Real Tough Guys

Spare us the oohing and aahing over the “severity” of the sanctions against Pennsylvania State University football in the wake of an investigation that found the sainted Joe Paterno guilty of covering up for a child rapist.  If we were Southern Methodist University, we would secede from the National Collegiate Athletic Association, hire a lawyer and sue for the revenue it lost when its football program was kicked to the curb.

All SMU got from the NCAA was the death penalty in the early 1980s for the good old-fashioned all-American way of gaining an edge  –  paying its scholars to block and tackle.  But Penn State?  It still gets to play, pack its stadium with 100,000-plus fans for each home game this season, and still be on television.  Great.  If you’re so inclined you’ll be able to watch and listen to the blow-dried bloviators speak of the indomitable Penn State community and the “healing” virtues of intercollegiate competition.

This is what passes for disapproval.  Oh well.  We’ll get over it, though we won’t be as big a college football fan as we used to be.  We’re free of that now.  Of course, Western Civilization will fall if Oklahoma falls to Texas this October, but we can take it.

What we can’t take is the sense that the NCAA is somehow trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.  Self-righteous to a fault, the NCAA proved to be as gutless as the Penn State administration and its hypocritical head coach.  We don’t have the numbers, but $60 million is probably what parking tickets are to Federal Express   –   just the cost of doing business

No, the NCAA flubbed it.  To sleep at night it chose to tell itself a story, the one about what a tough guy it was for making the Lions cut back on the number of linebacking studs it could stuff into Theory of Volleyball 101.

In our ideal world, every male freshman would receive a flyer (or a text message nowadays) informing him of football tryouts the Saturday before Labor Day, leather helmets would be optional, the coach would be a professor wanting to make some extra dough.

But, alas, it isn’t so and never was.  The men who ran Penn State and its football “program” thought it more important than little boys and sought to protect it rather than them.  By not pulling the plug, so did the NCAA.