No collective punishment for Penn State football sins

Dave Zirin says the 'death penalty' solves nothing and leaves corrupt NCAA system intact

Unlike other college football "scandals" at places like SMU or Ohio State, the criminal and civil courts will extract more than a pound of flesh from Penn State. The NCAA, a cartel devoted to little more than ensuring its own reign over an utterly corrupt status quo, should just step back and let the grown-ups do their job, which leads to point three.

3. The NCAA is part of the problem. Once again, Louis Freeh is correct that the problem is a "culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus community." But this is the tragic truth at universities across the country. You cannot tell me there aren't scores of stomach-turning scandals at big-money, big-conference schools that just haven't seen the light of day. There are others that have, like the rape scandal at Notre Dame involving football players and female students, which for curious reasons, find themselves painfully under-discussed.

The common problem — from Penn State to Ohio State to Notre Dame — is a system that treats coaches like deities and young players as an uneasy mix of gods and chattel. If the call was to abolish all of college football in the wake of the Penn State scandal and convert all athletic scholarships into academic ones, then let's support this for the collective good. But to punish Penn State for the deep rot that lies in the system? To legitimize the NCAA's bankrupt moral authority to punish evildoers? To think for a moment that the NCAA has any stake in somehow altering this lucrative "culture of reverence"? That's like asking Tim Geithner to clean up Wall Street. It's a fool's errand.

If Ms. Jenkins, Mr. Reilly and others really want to do something other that beat a dead Nittany Lion, they should call for the heads of the real enablers. They should call for the resignation of the Penn State Board of Trustees, including board member Gov. Tom Corbett. They should call for the abolition of the NCAA. They should call for anything other than the destruction of Penn State football: an action that would bring vengeance without justice.

Dave Zirin is the author of "Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love (Scribner)." This article appears courtesy of The Nation magazine/Agence Global news service.