The Penn State penalty

@John_Infante
To clear up scholarship penalties: Penn State can bring in 15 new scholarship recruits/year & have 65 total on scholarship for four years

80 total schollies lost over 4 years

 

I don't quite see where the scholarships are going to cripple the program.

As somebody said last night, 65 scholarships is still three full strings, offense and defense. This will affect fourth-string tight ends.

The bowl ban will hurt more, but it's not something that's going to knock the program back 20 years.

 

They can begin building their dynasty in Division II now if they'd like.

 

They can bring in 15 and will get down to 65 total, but if they are over (which they are now), they won't have to cut scholarships.

Of course, the mass exodus from State College will begin today. They will be fortunate to have 40 scholarship athletes by the time camp begins.

 

Re: the loss of scholarships penalty ... I've long felt that simply not being allowed to award a certain number of scholarships is a misguided penalty. I think schools being given such a penalty should be made to award the scholarships, but perhaps on the academic side. Or, alternatively, such schools should be made to fund additional scholarships at competing schools.

 

Let a mass of current players bail and we'll see how crippled those scholarships make the program.


I predict at least one, maybe several, of these happening at various colleges....maybe not a man-boy scandal but something close.

 

Oh, it'll hurt, and it'll hurt bad. The transition from high school star to serviceable DI player is loaded with uncertainty. You don't have those extra scholarships and suddenly you might find yourself with half a roster of fourth-string tight ends.

 

I get the same sense.

One of the penalties you see in soccer occasionally is being ordered to play games "behind closed doors," in other words with no fans allowed to be present. That might have been something, or being ordered to play all their games on the road, with no visiting ticket sales.

 

I don't like the fact they vacated the wins.

Did anyone else notice the Pres. remarks about the $60 million fine; its equal to one year of PSU's football revenue. One. Year. Gee, wonder why they sought to protect the program?

Love that the NCAA gave PSU players the option to leave w/o penalty.

It ain't the death penalty, but it's close. Life support at best. As a former PSU fan and JoePa fanboi I can live with it. As I guy who thought the program should have been shutdown I can live with it.

I am glad the NCAA stepped in, but I also think the NCAA made a rush to judgement.
As Chris Fowler noted, 11 days after the Freeh Report the NCAA swings the hammer. Typically the NCAA does it's own investigation, something that takes months. I know this out of the NCAA's scope (investigating sex abuse), but the Freeh Report, while commissioned by Penn State, is far cry from the courts. And the Paterno family - to my knowledge - was given not chance to provide any defense to the NCAA to rebut the report. Maybe they had nothing to refute, but were they given the chance?

At the end of the day, I think the NCAA did the right thing and handled it well.

 

I'm all for vacating wins if those wins included players who were either academically ineligible because they cheated on tests (as in Florida State) or were bought and paid for by boosters, etc. In those cases, you could argue it was a competitive disadvantage to have those players. But nothing in this case ever gave Penn State a competitive advantage. The penalties were tough enough without the wins vacated.

 

Maybe not 20, but at least 10 and possibly more.

 

The best thing the Paterno family can do is crawl into a hole for quite a while and close it behind them.