[quote]gregron wrote:
The issue with “fixing the culture” is that you need to hire morally responsible people to run things. That’s the only way to change anything. NOTHING else will work.
The “culture” is dictated by the people who run the program. Get good people in there and the culture is good, have morally questionablr people in their and, well, you see what happens.
No punishment to the university will change things.[/quote]
Yeah, but how do you prevent morally-repugnant, corruptible people from getting hired in the first place? Everyone thought JoePa was one of those guys and he turned out to be a complete piece of shit. I think the problem is that the culture attracts the sort of people who don’t belong in amateur sports and the culture also can be corrupting in and of itself. There is Big Time Money involved with high-level DI football. So much money that schools are willing to set aside temporary morality for permanent wealth.
The truth is that there are only about a dozen schools in Division I-A that have never been sanctioned by the NCAA. And only one of those schools, Stanford, has a good sports program across the board. In fact, Stanford routinely wins the award for best overall sports program in the NCAA, which they won this year.
So it’s possible to have a top-notch sports program without falling victim to the corrupting power of money. But Stanford is the rare school that gets so much money from tuition and donors that they don’t need to give the athletic department, and especially the football team, extra leeway in exchange for a more successful program and more money. Stanford is constantly resisting calls for a lessening of academic standards so that it can recruit more football players. But other schools can’t do this.
So the culture really stems from the massive amount of money that is involved and the best way to avoid corruption is to lessen the influence that money has had.
That being said, I don’t think shutting down the entire football program is the answer. The NCAA needs to enact more safeguards or whatever to punish coaches who demand extra latitude for those associated with the football program. They should also allow anyone on the Penn State football team to immediately transfer to any other school without having to wait a year before being eligible to play again on a scholarship. The school should also be barred from any recruiting at all for several years and have all of their scholarships taken away. Any players who currently are at Penn State can keep their scholarships for the remainder of their eligibility, but incoming players (who have not been recruited but come solely by their own accord) are not eligible for any athletic scholarships, only academic ones available to the general student population.
That would effectively decimate the program without actually shutting it down. There would be a mass exodus of players and very few, if any, quality players would go there in the future. Anyone who plays at Penn State in the future would have to REALLY want to play there since they’d be paying their own way to play on a team that would be mostly devoid of talent.