If any of you have been keeping up with the Penn State/Sandusky saga on here, you've probably seen my numerous posts saying that the NCAA should have no authority to punish Penn State for the actions of Sandusky and Paterno and the men who covered for him and were complicit in the rape of children.
I still maintain that. If the NCAA had stuck to what its charter says, particularly the explicit parts, it shouldn't have done anything here. This is still purely a criminal justice matter.
Tomorrow, the NCAA will take a quantum leap from an organization that enforces fair play and amateurism in college athletics to one which can interject itself into purely criminal matters, and one which can issue arbitrary punishment.
Not that I like to bring in politics as a comparison, but this decision is reminiscent of President Obama bestowing upon himself the power to execute American citizens if they are deemed threats; He may well exercise that authority responsibly, but there is a far larger problem in that authority exists in the first place. Likewise, as of tomorrow the NCAA will have the authority to effectively wipe out college athletics programs as it sees fit, and by extension wipe out the economies and livelihoods of the individuals, universities and communities all over the United States that are supported by college football programs. And it can do so with no oversight and the ability to loosen its rules and bylaws as it sees fit.
I understand measures taken by the NCAA here are to correct the wrongdoings of an institution. I disagree with that premise entirely; crimes are committed by individuals. Penn State did not commit a crime, Penn State cannot be locked up in prison and Penn State cannot die of heart failure.
Yes, some people possit that these crimes were done in the name of the institution (again, I whole-heartedly disagree; they were done in the name of Joe Paterno), but punishing the instution is akin to restricting guns or violent video games in the wake of tragic outbursts like the recent one in Colorado; the step the NCAA is taking tomorrow will be overly-punitive and entirely misdirected, and the only reasoning I can fathom is to satisfy a public outcry for aimless revenge.
This point has been explained ad nauseum, but cannot be emphasized too much: the NCAA's actions will not have one iota of negative effect on those individuals responsible guilty of child rape. It could quite possibly, however, devestate the economy of central Pennsylvania of which Penn State football is the keystone.
But, now that these senseless and terrifying steps have been taken, the NCAA did the worst thing it possibly could have: stop short of the death penalty.
Emmert has deemed himself in a position to provide justice to Sandusky's victims, and to respond to the whims of the most vengeful, self-righteous voices out there.
And to balance the scales of justice, Emmert has apparently decided that a few years of bowl games and a few dozen football scholarships are of equal weight to the rape of dozens of children.
Emmert took the absolute worst possible course of action on this, to first decide that the NCAA was in a new, massively expanded and practically unaccountable authority, and then use that position to decide that a punishment usually reserved for LOIC and players getting paid off was fit.
In this whole episode, the only more vile group than Emmert and the NCAA is the former leadership of Penn State.
