What's going to happen to Penn State football?

Cowher doesn't have the squeaky-clean image of Dungy. (Before the whole Sandusky situation exploded, I actually thought he would be a 'stealth' candidate to succeed JoePa. But now anybody they hire has to be clean beyond a possible doubt.)


Dungy is 56. He has to decide in the next 3-4 years if he is ever going to coach again.

He would certainly get plenty of NFL offers if he put himself back on the market, but if he takes one of them and goes 6-10 three years in a row he becomes just another guy who came back for a paycheck and got sent out to pasture.

Penn State is going to be the college equivalent of Hiroshima for the next year or so, but it's also a place where something really inspiring could be done.

It's almost a perfect replay of "We Are Marshall" -- without the plane crash.

 

So Paterno wasn't the highest paid State employee?

 

Presume that most, if not everyone, that has even a whiff of culpability in this sorry mess gets fired/imprisoned/death-by-snusnu/Budd Dwyer'd. Who does shutting down the program hurt? A bunch of people and institutions that did nothing to deserve the massive economic hit it would create. 100,000+ people on seven Saturdays a year = an assload of taxable goods and services provided by those who live and work there. 12 schools have to scramble to find a football opponent at the last second because they didn't know one of their opponents was about to be dubbed Ped State. A bunch of kids who chose to go to a place three hours from anywhere to play football and get a degree have to scramble to find a safe landing spot because of something their coaches did or allowed or didn't do enough to stop.

Plus it's not like you can go back to the way things were in 2013. There's a reason the NCAA only handed out the death penalty once, and it also happens to be the reason it took SMU 25 years to get its football program on anything resembling solid footing, even though the punishments expired long before.

Shutting down the football program doesn't punish the wrongdoers. It doesn't unring the bell. It just takes a bad situation and makes it worse by hurting a bunch of kids, the school and the community worse than it already is, and none of it deserved in their cases.

 

Plus Dungy likes redemption stories. He mentored Michael Vick in and out of prison. He might not do it, but he'd appreciate the challenge more, and in a different way, that most other coaches you'd consider.

 

What did the players do wrong?
Paterno fucked them in the figurative way as Sundasky did in the literal way. Paterno's failure to know right from wrong has hung his team out.

 

Honestly, knowing the scorn many ivory tower academics hold toward big-time college athletics, it wouldn't surprise me to see a massive push-back from the PSU faculty with regard to the future state of the football program.

Combined with the need for all the positive PR it can stand in the face of what will undoubtedly be a string of massive lawsuits, I could see the new Penn State administration overreacting to this mess by significantly altering the budget and ambition of the football program in the short term.

 

If the program is shut down, the players can transfer immediately. I presume that since they were good enough to get scholarships in one of the better recruiting classes initially, they would find a landing spot somewhere else in Division I, likely in a BCS conference.

 

And as has been mentioned before, there IS a base of talent there. He wouldn't be walking into a Marshall situation where he'd be going 1-10 for the next five years in a row.

 

You still have to let it all play out, but even with what we know so far this is the biggest sports scandal in college athletics and probably the biggest since the Black Sox scandal.

And if there is truth to any of the stuff in this link

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=ycn-10407023

and the university has to shut down football for a year or more, then it does it. Other major institutions have done this (San Francisco basketball as I said) and even an entire conference - the Ivy League.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if Al Golden jumped ship at Miami to coach his alma mater. He's recruited the area for a long time and would likely be able to keep some semblance of status quo with the scheme on the field. At worst he'd be jumping from one scandal to another, just in a place he's spent much more time.

 

There should be a massive push-back from the nation, generally, about scholarship athletics right now.

I can't remember who it was or exactly what the story I was working on was, but I remember a reformer - maybe James Duderstadt or Allen Sack? - once telling me that eventually there is going to be an enormous scandal that finally forces college sports to reform massively. Something we couldn't even fathom at that point, but that's what it would take.

This might be it.

 

I have no stomach for the Penn State redemption story. None.