Sports
Penn State Football Escapes NCAA 'Death Penalty'
The NCAA imposes $60 million fine, reduces scholarships, bans bowl appearances.
Stopping short of cancelling the season, the NCAA Monday imposed severe, wide-ranging sanctions against Penn State football in light of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.
“This is just an unprecedented, painful chapter in the history of intercollegiate athletics,” said NCAA President Mark Emmert.
The sanctions include:
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- $60 million dollar fine, with the money going to set up an endowment to benefit child sex abuse prevention and treatment programs nationwide. The amount is equal to a year's gross football revenue at Penn State.
- 4-year ban on bowl game appearances.
- 4-year reduction in scholarships from 25 to 15. Current scholarship players are free to transfer from Penn State to other schools and immediately play at their new school, if academically eligible.
- All Penn State wins from 1998-2011 are vacated, essentially stripping late coach Joe Paterno of the title of "winningest coach in college football history."
- 5-years probation.
The NCAA also will require Penn State to employ a chief compliance officer. The NCAA will select an ethics integrity monitor who will report to the NCAA as well as to Penn State and the university’s trustees as to the school’s progress.
Emmert said Penn State has signed a consent decree, indicating the university will not appeal the punishment.
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The sanctions are meant to "ensure that Penn State will rebuild an athletic culture that went horribly awry," said Emmert. “For the next several years now Penn State can focus on the work of rebuilding its athletic culture, not the next bowl game.”
Emmert said the NCAA considered the death penalty, a sanction that would have shut the school’s football program for a period of years, but felt it would have brought “harm to many who have nothing to do with this case.”
The sanctions come a day after Penn State President Rodney Erickson of Paterno's statue from outside Beaver stadium, and are based on former which concluded that the highest leaders of the university showed a "total disregard for the safety and welfare of children" who were abused by Jerry Sandusky.
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