By Robert Edwin Field
Point #1: Had Jerry Sandusky been a retired Physics professor making use of the Penn State field house rather than a retired football coach, would the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have punished Penn State in a similar fashion?
Point #2: If the NCAA is truly concerned about the wellbeing of college student, why hasn’t it banned football as a competitive sport given the toll it takes on the health and longevity of its players?
According to Washington Post columnist George Wills, “ …accumulating evidence about new understandings of the human body — the brain, especially, but not exclusively — compel the conclusion that football is a mistake because the body is not built to absorb, and cannot be adequately modified by training or protected by equipment to absorb, the game’s kinetic energies.” He points out players today weigh much more and thus hit much harder than in the past.
Wills continues: “Football is just an increasingly guilty pleasure. Might Americans someday feel as queasy enjoying it as sensible people now do watching boxing and wondering how the nation was once enamored of a sport the point of which is brain trauma?”
Point #3: The NCAA now justifies its draconian penalties of Penn State football players past and future as follows: “’The executive committee has the authority when it believes something is of a big enough and significant enough nature that it should exercise its ability to expedite the process of reviewing cases’ Ed Ray, chairman of the committee and president of Oregon State, told USA TODAY Sports last month.”
What sort of organizations sets aside its constitution, bylaws, and regulations and threatens a ‘death penalty’ without due process?
Hopefully, the handling of the entire Sandusky matter will come to be viewed in a different and more rational light.
Not a single player on the Penn State football team has been associated with pedophilia. A decade had passed since Jerry Sandusky was allowed to coach. The criminal justice system had several times for over a decade been aware of Sandusky’s abuses of children and yet had not intervened. No Penn State football team had a competitive advantage because of any action taken by the coaches or administration.
The good of what has taken place will be attention drawn to safeguarding children, a task for all of us. But the inanity is how the governor, the Penn State trustees, the NCAA, the media and much of the public created a Salem Witch Trial atmosphere, burnt Joe Paterno at the stake, and irrationally punished both past and future Penn State football players for something with which they had nothing to do nor from which in any way they benefited.
If the NCAA really cares about the players rather than the money generated for universities at the cost to player lives … and if we do also …then it is time to follow the precedent of the University of Chicago and simply drop college football competition entirely.
The NCAA should suspend all penalties and conduct a fair and open investigation. It is time that somebody does!
