waiting to see how the powers that be in the NCAA will react to an actual lack of institutional control.
photo courtesy of abcnews.com
