Penn State wins vacated from '98-11, fined $60M

The NCAA slammed Penn State with an unprecedented series of penalties Monday, including a $60 million fine and the loss of all coach Joe Paterno's victories from 1998-2011, in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.

Other sanctions include a four-year ban on bowl games, the loss of 20 scholarships per year over four years and five years' probation. The NCAA also said that any current or incoming football players are free to immediately transfer and compete at another school.

NCAA President Mark Emmert announced the staggering sanctions at a news conference in Indianapolis. Though the NCAA stopped short of imposing the "death penalty" — shutting down the Nittany Lions' program completely — the punishment is still crippling for a team that is trying to start over with a new coach and a new outlook.

Sandusky, a former Penn State defensive coordinator, was found guilty in June of sexually abusing young boys, sometimes on campus. An investigation commissioned by the school and released July 12 found that Paterno, who died in January, and several other top officials at Penn State stayed quiet for years about accusations against Sandusky.

Emmert fast-tracked penalties rather than go through the usual circuitous series of investigations and hearings. The NCAA said the $60 million is equivalent to the annual gross revenue of the football program. The money must be paid into an endowment for external programs preventing child sexual abuse or assisting victims and may not be used to fund such programs at Penn State.

"Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people," Emmert said.

Emmert had earlier said he had "never seen anything as egregious" as the horrific crimes of Sandusky and the cover-up by Paterno and others at the university, including former Penn State President Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley.

The investigation headed by former FBI Director Louis Freeh said that Penn State officials kept what they knew from police and other authorities for years, enabling the abuse to go on.

There had been calls across the nation for Penn State to receive the "death penalty," and Emmert had not ruled out that possibility as late as last week — though Penn State did not fit the criteria for it. That punishment is for teams that commit a major violation while already being sanctioned.

End the madness, Penn State, and give us Paterno's statue

Give us the statue, Penn State. Take it down, and do it now.

What about this don't you understand? Seven months ago the school fired Joe Paterno for not doing enough -- barely doing anything, really -- during the previous decade to stop longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky from molesting kids. Eight days ago Penn State released its own commissioned report on the Sandusky scandal, a report that focused on blame for the cover-up and concluded it lay heavily with Joe Paterno.

And still the statue stands. At Penn State. Outside the football stadium where Jerry Sandusky worked for 30 years, where he built up his name, his reputation, to the point that he was a celebrity around State College. Sandusky used Penn State football to win over parents, get access to their kids, take them to campus or his basement and do unspeakable things.

And still the statue stands.

Give us the statue, Penn State. It would be a symbolic gesture at this point, nothing more, but symbolism is all we have. We can't go back in time and wipe Sandusky from the face of the earth, though if we had a time machine ...

We can't fix the victims he ruined, because some wounds are just too deep. We can't throw Paterno in jail for abetting a pedophile, because he's dead. We can watch the perjury trial for Paterno's spineless cronies, former athletics director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz, and hope their trial goes so badly that they get the maximum sentence, but whatever it is won't be nearly enough -- and anyway, they were just doing what Paterno wanted. So was former school president Graham Spanier.

So give us the statue, Penn State. Take it down because at this point, all you can do for the world is to acknowledge that something went terribly wrong within your football program. And every second that the statue stands with its acid-churning words -- "Joe Paterno ... humanitarian" -- is another second that we think, no we know, you still don't get it.

So understand something, Penn State. This is not another Joe Paterno rant. We've been there, we've done that, and who knows? Maybe we'll do it again someday. But don't confuse this story about Joe Paterno, statue, with any of those earlier stories about Joe Paterno, man. The man has been taken down, his reputation dismantled by his own ambition and cowardice.

The statue remains, even if everybody knows how this story is going to end. It will end with the statue coming down, just like the Joe Paterno story was going to end with his dismissal -- everyone knew it -- once the grand jury indicted Sandusky and the world learned that the man Paterno once groomed to be his successor had been grooming young boys, a secret known only to a handful of people in the world, that handful including the victims, yes, but also including Joe Paterno. When that story broke on Nov. 5, we knew Paterno would be fired. He had to be. Penn State fought it for four days before finally giving in.

Now, the statue. It will come down, although the longer Penn State waits, the more this looks like the school is worried about triggering a student riot. We all know what happened the night Paterno was fired -- the students went nuts.

Light poles were knocked down and TV trucks were turned over as profanity-chanting students -- not all of them, but thousands of them -- embarrassed themselves and their school. Surely that's a consideration now, what with some students taking the statue so seriously, even now, that they're camping out alongside it to keep it safe.

If the statue hasn't remained up to assuage the student body, what else could it be? It can't be the insulation of State College, insulation that spawned this evil scandal. Can it? That insulation still exists, but only on the micro-level. It exists inside the Paterno house, with his children defending their father, attacking the Freeh Report and vowing to conduct their own investigation to get to the bottom of this whole matter, as if the Paterno family could possibly find out information that eluded the former head of the FBI.

The Paterno family is tone-deaf, saying things nobody wants to hear, but they're insulated from reality just as their father was for decades. They're surrounded by idolizers and apologists, and also they're family. Blood is thicker than water or common sense or even, apparently, a father's cover for a pedophile.

But that's no excuse for Penn State. There is no more insulation there. It has been ripped away, exposing the school as a frail phony. The world is angry and getting angrier with every day the statue stands, and the school knows it. Someone even rented a plane to pull a banner that suggests domestic terrorism will ensue if it isn't removed. "Take the statue down," the banner warned, "or we will."

See, it's no longer a statue of a football coach. It's a monument to everything Paterno ever did, and while he won a lot of games and graduated a lot of players, he also chose not to protect a lot of victims when he covered for a pedophile.

Give us the statue, Penn State. Is Joe Paterno all you see in that cold, unfeeling pile of bronze?

We see Jerry Sandusky. Standing outside Beaver Stadium. With a smile on his face.

Source: Gregg Doyel, CBSSports.com

Jerry Sandusky Found Guilty, Now Healing Begins

Yesterday evening, Jerry Sandusky, former Penn State assistant football coach, was convicted on 45 of 48 counts related to sexual abuse of boys. While celebrating this end result, we should also be praying for the victims and their families. That they may now have closure and that their wounds may begin to heal.

We should also pray for the Sandusky family. I'm certain that having to live through this process has been one of the most painful things they have ever had to endure. (Let's not forget after the conclusion of the trial, it was revealed that the Sandusky's adopted son had also been a victim of his father's.)

Finally, let's pray for Jerry Sandusky. Now that he has been found guilty he will, more than likely, be spending the last of his days on Earth in jail. Let's pray he can/will repent for the heinous sins he has committed and will somehow be able to find peace within.