The Death Penalty

In 1987, Southern Methodist University (SMU) did not have a football program thanks to the ultimate NCAA punishment, known as the death penalty, where an entire athletic program is shut down. SMU took the next year off, too, because they still needed the time to regroup. SMU was a powerhouse football program in the 1980s, but the NCAA discovered that there were multiple egregious extra benefits violations within the program. SMU is the only school that the NCAA has ever handed the death penalty. It took SMU years to overcome the downfall of their program. In fact, it has only been in the last few years that SMU has been any good at all, but they will never again the team they were in the 1980s. Far too much has changed in the college football world, changes that left them too far behind to catch up. I broach this topic because the NCAA is currently considering sanctions for Pennsylvania State University (PSU), and "the head of the NCAA declared the so-called death penalty has not been ruled out." I seriously doubt the NCAA will go that far. PSU is too much of a cash cow, with its storied history and placement in a BCS conference, and I don't think the NCAA has the backbone to exercise that level of integrity in this matter, especially after what recently happened with Cam Newton and Auburn and Terrell Pryor and Ohio State. Granted, those latter violations are FAR less serious in nature than what has happened at PSU the last fifteen years. Certainly, that is why the death penalty "has not been ruled out." But the fact that the head of the NCAA made that statement publicly proves to me that it is nothing more than hot air, an empty threat. So PSU will not join SMU as the only other team ever to receive the death penalty despite far more serious violations; I mean human rights violations. The biggest issue still at stake, however, is the welfare of those who suffered at the hands, not just of Jerry Sandusky, but of the entire entourage involved in perpetuating his actions, even creating a climate that made his continuing abuse of them possible. Regardless of what happens to PSU, it will change nothing that happened to those poor young men, whose lives are forever tarnished.