Still waiting for someone to answer this question: What do you hope to accomplish by giving the program the death penalty that firing/jailing those involved would not?
Donny, another point to consider is that the culture of PSU football dominance was/is/has been so prevalent that even today you see some strange evidence of its continued pull. Surely you've seen a lot of the "statue removal" polls lately. They all seem to be 50%-70% remove the statue. Isn't this a simple question and simple answer? Yes, you remove a statue of a man who fostered serial child rape. Not that complicated. Who's voting yes? I have to imagine either crazy people, or PSU fans, students, alumni. It's just a poll, sure, but just a point. Sometimes you just have to punish for punishments sake. Will some people be punished unfairly? Sure, but work to minimize those penalties if possible, but not outside of what needs to be done. You have to hammer this program. You have to. There are few crimes more serious than what Sandusky did, imo, and the coverup is almost as bad. Punishment for punishment's sake. Removing without a shadow of doubt the institution that caused/contributed to the harm in the first place and thus having no worries about what might come in the future. Sending a much stronger and more appropriate message to any and all still absurdly on the fence about the severity of this event.
Thank you for finally humoring my curiosity. For what it's worth, I have to fight back my occasional urge to grab a pitchfork and join right along side you in burning the whole thing down. The irony of the whole thing is that since the inception of the DP, a program that didn't deserve the DP will have ended up getting it, and the program that (almost) did won't.
So you and justtxyank agree with this, then, correct? There's really no way for us to see eye-to-eye on this one. At least, in the end, justice has and will be done to those responsible. DP or not.
Oh come on. Of course the individuals played a part. As did the program. Put them in prison, ruin their legacies, all of it. Kill the program too.
To be fair to the others responding, I did also include other reasons, including what seems to be their main one (and is probably my main one as well, though I do believe in punishment for punishment's sake when merited): killing the institution that fostered the behavior because absent doing so, you'll "never know".
Punishing the program responsible for all this and killing the culture that says football is more important than a few kids getting raped. Saying all of this is just a few bad apples is like saying the fall of Enron was just because of Lay and Skilling. It misses the bigger point. It's about the culture that allows this kind of thing to happen.
Doesn't firing everybody involved "reshape" the program that fostered this? This is what I'm getting at. Clean house administratively and you get the same effect as the DP without screwing over hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Good example, so what would the equivalent DP for the Enron situation be? Shutting down the entire energy trading industry? There were a ton of people at the bottom of that totempole that got **** on, that's what we want to avoid doing here, crapping all over the innocent for the sake of making an example out of a handful of people.
I don't think so. I really don't think it does the job. That said, I don't know for certain, and given the implications, I'd rather kill the program than risk continuing to foster this culture. Even at risk of screwing over the innocent, especially since they don't appear to be screwed over that badly, and there are ways to further minimize it.
That's right. It also goes beyond Penn State. If I could tear into the entire NCAA football universe over this I would. If Congress wanted tos tep in and regulate the hell out of college athletics using public funds as the way to do it I wouldn't blame them. Killing PSU here isn't as extreme as I would like to go but it is probably as extreme as we can go. So kill it. This is the worst case we've heard of but we are all naive if we think this is the only time it's happened. Honestly if this weren't kids people would barely care. Stories break that college athletic programs are basically prostituting coeds for recruiting purposes and nobody gives a damn. A college girl trying out for a football team leaves a school over rape allegations and the students are her university want her lynched. Kickers miss field goals and they get death threats. It's all part of one really big problem: College Football has gotten too big to control. So Penn State went too far. Kill it. And maybe that message will get out there to the other universities that they can all die too.
Goddam what a great post. Took all the words out of my mouth that I was too lazy to put to paper. Tried to rep...denied.
I agree with a large part of what you said, but ask yourself, how did killing SMU work out for "setting an example" and deterring corruption in college football? The DP shat all over a ton of completely innocent people at SMU, and college football is corrupt as ever. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. If you want to go "big" with reshaping college football, it all starts and ends with the NCAA...
Not really a good equivalent unless we were talking about giving every D-1 school the DP. A better equivalent would be shutting down the entire company, which is exactly what happened. No doubt about it, but that's inevitable when anyone is punished. Do we not put murderers in prison because we're worried about upsetting their parents?
Some interesting reading on Wikipedia regarding when the death penalty was given to SMU. I'm sure they'll be really hesitant to hand it down again, but this could turn out to be a case that merits it.
Didn't the company die on its own? A better analogy to the DP would be jailing the parents of murderers. Or better yet, the distant cousins of murderers. Overkill that doesn't help anything.
