Isn't Big 10 Complicit ?.

[loyolacat]

Isn't the Big10 and indirectly NU complicit in the same way Joe Paterno was in the Sandusky case if they do not speak out against the NCAA s recent decision? You can say what you want about the last decision but it will be used by PSu to back the theory that PSu and Paterno had nothing to do with this and the whole thing was just an isolated incident by Sandusky and there was no lack of institutional control. In reality doesnt the Big10 and its members want to sweep this under the rug as quickly as possible and have PSu back as strong as ever because it makes the Big10 financially stronger?
Isn't the group just banding together? Did the Big10 ever issue any punishment of their own against PSu ?

 

[ToledoCat]

The college students who won those football games apparently had nothing to do with the case were the ones punished. They are giving the wins back to the kids and some dignity back to the alums who had nothing to do with it.. Paterno was punished while alive. A few people deserved criminal prosecution not the whole school. The real criminal is in prison for life. Not sure what additional prosecutions will happen but I admit I was glad PSU got the Bowl win. I don't root for them usually, but this is better for the BIG. Paterno and Sandusky will have eternity to deal with this.

 

[Turk]

It's an interesting discussion. The question is, who committed the crimes? If it is reduced down to Sandusky, then the answer is clearly seen.

IMO, while the crimes were committed, apparently there was knowledge of the crimes by Paterno, the president of the university, athletic director, etc., who suppressed the crime information or brushed everything under the carpet for "Just Win Baby". While doing that, apparently a few more boys got raped.

IMO, that is why they took the wins from the school, because while the crimes were the result of one man, others had knowledge of the crimes but put wins and football ahead of a few unfortunate boys.

Therefore, if I were the father of one of the boys, I would be disappointed that they restored the wins.

Whatever the case, what's done is done.

 

[EvanstonCat]

What Jerry Sandusky did was a horrific crime. I still maintain JoePa didn't know or understand what was going on. But, in any case, he died, probably killed by what happened. The men who tried to cover up Sandusky are fired. PSU athletes, students, and alums did nothing to deserve punishment.

PSU is more our brother than dOSU ever was. We should welcome them back into the family.

 

[Deeringfish]

Originally posted by EvanstonCat:
What Jerry Sandusky did was a horrific crime. I still maintain JoePa didn't know or understand what was going on. But, in any case, he died, probably killed by what happened. The men who tried to cover up Sandusky are fired. PSU athletes, students, and alums did nothing to deserve punishment.

PSU is more our brother than dOSU ever was. We should welcome them back into the family.

Apparently, there was an email that made it pretty clear Joe Pa knew what was going on. He may not have fully understood it.

Beyond football I don't think he was a very sophisticated person. I have always felt that he washed his hands of it as soon as he felt someone else was taking care of it. My guess is, that is how he delegated all tasks that fell out of his comfort zone.

We often automatically assume that a person who has risen to such high stature as Paterno would have all sorts of complimentary gifts. I'm not sure that is true. Warren Buffet said that if he had been born 100 years earlier, he would have starved to death. He may have been exaggerating but his point is he was the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Paterno was an inspirational guy and a football savant. He started his career before you had to have CEO credentials to be a head coach and the organization built itself around him, hiring people to care for his needs. If he started today he would never get past high school coaching.

 

[GlideCat]

The issue at hand is not whether or not the Athletic Department, JoePa, or the institution of PSU was directly or indirectly complicit with Sandusky's actions or the following cover-up.

Nor is it whether the sanctions enacted at the time punished the correct people.

The issue is whether the actions which occurred at PSU were under the purview and/or within the jurisdiction of the NCAA to punish. Is there anything within the by-laws or regulations which have been agreed by member institutions which allow the NCAA to impose and enforce these sanctions? "Lack of institutional control" only applies to said lack of control as it pertains to actions which are enforceable under those by-laws and regulations. That is not a phrase which allows the NCAA to punish any university for any action.

The member institutions do not want for the NCAA to be given such a carte blanche to invoke sanctions for any actions whether or not they are part of the agreements. The lifting of the sanctions is the member institutions forcing the NCAA to agree that they do not have such authority to make the rules as they go along nor to make the rules based on public opinion.

This does not give any credence to any argument about JoePa's culpability. Nor does it give any credence to any argument about whether the right people are being punished. It is just about the member institutions stopping the NCAA from acting outside of their jurisdiction. As much as many do not like that PSU is not being punished based on the heinous nature of the crimes and cover up, the action of lifting the sanctions is the correct one legally and institutionally.

My uninformed opinion.

 

[loyolacat]

I am just guessing that both the NCAA and the Big10 have some of moral behavior clause. No? Also did the BIG10 issue any sanctions or were they all by the NCAA ?

 

[chariots]

I think the legal challenges were brought by people who are primarily motivated by purifying JoePa and PSU's record. They weren't interested in jurisdiction questions except that it fit their narrative.

They won the legal challenge because the NCAA in fact did overstep and the NCAA settled to protect itself.

Rest assured the Blue and White faithful will claim the rescinded penalties from the NCAA implies that JoePa and others are vindicated.

 

[thewildcat2011]

The whole "JoePa might not have understood" line of thinking/argument has to be, bar none, the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.

Only idiots would think that child molestation, or sexual crimes in general, are something new that an older person would not understand. What, the boomers invented diddling kids in the past 50 years? Can you imagine trying to make that line of argument about rape? "JoePa just didn't understand that rape was a bad thing since he was older."

As Stupor would say, GMAFB.

 

[Sheffielder]

I sincerely believe that Paterno had a perverse respect for the chain of command. He reported it to his superiors, and once they said not to worry about it, he didn't. Absolutely negligent but not the cover-up artist that many accuse him of being...leave that to Curley and Spanier, who as administrators had the greatest formal obligation to act, and chose not to do so.

And then there's McQueary, who was an eye witness to the incident, and who did what? Reported it to his supervisor. McQueary deserves at least as much blame as Paterno if not more, but he's not as well known so most idiots would rather focus on the person with the most celebrity in the situation.

Regardles...no shortage of blame to go around here, which doesn't even begin to look at the NCAA's bungled handling of the whole situation.

 

[PaCat]

Sheffielder, here's a refresher on evidence indicating Paterno's direct involvement in influencing his "bosses' " to reverse their decision to turn Sandusky into the authorities. http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaaf--joe-paterno-role-jerry-sandusky-coverup-grows.html

 

[Katatonic]

It's this.

The NCAA overstepped its bounds into what should have remained a criminal matter - but the publicity/attention was so overwhelming since it involved child molestation.

There have been numerous cases (including in the B1G) where (alleged) criminal activities by athletes have gotten the slow-play or worse by the school admin and local law enforcement, if not both, including for rape cases.

So why didn't Emmert and the NCAA come down on them?

Case in point is the sad story about former Mizzou swimmer, Sasha Menu Courey.



The University of Missouri did not investigate or tell law
enforcement officials about an alleged rape, possibly by one or more
members of its football team, despite administrators finding out about
the alleged 2010 incident more than a year ago, an "Outside the Lines"
investigation has found. The alleged victim, a member of the swim team,
committed suicide in 2011.

For most of 2010, Missouri swimmer Sasha Menu Courey harbored a
secret: She believed she'd been raped by a football player. Late that
year, her life spiraling downward, Menu Courey began to share her secret
with others, including a rape crisis counselor and a campus therapist,
records show. In the ensuing months, a campus nurse, two doctors and,
according to her journal, an athletic department administrator also
learned of her claim that she had been assaulted.

Healthcare providers are generally exempt from requirements to report
such crimes and also are bound by medical privacy laws. But those same
protections do not extend to campus administrators, who at Missouri were
made aware of claims that Menu Courey had been raped through several
sources, including a 2012 newspaper article as well as the university's
review of records when fulfilling separate records requests by her
parents and "Outside the Lines."

Under Title IX law enforced by the U.S. Department of Education, once
a school knows or reasonably should know of possible sexual violence it
must take immediate and appropriate action to investigate or otherwise
determine what happened. The law applies even after the death of an
alleged victim. Further, the federal Clery Act requires campus officials
with responsibility for student or campus activities to report serious
incidents of crime to police for investigation and possible inclusion in
campus crime statistics.

"... I started to panick & as i still on the phone trying to
reach one of them tears start going down & the guy just lift up my
dress & next thing i knew he inserts from behind. by that point
tears were falling more but i wasnt loud & didnt anything. and then i
just snapped and kind pushed him away & yelled no! and then he just
left."


The basics of Menu Courey's account are supported by a former
Missouri football receiver, who alleges that more than one of his
teammates raped her that night. Rolandis Woodland, a receiver with the
Tigers from 2008-12 and a friend of Menu Courey's, was not at the scene
but said the morning after the incident she was distraught and crying,
confiding to him that something bad had happened to her without saying
exactly what.

Later, after she died, he said he saw a videotape of three players in a dark room assaulting her in a drunken state.

"You could see her saying 'No, no,' hysterically crying," Woodland,
who had dated Menu Courey briefly, told "Outside the Lines." "She uses
the name of [redacted player] when she tells him to get off of her, and
he says, 'It's only me.' They dim the lights and you could see them
switching [assaulting] her but you cannot see who was switching because
the lights were dimmed. About three minutes into the tape, she pushed
whoever was on her off of her and ran out of the room."
The Mizzou admin/swim coach then proceeds to kick Sasha off the team, take away her financial aid/schollie and have her sign a withdrawal from school (while on suicide watch).

And in at universities all across the country, there has been a history of school admins pressuring (alleged) rape victims to agree to let the school handle the situation instead of going to law enforcement, etc.



This post was edited on 1/18 9:57 PM by Katatonic

Outsidethelines/Sasha Menu Courey

 

[Sheffielder]

Originally posted by PaCat:
Sheffielder, here's a refresher on evidence indicating Paterno's direct involvement in influencing his "bosses' " to reverse their decision to turn Sandusky into the authorities. http://sports.yahoo.com/news/ncaaf--joe-paterno-role-jerry-sandusky-coverup-grows.html

I do not wish to re-hash the details of this situation, and for the most part I think everyone has made up their minds about how they feel, but I hardly think an email from Curley that refers to "talking it over with Joe" is a smoking gun that implicates Paterno, despite the agenda that Wetzel clearly had in drafting that article. Curley has done nothing to indicate he is a man with any integrity, and for all we know he was using a vague reference to Paterno to advance his own wishes on how to proceed with Schultz and Spanier. If Paterno was the most powerful man in State College as the media would like to portray him as being, it stands to reason that Spanier et al would have asked the man himself, does it not? And shouldn't they have been in the Big East like Joe wanted? Or been playing Pittsburgh every season? The fact is, his power was not unlimited, especially in his mid-70s with a string of losses that were piling up and he was arguably at his weakest ever in terms of political power.

I'm not a Penn State guy or a Paterno guy...I don't have a stake or anything to gain in defending the man. I just think he rather sheepishly trusted his superiors to handle the situation appropriately, and in Joe's words, wished he had done more.

 

[PaCat]

Spanier et. al. could very well have spoken directly to Paterno. Paterno didn't use email so we only have the emails of others as evidence. Unfortunately I doubt that Spanier, Curley or Schultz will take the stand in their trials. However, it doesn't matter. If they testified and confirmed what the email indicates, the Joebots here in Pennsylvania simply would brand them as liars. For me until I see evidence refuting the email, I don't see any reason to engage in speculation to exculpate Paterno.

 

[hoosboot]

No, they're not.

 

[loyolacat]

I agree everyone has probably made up their minds but a couple of points
1. wishing to do more and not doing more is the act of avoidance.You make a report of something, then dont bother to follow up? Not my job man
2. The Missouri incident, added to several similar incidents, is evidence to me that indeed schools, conferences and the NCAA would rather have these handled as criminal and outside their jurisdiction and that is part of the problem.In a world where college athlets in the big sports at the big schools have higher and higher profiles....no one wants to take the shine off the golden calf.
3. I do think we all want to sweep this under the rug and have things return to our vision of normalcy.
4. Did nothing come of this at all from the BIg10? Not even an investigation of how allegations of any kind are handled with in an athletic department? Something?
5. I fear that like other big time TV shows, major college sports is about ready to jump the shark along with Two and Half Men

 

[willycat]

Right on Loyola, especially point #2. ND anyone?