The Daily Traub

On Monday morning the NCAA set a historic precedent in the world of college sports.  They dropped the hammer on Penn State.  They fined them $60 Million dollars, gave them a four-year postseason ban, docked them 10 scholarships per year, forced them to vacate all wins from 1998-2011 (making it so Joe Paterno is no longer the winningest coach in college football and Bobby Bowden has now reclaimed the title), put them on a five-year probation, and is allowing any current or incoming player to transfer without having to sit out a year to play.  The Big Ten Conference later chimed in that Penn State was ineligible for the Conference Championship game for four years, and that they will be fined what their approximate bowl game revenue would have been for those four years as well (about $13 Million per year).  These are huge punishments that have been dropped on Penn State, but don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, this is not as bad as the Death Penalty; it’s close, but not quite.  It took SMU 22 years to make it back to a bowl game after the Death Penalty was handed to them, and they had to cancel a second season on their own because they could not field a competitive team.  Once the bowl ban is lifted, Penn State will be back playing in the postseason right away.  Even though players can transfer anywhere they want right now, not everyone on scholarship will; with the Death Penalty, every single player on scholarship would have left and as history has shown, would have set the program back decades.  The NCAA wants you to believe that forcing the University of Penn State to vacate wins was to attack them, but that was a specific action to take Joe Paterno out of the top of their record books, and send him down to 8th all-time (originally reported as 12th, has since been recalculated by ESPN to 8th).

Continue reading →