From the DAILY BEAST:
…But [NCAA Commissioner Mark] Emmert and NCAA Executive Committee Chair Dr. Edward J. Ray noted in their remarks on Monday, more in officiousness than in anger, that for all its severity the penalty was not strictly punitive. It was of course hugely punitive, arguably as severe as the storied “death penalty” that Southern Methodist University received in 1987 after it was revealed that the school had continued paying its football players from a secret booster-fed slush fund even while under NCAA probation for paying its football players from a secret booster-fed slush fund.
….The whole shameful affair was, instead, neither a football offense nor, strictly speaking, the NCAA’s affair. No quarterback received a SUV of suspicious provenance, no unfair on-field advantage was gained, and for all the shameful evasions of Paterno and the rest, no one ever actually cheated. The offenders are in the hands of the criminal justice system and, in the case of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett—who has been criticized for an insufficiently urgent approach to the first allegations against Sandusky while serving as Pennsylvania’s attorney general—in the hands of the Keystone state’s voters.
And so Emmert, unable to rely upon the NCAA’s rulebook for justification, took to the bully pulpit and bullied, righteously. If the NCAA’s formal job is to preserve the integrity of amateurism in college sports and its informal job is to preserve the appearance of amateurism in college sports, Emmert’s punishment arrogated to himself and his organization a strange new responsibility and right—that of changing mindsets and de-perversifying cultures, however retroactively. That the NCAA has only sports-related disciplinary tools to do so apparently didn’t matter…
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EDITOR: The second paragraph says it all.
