No. It's not the same. The market for regional entertainment services and for global heavy industrial manufacturing aren't the same. Sure, the Steelers are, as is high school football, as is live music, as is basketball, as is getting wasted by the railroad tracks in scranton - the point is, unless you're arguing that the propensity to consume is permanently diminished by the lack of Penn State football - the impact is negligible as a whole. Instead of converging on State College it will be filtered throughout the rest of the area onto other places (unless you are arguing that it's like the auto plants again and people are going to simply watch cheaper Chinese-made football instead...) So suspend the "sit a year" rules, just like they did with SMU or when a program goes defunct. Hardly unprecedented.
No, not ban the NCAA, ban college football. If college football the sport didn't exist, there would be no program to cover up one man's pedophilia. We have no idea if this is occuring at other schools where the sports programs make millions of dollars for the univerisity which would lead people to cover something like this up if it was occuring to save the millions of dollars. So I propose we just ban sports in general. Or at least the money-making ones. This makes as much sense as banning this program and hurting hundreds of people based on the actions of a few. Now, come back with some oh-so-sarcastic response that makes you feel better about yourself. I'm not usually the target of it, so it's still enjoyable to me.
Yes, I'm sure however many thousands of people make their way from out of town into State College 6-7 times a year are still going to make that trek with no Penn State football team.
Or better yet blame air, because everybody involved was breathing it. It's not hard to sit around with any sequence of real-wordl. events of any degree of complexity and to be able to assign SOME fractional level of causation to any factor down to the Higgs Boson - That's not an argument, it's a parlor tricks. In the real world, it's not hard to determine where in the real world responsibility lies. We do it every day. In this case, it's with Penn State football.
They're the same in that they both impact their communities beyond the singular enterprise being removed. When plants, businesses or, yes, football programs are shut down, there's a residual impact to the rest of the area, especially in smaller communities where said plant/business/football program is so integral to the local economy. Yeah, I am arguing that. These aren't general football fans who happen to live in State College so I guess, whatever - I'll follow the Ninny Lions. These are Penn State football fans who choose to follow the Nitany Lions, specifically. The Steelers are no more a viable "substitute" than the Cowboys or Texans would be to the economy of BCS if the Aggies' football program was shut down. I'm not arguing State College would cease to exist within some timeframe - and yeah, eventually, that money might be more evenly spread to other local enterpises not tied to football. But you're arguing there'd be no immediate and definitive fallout? I'm arguing it's tied not generally but specifically to Penn State football and absent said football, the local economy could potentially suffer as a result. Again, it's an easy, "do this, viola!" from your computer - I doubt the whatever number of scholarship athletes, not to mention the non-scholarship athletes, would agree with your "no big deal" opinion. It's a massive disruption of energy and possibly economic resources. And, if football is gone.... what sport keeps Penn State viable as an athletic program otherwise? So you're not just talking about football players, but literally hundreds of athletes who could potentially wake up to find themselves... losing Big Ten membership? Division I status?...
I'm not sure there would be incentives for a clean program there. In the short-term, sure. But the lesson learned would be that as long as we don't investigate and choose a "see no evil" method of oversight, the program won't be harmed - we can just fire any bad actors and be just fine. For me, it's the punishment / retribution part of it that encourages the death penalty (or alternatively, just taking away all the scholarships and making the program field a walkon team if they want). The fans were a part of this - many of them rioted when JoePa was fired. These people put the football program over all else. They didn't do anything illegal, but I think they don't deserve to have a football team. The fans should be paying part of the penalty here, because they directly contributed to giving JoePa and company the power over the University, and that has to be changed. If the program is protected, then it simply continues that culture where the football program is more important than all else. As for the related businesses (restaurants, etc) - that's part of the deal. If the football team went 0-10 every year, that business would dry up quite a bit (as it did in Austin in the 1990s when the stadium never filled up). That's sort of a risk of doing seasonal business connected to the success of a football team. The walk-on team is a partial solution to this concern, though.
The only thing that really bothers me about the death penalty is the fact that a ton of other people get screwed in the process. If you have a restaurant near the stadium, you're going to take a nice hit on your bottom line. If you're a vendor in the stadium, you're now unemployed. If you own a convenience store that sells Penn State memorabilia, you're basically going to be forced to shut down. Hell if you're anywhere on the supply chain for Penn State goods, you get hosed. I'm sure there are thousands of businesses that directly and indirectly benefit from Penn State and they'll all get hit pretty badly by the death penalty. And part of me feels that just isn't fair that their lives get flipped over as a result of this. Hopefully I'm totally wrong in saying the above but that's enough to make me say no to the death penalty.
And there the similarities end. The net losses from a Penn State football shutdown are mitigated by gains in other areas throughout the surrounding region. Maybe somebody decides to buy a new car instead of Penn State season tickets. Maybe Rutgers joins the Big 10 and Brunswick NJ experiences corresponding growth. The losses will be mitigated substantially. You can't really say this if you destroy an industrial cluster. If Detroit loses GM, Delphi follows, etc all the way down the chain and it doesn't mean that a plant automatically opens in California. Tough ****. I don't really care about the local economy of Bryan or State College any more than I care aobut the economies of the places that would benefit like Brunswick or Syracuse or San Marcos or whatever the **** - unless you live there I don't know why anybody really would. If they are losers and other economies in the region or country correspondingly win - I'm pretty indifferent. . LOL, think about what you're actually saying here. The absurd circumstance in which the unpaid labor of football players at Penn State is used to provide volleyball players and swimmers with a free education, by historical accident of Title IX, must be preserved! I'm very happy to solve the problem by handing the field hockey team a stack of FAFSA's, which is how I and millions of other students attended college. Granted, the impact on the national economy of losing field-hockey players with communications degrees or BBA's with extra spending money would be profound, but we'd survive Barring that, if the university truly felt this to be a noteworthy injustice, it could easily cover their schollies throughout their matriculation given the size of its endowment, and of course, they could transfer if playing was more important than finishing out their degree. Sorry, but Timmy having to finish his Lacrosse dream as a club player instead of a scholarship athlete is laughable in the trifling scale of its tragedy. I hate to break this to you, but it's actually possible to maintain a prestigious university that fulfills its core mission without prostituting itself on the altar of NCAA athletics. In fact, it's the rule rather than the exception.
If the 'death penalty' isn't used for extreme situations like this then they should just get rid of it entirely. The Penn State scandal is several magnitudes larger than the SMU case and they got what they deserved. If you are going to defend Penn State against the 'death penalty' - then let's hear the defense of the SMU case.
THe guy who runs Modells is going to take a huge hit because he is sitting on about 40,000 Jeremy Lin Knicks 17 jerseys. Should we think twice about allowing Lin to join the Rockets? Should the teams abrogate the deal? Or do we subordinate tangential economic impact to something else here.
I'm sure it has been said a million times, but I'll make it a million and one. Giving PSU the 'death penalty' is not a good idea. First, why should alumni, students, and current players have to suffer for something only a very very small few knew about? Second, many people will lose their job because of this. Something needs to be done, but killing the school is not the answer. Go after those who knew and covered it up.
Because those people ranged from the University President, his boss - perversely, Paterno, and all the way down to McQueary and even the ******* janitor. Paterno or Spanier alone are enough to impart liability on the program but the fact that people at all rungs of the ladder willfully covered up and enabled minors getting raped in the shower by the defensive coordinator- from the President to the dude who cleans toilets- is representative of institutional failure to me. As for the silly canard that the whole school dies with football- this isn't true but if so then good as it signifies that the school has ceased to serve its chartered purposes to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
I don't see how it's an NCAA violation, so I voted no. However, I'm perfectly happy with them getting anything that's coming.
I didn't realize the death penalty is just a short term thing - i.e, they lose a season or 2 or 3....man in that case, how can you not just punish them, seems like they deserve every bit they have coming to them......death penalty isn't really accurate...its more like a suspension...or am I missing something?
Like I said, a very small group of people knew. Put them in jail and throw away the key. I don't care if it's the janitor or the president, they're guilty, not everyone is.
Fair point. But does the DP have a remarkably dissimilar outcome? SMU eventually got its program back. The DP destroyed it, of course - but they were a power specifically and only because they were paying players. Once that option was eliminated, they returned to its prior irrelevance as a small private school in a large, indifferent metroplex. Penn State’s path back to a status close to where they were pre-scandal is remarkably similar whether they get the death penalty or not, with duration being the only primary difference. They’ll wipe out the administration; rebuild their infrastructure; and they’ll keep their noses clean with improved oversight and better transparency. And – unlike SMU, the NCAA is probably going to be much more forgiving to a program as prestigious as Penn State’s was. Meanwhile, as we saw with SMU, the DP has not in any way deterred rampant cheating in college football. So what do we accomplish doing it here? (BTW, it's kind of interesting, perhaps only to me, how closely the college football "death penalty" mirrors my own opinion of *the* death penalty. I intellectually understand it, I'm not 100% against it, per se... and yet, it doesn't seem to take any bite out of crime and it bothers me that a lot of innocent people suffer as a result of it...) Ehhhh... I absolutely agree with the "culture" component of this. I don't outright "blame" fans (and, frankly, they've never really been a component of my defense - the players, the coaches, the administrators, the business owners who lose jobs and/or business always were) but, yes: the "football is king" identity is absolutely ruinous. But with Paterno gone, I don’t think we’re going to see quite the same reaction from NL fans moving forward. He was a lightening rod and his involvement conflicted things tremendously. I didn’t go to Penn State, didn’t really think much of it – but even for me, it was tough to swallow that a guy who was genuinely one of the good ones in a sport teeming with scum, had so egregiously dropped the ball. I don't disagree, per se - but I think it's apples/oranges. Being bad is not permanent; the death penalty is (so to speak). And Austin is nothing like State College; it's a cool, progressive city with a lot to do. State College is forever intricately linked to the university and its football program. As I’ve said: If they’re ever going to break-out the DP again, seems they’d be hard-pressed to find a more “deserving’ recipient. But I hope they consider the wide-ranging ramifications of it before dropping it.
I feel that the DP is a much larger punishment than you do, I think. I think it's much harder to recover from, because you no longer have the continuity to build on - you have to start a program from scratch in terms of recruiting, etc. But yes, you can recover from it - as it should be. While true, I think that's in part because the NCAA got scared and stopped using it. If more programs were getting the DP, I think it would be a very effective deterrent - lack of institutional control would cost a university tens of millions of dollars instead of a bowl game or two. But it lost its usefulness because everyone knew they would never get the DP. Sorry - I just meant it in the sense that if your team sucks, all the surrounding businesses are going to struggle as well. That's part of the risk people take when building that type of business - they benefit from things that are not of their own doing (the success of the team) and they get hurt from that. I'm OK with finding another penalty - as I mentioned earlier, DP-lite where they just take away all the scholarships for a few years would penalize the sport without necessarily having the side effects of the DP. I just think the insitutition itself needs a punishment. I don't think going after just the individuals is enough here, because I think the institution & culture itself was a culprit.
I feel like a great deal of people who disagree with a Penn State death penalty also feel that Sandusky was innocent.
Paterno statue taken down NCAA to announce 'corrective and punitive measures' for Penn State on Monday Joe Schad @schadjoe [rquoter]Mark Emmert was granted authority to punish PSU in unprecedented manner by NCAA Board and Committee. Penn State facing loss of bowl/s and scholarships, but not so-called death penalty Penn State sanctions expected to be extremely harsh and could even be perceived as more damaging long-term than "death penalty" Thee sanctions were not self-imposed or negotiated. This is Emmert taking a stand he felt he had to due to horrors in Freeh Report.[/rquoter]
