Penn State Football - Death Penalty

It's been a little over a year since I last blogged, and what a way to come back.  This Penn State child sex abuse scandal has taken over the country.  I've thought long and hard about how I feel about the events of the last 6 days, and I'll do my best to outline them a quickly as possible.  There is no need to discuss the details as we all have been subjected to them in it's brutality line by line over the last week.

I will say that from the time I started watching and playing football, I dreamed of playing linebacker at Penn State University.  I wanted to play for Coach Paterno, and then I wanted to go on to play for the Washington Redskins.  I wasn't good enough to realize either of those dreams, but I still have always rooted for Penn State, and have always rooted for the Coach who ran a clean program with what seemed like the moral standard that anyone would admire.

While I honestly do believe that Joe Paterno has made good football players better men, and has turned out great football players and great citizens in our society at the same time, I also believe, unfortunately, that he dropped the ball.  At some point, the football program became more important than the morals that Joe Paterno had built his reputation on.  This was true for not only Joe Pa, but for University officials as well.  This is why the firing of Joe Paterno was necessary, and needed to be done.

As far as the penalties for the program, I believe that the Penn State football program needs to be given the death penalty.  While the NCAA has not said barely ONE word about this horrific set of circumstances, they need to act accordingly to let every program in this country know that football, or any other sport, will never be more important than the victims that they are allowing to be victimized.  The bottom line is that the University, the football program, the coaches (who knew what was going on), as well as many others, allowed a sexual predator to prey on young boys and use their facilities to do it.  They also allowed this predator to use their name to promote an outreach program that allowed him to keep fostering his victims.

Where are the NCAA dictators who suspend a kid for an entire season for having a conversation with a former athlete?  Where are these dictators who put a program on probation because a player receives money to buy a pair of shoes?  Where are these dictators who punish kids four years after the guilty party has left the campus, kids who never even played with the guilty party?  Where are these dictators who suspend a kid for selling his jersey, or trading his jersey for jewelry?

The NCAA has said that they would never hand down a sentence of 'death' again to a program.  My question is this, how can SMU or any other program in the history of sports ever do anything worse than this?  The NCAA loves to use phrases like, "lack of organizational control".  Please, tell me WHERE there has EVER been a bigger case of this in the history of college athletics?  There is no comparison to schools paying players and schools harboring a fugitive of the worst kind.

The Penalty?  If I was the one handing down the sentencing it would be this:
1) The Penn State football program would be shut down for the 2012 season.
2) They would not be allowed to participate in post-season play for 3 years thereafter.
3) All current football players would be allowed to transfer immediately without sitting out the mandatory one year.
4) Any coach that is found to have knowledge of what was happening and did nothing to report this to the police would be banned from college athletics for life!

Is this harsh, yes!  But is it any worse than what these children went through?  It's not even in the same discussion.  Football is, always has been, and always will be, a game.  The rape of young boys by a sexual predator when grown men just sit by and do nothing is the worst of humanity.

I hope the NCAA stops investigating kids who are taking $50 for a good game, and shuts down this program.  A program that up until last Saturday, I loved dearly.