Penn State scandal, JoePa and the football/college town complex

Only if it's the world's biggest drop or the world's smallest bucket.

But you're winning the thread, so keep it up!

How much is $12 million to a university like Penn State? Seriously. They can get donations from alums to cover that amount every single year. Penn State isn't poor. Far from it.

Well, no-- they'll still be recruiting to a program which has lost steadily for four years and whose coach has never won. They'll have a reasonable pitch to make to blue chippers, but they'll probably get 10% of those pitched instead of 40% for a while.

The change will be real for at least four years after the sanctions expire, I would guess-- they'll be in constant danger of recruiting on the opposition instead of the program.

"Come to Penn State, you'll get to play against Big Ten competition" instead of "Come to Penn State and compete for championships."

They should shut up....they may not want to hear "the full truth"...

Their lone opportunity to win a championship in the last 15 years was their Orange Bowl run in 2005 when they finished third in the nation, so they've mostly been selling the idea to parents that Penn State is a worldly institution built on honesty and integrity. They've had some real mediocre years between then and now, so it's not like they were going to be any good anyway. At best another 8-4 year.

I'm not saying that they won't be hurt by some of these sanctions. They will, but it won't be to the degree where the culture would change. It's like the University of Miami. How many more recruiting violations do they need before something drastic is finally taken against the program where the culture of corruption is changed? I guess that's hard to do when the NCAA is so corrupt to begin with.

Sandusky used the program for at least one child as bait. Paterno and the University covered it up becuase of the hit the football program would take. Let's change the scenario. Let's assume that Sandusky was the Calculus I professor. Would the higher-ups have covered it up in the same manner?

This was posted by someone who covers college sports over on another thread...

Like I said, not a big deal to Penn State.

I thought $54M was their revenue. the profit was something like $15M.
still not a huge hit, but it's significant. it won't kill the program permanently, but it'll definitely set it back 5-10 years. I don't think the so-called death penalty should really be the standard to judge by. I don't think it will ever be imposed again. I don't think the NCAA would even impose it again on SMU with hindsight. it has taken SMU 20 years to recover to some minimum extent, and it will never fully recover. I don't think the NCAA knew or understood the full ramifications of the death penalty when they imposed it on SMU. this is a pretty stiff penalty, and I'm satisfied with it.

Your school may differ from Penn State. I don't know specifically how they work their money. I'm not their accountant. All I know is that they're not broke, and they should easily be able to take care of $12 million a year, especially if their football profits alone are $54 million.

This was pretty widely discussed at the time, and they most certainly did.

The NCAA had already applied its maximum traditional sanctions to SMU repeatedly without result, and been lied to all the way up to SMU's board of governors IIRC. They were past being concerned about SMU-- they were trying to write a cautionary tale for the UNLVs of the world...

Penn State's donations in just the last year were in the two hundred million-plus category.

This NCAA fine is BS. They vacated Paterno's wins since '98 when there was proof he covered up for a child molester. They should find out how much Penn State made from football since '98 and fine them half of it.

Penn State can pay the fine with last year's donations and have almost $150M left over.

Not sure how old you are, but I first became aware of sports in this vein about 1971. SMU has already recovered.* The Pony Express teams were an absolute aberration from the norm for SMU football. What you see is what you get, and what you've always gotten.

*For el jefe or other fanaticos out there, I know SMU had some great teams waaaay back in the day. But since football went to double platoon, SMU hasn't been a factor except for that small window we're talking about here.

1. They aren't. That's the point.
2. What do you think happens to the football profits???? Think, man, think!

That covers the differences between Penn State and SMU that I mentioned: I seem to remember even when it was paying players, SMU was still drawing around 40,000 per game. The size and success of the program was never anywhere near Penn State's. But still, I don't remember anyone trotting out the "but what about the innocent non-revenue athletes" line when SMU football went down.

I don't work in academia or anything, but even *I* know how wrongheaded you're being here.

What do you think PSU does with the donations?

Some of you people are venting rather than thinking. This fine is going to HURT. If you follow college sports, you would have an idea of the money involved. Schools will do some pretty rapacious stuff just to get an extra $1M per year. This fine is 12 times that! Think of all the drive to get conference championship games in football. How much money does an ACC school or a Big 12 school get for those championship games???

Lastly, I would point out that almost all that money just gets funneled back into the maw of the beast. If PSU is down several million dollars a year, they're going to be hiring 3rd rate asst coaches when their staff turns over. They're going to have 3rd class weight lifting facilities.

According to this article, in 2009 PSU had over $50 million in profits as they ran one of the most lucrative and profitable college football programs in the country.

If you're talking about selling themselves as a troo B(C)S title contenda, there's only about six programs that can do this right now, and three of them are in the same conference. What top programs will tend to emphasize is winning their conference and then hoping that the regular season pageant's judges choose to put them into that 4-team playoff with the three SEC slots. PSU won shares of the Big Ten in 2005 and 2008, so it's not like they had nothing to show for the last 15.

No, it isn't.

It's much worse.

It's worse, even, than the situation at Alabama where a booster "committed suicide" during the Albert Means investigation (blood was found on both floors of the deceased's home as well as on the stairs). It's worse than Auburn outbidding Mississippi State for Cam Newton. It's worse than the Eric Ramsey scandal at Auburn or the Gene Jelks scandal at Alabama. It's worse than Arkansas hiring the head coach's side trim over more qualified candidates. It's worse than former Alabama coach Mike Dubose lying to his AD about side trim. Worse than former Alabama coach Mike Price getting caught with a woman before spring training, worse than Mississippi State's violations, you get the pic.

The U's a 16 year-old pot dealer with shiny rims that get his car noticed by the cops. The programs I mentioned are Escobar-esque by comparison.

Not that it means a damn thing in the grade scheme of things, but since Penn State's bowl wins were vacated the University is no longer the rightful owner of the associated trophies, what happens to them?

And you can put every pay-to-play grade-changing scandal at every level together and this is still a zillion times worse. It'll take a generation for Penn State to recover from this, if they ever do. The Penn State name is basically dead outside of Pennsylvania now.

I'm saying that there's a culture problem with college football. That's where my comparisons to the U of Miami come in. The culture is rife with corruption and scandal, and yet the NCAA doesn't levy the harsh punishments. Of course what went on at Penn State was the worst thing that's happened to date regarding a program, but the culture surrounding college football has led to this, and as long as the NCAA keeps giving wrist slaps, then nothing will change.

The trophies will probably be returned to the bowl organization. No respectable program would want them if they lost the game on the field.

If you want the culture of college football to change, the NCAA isn't the place to start looking anyhow. They're not in it for doing right, or they'd have done a lot of things differently since the early fifties (that's basically about the time they began to be the governing body that mattered most to those with the most). They're in it to make the biggest member schools the most money.