By
Ray Blehar
On April 16, 2014, Joel Mathis wrote a blog insisting that the NCAA punishment was just because "something uniquely evil" had developed at Penn State. Mathis, of course, was rehashing the nonsense that was written in the Freeh Report and then blindly accepted/tweeted the minute it left Freeh's mouth during his grand standing press conference on July 12, 2012.
Mathis then stated that PSU copped a plea and accepted the Consent Decree because:
Why? Because Jerry Sandusky molested young boys. Because important people at Penn State knew about it, eventually. Because they passed the buck out of deference to the football program. And because that allowed Jerry Sandusky to keep molesting young boys. All of which may not violate any particular NCAA rule, but it did undermine the underlying ethos of the NCAA’s enforcement regime: Schools are supposed to have control over their athletics programs, not the other way around. Penn State didn’t. Period.
You could argue that last statement is true to some degree of almost every major college sports program in existence, that the culture of college athletics has grown far beyond its useful boundaries. I wouldn’t dispute that. At Penn State, though, the cancer developed into something uniquely evil. It deserved an equally unique, intense response. Thus the sanctions and the $60 million fine.
After about 75 comments from readers who tended to know a lot more about the case than he did, Mathis responded with this comment, to which I replied with the hopes of setting the record straight and shifting the focus where it belongs.
