(Host) Commentator Brian Porto is Deputy Director of the Sports Law
Institute at Vermont Law School. And even though the 2012 college
football season is under way, he’s still thinking about the lessons to
be learned from last season’s saddest sports story, the sexual abuse
scandal at Penn State.
(Porto) By now, you probably know that the
National Collegiate Athletic Association has penalized the football
program at Pennsylvania State University severely because University
officials failed to report child sexual abuse by a former assistant
football coach.
The NCAA levied a $60 million dollar fine,
thereby depriving Penn State of its annual gross income from football,
banned the University from playing in a postseason bowl game for four
years, reduced the number of football scholarships it could award during
that time period, and vacated all of its football victories between
1998, when the sexual abuse by former coach Jerry Sandusky was first
suspected, and 2011, when a grand jury indicted him. These penalties
are the most severe the NCAA has imposed since 1987.
Their
severity reflects the failure of leadership by Penn State’s top
officials, who did not report to proper authorities in 2001 Sandusky’s
sexual abuse of a young boy in a shower in the football building, even
though a graduate assistant who witnessed the abuse had reported it to
them. That failure not only allowed Sandusky to continue his abusive
behavior for another decade, but also violated the NCAA’s principle of
"institutional control and responsibility," which holds member schools
accountable for the actions of their athletic staff and anyone else
"whose activities promote the athletic interests of the institution."
That language includes Jerry Sandusky, who ran summer football camps for
youngsters at Penn State.
Admittedly, the NCAA bypassed its
usual investigative process in this case, but had it used that lengthy
process, it would surely have been criticized for a slow response to a
crisis. Besides, as the NCAA president noted, the penalties were based
on an investigative report written by former FBI director Louis Freeh,
at Penn State’s request, and that report was more detailed than an NCAA
investigation would have been.
That doesn’t mean all the
penalties were appropriate. The scholarship reductions, in particular,
punish innocent Penn State players, who are likely to be outmanned, even
humiliated, on the field for years to come because of those reductions.
A better way to change Penn State’s football-first culture, without
disadvantaging innocent players, would have been to shorten the season,
scheduling the first game in mid-September and the last one before
Thanksgiving, like Dartmouth and the other Ivy League schools do.
Still,
Penn State has accepted the penalties, so it’s best now to focus on the
future and use this tragedy to encourage discussion about the proper
role of sports at colleges and universities. For now, I’m pleased that
the NCAA acted quickly, decisively, and, for the most part,
appropriately, and I hope that the Penn State episode has reminded us
how excessive concern for an institution’s athletic brand can blind even
ordinarily responsible adults to unconscionable human behavior.