Big Ten Sanctions Against Penn State

Via the LA Times

The Big Ten Conference issued its own penalties Monday to Penn State, banning the school's football team from appearing in the Big Ten championship game for four years and stating the school won't receive any conference bowl revenue during that same span.

That revenue is estimated to total about $13 million, bringing the grand total Penn State has been fined to $73 million.

. . . "The accepted findings support the conclusion that our colleagues at Penn State, individuals that we have known and with whom we have worked for many years, have egregiously failed on many levels -- morally, ethically and potentially criminally," read the statement from the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors.

I guess it could be worse, as the Bleacher Report states:

Penn State was effectively delivered a death knell by the NCAA, but at the least the Big Ten had the decency not to spit on its grave.

NCAA Guts Penn State's Prestige

The NCAA slapped the Nittany Lions with sanctions that will reverberate through College Station for the next four years and beyond. They gutted the revenue earned this year from the Penn State football program, banned the team from bowl games for the next four years, and "vacated" all wins from 1998 through 2011, effectively destroying the legacy of Joe Paterno, who is no longer the "winningest coach in history."

So the football team survives and players can play the game, but the prestige is gone along with Joe Pa's statue, and that's fitting. Why should a team and a university have bragging rights when the so-called "ethical" leaders were nothing but apologists and enablers for a serial child molester?

I find all of it very satisfying, since it puts the priorities of the university back where they should have been in the first place.

Penn Live

Penn State will be banned from bowl games for four years. It will lose 20 scholarships a year for four years. It will pay a $60 million fine -- a year's average gross annual revenue for the football program. That money will be used to fund programs to prevent child abuse. Penn State can't pay that fine with academic money or by cutting other athletic scholarships.

And the Nittany Lions 109 wins between 1998 and 2011 have been vacated. Joe Paterno is no longer the winningest Div. I football coach of all time.

NCAA president Mark Emmert said the NCAA crafted the punishment as a consent decree, which the university has signed. No appeal is expected.

The penalties are meant to carry a message, Emmert says. Big sports he said, have become too big to fail, and in some cases, too big to question.