The Penn State tragedy is the biggest scandal in the history of college sports, and it's not even close.
Some numbers to try on for size:
45: the number of felonious sexual assaults for which Jerry Sandusky was convicted. Try counting all the way to 45 knowing that each number represents the horrific rape of a child. I bet you don't make it. Maybe you can make it to:
8: the number of children whose lives were torn open by those 45 crimes.
4: the (minimum) number of senior University officials who knew about Sandusky's pestilent predilections. President Spanier, VP Schultz, AD Curley and CEO Pope Don Coach Paterno. These four men knew - knew that Sandusky was raping children - and did nothing. Well, nothing but actively cover it up as it continued to happen.
14: the number of years those men knew about those crimes but kept silent as the horror continued.
The president of a University stayed silent for fourteen years to cover up the unspeakable acts of a former football coach. Even as I type it I can barely believe it's true. The depth of institutional failure is horrifying, mind-numbing. The so-called "Culture of Reverence" for the football team at State College insulated a child rapist from the law for almost a decade and a half. Joe Paterno built a legend on the idea that you could win with integrity; the Grand Experiment was premised on the notion that you could carry yourselves on and off the field as true student-athletes, and that you would burnish - not tarnish - your school and its academic standards through deeds on the gridiron.
It sounds like a sick joke, now; now that we know Joe Paterno - the most powerful man at Penn State, to be sure - knew that his colleague was involved in the serial rape of children from at least 1998 to the day he died, and lied about it to all of us. As alum Michael Weinreb wrote over at Grantland, "the Grand Experiment is a failure, and the entire laboratory is contaminated, and there is no choice to go back and start all over again.
So I'm joining the throng of writers urging Penn State to suspend its football program. Shut it down. Turn off the lights. Pull back the culture of reverence that enabled this whole disaster.
I know the counterarguments: shuttering Penn State football will do nothing to punish the four men who participated in this grotesque cover-up. They all lost their jobs, one's dead, and the other three are facing criminal charges (or will soon). Shutting down football doesn't hurt them, it hurts the current players, current students, and current administrators who didn't do anything wrong.
I can hear some of you saying right now, "those students didn't do anything wrong, and suspending football will not only deprive them of the entertainment, but of the astronomical publicity, prestige and cash that it brings in." And you're right, turning off Nittany Lion football would be a crushing blow to the institution, but that's the whole problem. When eliminating a football team is the biggest single blow you can aim at an institution, the football team is plain and simply too damn important. It's that level of institutional dependence on a sport that led four allegedly upstanding members of the Penn State community to prioritize it over the lives of children.
Which, by the way, is why we're kidding ourselves when we say this was a one off thing that couldn't have happened anywhere else. I like to think that at schools like Texas, Florida, Alabama, Nebraska, USC, Oklahoma, LSU, Ohio State, and my beloved Michigan someone would have blown the whistle and reported Sandusky's crimes, instead of doing what Penn State did - take away his key to the locker room showers. But at each of those schools, football is God. The Michigan Winged Helmet is the most important and visible symbol of the university, Alabama's Crimson Tide is its lifeblood. Sports - football, at any rate - has taken over educational institutions and occasionally become the most important thing about them, and now we see what terrible moral havoc that can wreak.
Count to 45.
When an institution like a football team becomes that important and causes this kind of damage, you need to start over. You can't continue to protect the team that these men protected by hiding another's heinous deeds from the world. Start over. Tear it down and start over.
I hope the new leadership at Penn State does the right thing. They'll be booed on the road; I'm terrified of the signs opposing fans will hold up at those games; every football Saturday will be occasion to wonder how Penn State is righting its wrongs (and to talk about the legion of civil suits against PSU that will take years to finish). They should take the high road and pre-empt others' condemnation by condemning themselves and drawing the curtains on the football team. So far? They've decided to keep Paterno's statue up and to remodel the locker rooms that served as the scene of the crimes.
Do better.
If they don't, I hope the NCAA does. The NCAA is a hypocritical, sanctimonious, exploitative farce, but they have to get this one right. They banned USC from the post-season for two years and took away 20 scholarships because the school failed to properly monitor its team. They suspended five players and took scholarships away from Ohio State because its coach lied about the memorabilia his players exchanged for tattoos. Almost 30 years ago they gave Southern Methodist the "death penalty" - two year suspension of the entire football program - because of a scandal involving cash payments to players - and the participation of the school's President and Chairman of the Board of Governors.
The term of art for violations like these? "Loss of institutional control." Is there a more clear cut case of "loss of institutional control" than a school's President, Vice President, AD, and beloved football coach covering up multiple instances of child rape to protect the football program? If "loss of institutional control" doesn't mean that, then it doesn't mean a damn thing.
There isn't going to be an easy way for Penn State to do this. There isn't a way that won't punish some of the innocent students and players. I know the "proper" solution is one on which reasonable people disagree, and maybe you think shutting down the program for a year or two is too harsh. If you do:
Try counting all the way to 45 knowing that each number represents the horrific rape of a child. I bet you don't make it.
Yes!
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