Showing posts with label joe paterno. Show all posts
Showing posts with label joe paterno. Show all posts

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Another NCAA reform now in limbo ...

Uh-oh. For the second time in that number of weeks, enough NCAA schools have objected to an NCAA reform measure to throw it into limbo. This time, it's a provision adopted in October to allow multi-year Division I  football scholarships rather than the one-year renewable schollies now in place. Because at least 75 schools objected to the rule within 60 days, it will be reconsidered by the NCAA's Division I Board of Governors when it convenes in mid-January 2012.

Earlier this month, the NCAA suspended another new reform measure that would have allowed schools to provide an additional $2,000 stipend -- called a "miscellaneous expense allowance" -- to help some scholarship athletes pay for incidental costs they incur as college students (as noted in previous posts on this blog). It, too, will be reconsidered at the January Board of Governors meeting.

Both measures were initially adopted after NCAA President Mark Emmert called a retreat for college presidents to discuss ways to improve NCAA athletics. Notably, both of these measures are directed at improving conditions for NCAA student-athletes, whose welfare has not been much of a priority for the NCAA in the past.

Kudos to Emmert for pushing these and other proposals aimed at improving the lives of student-athletes. But after such wide and quick dissent among the NCAA member institutions, you have to wonder how much longer they will put up with him and his reform mindset. After all, they hired him and could fire him. Firing him would seem to be a tragedy, perhaps still another indication -- exemplified in the extreme by the very sad events over the past decade or so at Penn State -- that the institution of college football outweighs the welfare of the most-vulnerable and most-expendable people involved with it.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

The Penn State outrage ...

After reading the grand jury report enumerating and describing the sordid details of former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky's alleged sexual assault of young boys, it's difficult to believe that anyone with knowledge of Sandusky's not-so-secret behavior -- much less than people with near-ultimate authority, such as now-former head coach Joe Paterno and Penn State President Graham Spanier -- would allow any possibility of it continuing. But that's what appears to have happened.

Several points come to mind:
  • This did not involve only a single incident, or even a couple of incidents. It was many incidents, involving many boys, over many years -- more than a decade. For Joe "I wish I had done more" Paterno and other coaches and administrators at Penn State to cover up this long history of criminal behavior is incomprehensible -- and scary for the rest of us who realize what control and power these coaches and administrators have over college students, even if those students are much less vulnerable than the boys who were molested and assaulted.
  • Clearly, coaches' and adminstrators' loyalty to Penn State football and Joe Paterno took precedence over protecting young, defenseless, vulnerable boys from a predator. In short, this was loyalty run amok. And there's a lesson in that for all of us, who sometimes believe in people and institutions without question ... voluntarily waiving our ability to clearly judge what is right and what is wrong. 
  • In the end, the cover-up conducted by Paterno and other coaches and administrators caused precisely what they wanted to prevent -- damage to the good name and reputation of Penn State University and its football program. As the author of a book on college football recruiting, I've been asked how this might affect the football program's recruiting efforts (an issue which pales beside others, such as the effect on the children who were so violently abused by Sandusky). In response, I can say that if I was the parent of a football player being recruited by Penn State, I would go out of my way to prevent my son from joining that team until every one of Paterno's assistant coaches, and probably many of the football programs administrative staff, left the program. I would not want my son put into the hands of anyone whose loyalty to Paterno and Penn State football was so extreme that they could not or would not, over more than a decade, prevent one of their own from inflicting such serious harm on defenseless and vulnerable young people.