I listened to the NCAA ruling this morning. After a few moments, a friend from out West emailed asking my reaction. Here it is:

I listened to the announcement live. It was carried on all the radio stations. I do know what will happen. This is very different from the SMU thing. In some ways much worse. The crimes here and the administrative looking the other way hid things much more vile than sports cars and paying players. In some ways I think that PSU is in a much better place. SMUs administration was always and ever trying to hide things from the authorities. After the first NCAA punishment, they had a meeting and the board (which included the Governor of Texas) decided to keep paying players because “they had a payroll to meet”. In the PSU case, the board has acted to dredge through everything (they commissioned the Freeh Report). We will see.

On the cultural critic side, this whole thing sort of irks me. Let’s be frank…the whole thing is a ruse. The NCAA today said that it is out to “change the athletic culture” and to make sure that “athletics is part of an integrated whole with the university’s educational goals.” Really? This is a lie. I do not think that the people telling can believe it. I started at a D2 school with no football team. The basketball players showed up the first day of class and they came to take their finals (never saw them otherwise). A few good books on the phenomena would be John Gerdy’s Sports: An All American Addiction and Air Ball. He is an NBA player and was on the track to be an AD at one of the SEC schools. He saw what the culture around athletics was like and rebelled against it. He lives here in Lancaster and runs a foundations that encourages music education (they leave pianos all over the city and people can just stop and play them—it end up being really fun). Out colleges and universities are NOT about education (preaching to the choir here I know). This is the most egregious example. I want the death penalty for the whole thing (college economics and bad debts will more likely to cause this). Do we believe that the culture is more healthy at Alabama, or LSU. Sandusky’s actions are reprehensible, but we feed the athletics department busloads of drug addled 18 year old coeds every night. We sweep it under the rug and load the next bus…and a few universities cash big checks (about 80% actually lose money on sports!). It is a ruse…an idol.

At PSU now, a lot is happening way too fast. I think that people should give things a few years before making any sort of final judgments. I think that the NCAA is reacting to the news cycle. Calmer heads might have made a better decision than this on reflection (it might need to be the death penalty). This is sort of knee jerk. We will see if it was the right call.