Probably just like the Penn State students in State College, Pennsylvania early on Monday morning a few of us here at Coaches Hot Seat gathered together at CHS Central for some hot coffee and NCAA president Mark Emmert’s press conference on Penn State’s NCAA sanctions and we sat in stunned silence no doubt like many others as NCAA penalties on Penn State were read aloud.
“Wow,” was the first thing any of us said after Mark Emmert had finished talking and it took a few minutes to take in the enormity of what had just happened not only on Monday morning but over the past 9 months which has seen the once proud Penn State football program and Joe Paterno’s long-earned reputation be put into the shredder with now little opportunity for Penn State football to recover anytime soon without some kind of miracle or another coach like Joe Paterno showing up in Happy Valley sometime soon….and we rather doubt that Bill O’Brien is anywhere near as good of a football coach as Joe Paterno was even early in his coaching career.
As with all punishment whether it is our children that are being punished or in this day and age not really being punished but more than likely not having or being able to do something they really enjoy OR with criminals that are sentenced for their crimes it has always been our contention that human beings have deep inside of them in their DNA not only a desire to see wrongdoers punished but also an ability to discern whether the punishment “fits the crime.”
In our opinion the punishment handed down by the NCAA and Mark Emmert most certainly “fits the crime” because also in our opinion the wrongdoing in this case at Penn State is so bad, so deep, so egregious and so completely counter to the kind of behavior that is expected of “leaders” on America’s colleges and universities that almost anything that came out of Emmert’s mouth relative to the punishment of Penn State University and its football team would have “fit the crime.”
On Monday we had set-up a lunch with a good friend of ours who has been an attorney on almost every side of a court case from assistant DA to criminal prosecutor to a defense attorney for both serious crime and civil cases and over this past weekend we asked this neutral observer who cares little about college football or anything beyond what you would imagine Ivy Leaguers would do with their free time…”squash, tennis, wine tasting and we assume playing chess?”…. to read the Louis Freeh report on what happened at Penn State with Jerry Sandusky.
(Here is a link to the Louis Freeh report)
As we were waiting for our good friend of the attorney to arrive there was a loud “thump” on the table as our attorney friend had approached without us knowing tossing the Louis Freeh report onto the table and then sitting down with the very first thing coming out of his mouth being:
Attorney Friend: “Hey, I know who Joe Paterno was…..great coach….Italian from New York who played football at Brown….but after reading this Freeh report something I cannot understand that maybe you guys can help me with.”
CHS: “Yes?”
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