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[The State Of Pennsylvania Vs. The NCAA] - I'm Rooting For Team Meteor
Posts
You've already been given two examples (Triponey, Corbett).
I just want everybody here to know: If I had walked in on a man raping a child, my first reaction would I hope be a righteous beatdown or at the very least a LOUD "WHAT IS GOING ON HERE" and escalated from there.
Because nothing, NOTHING that happened in the aftermath would have been as bad as having to live with myself after walking away.
The greater PSU community <> "Institution". The institution that failed was the PSU board of regents and their subordinates, in particular Spanier, Curley & Schultz.
When the School President, a Senior VP, and the Athletic Director, and the Director of the Campus Police (ignoring McCleary, Paterno, and the facilities workers), all fail to report child sexual abuse. What the hell else would you call it but 'institutional failure'?
Well, lets separate the emotions from the facts. I can understand how given the context of how it happened, the assistant coach may not have instantly known just how to proceed. My point is more to the fact that ultimately he thought the man best equipped to handle this was Joe Paterno, who then told his superior, and everyone apparently thought that as long as someone above them knew about it, they were ok to forget and move on.
Now, I would posit it is an institutional problem when blatantly illegal acts are not quickly addressed by either the football or college administrators, and that it is in NCAA's and student athletes' best interest that the NCAA make it patently clear that illegal acts once identified are to be prosecuted. I know no one in college football wants to talk about it, but there have been other fairly high profile sexual abuse cases where schools tried to sweep it under the rug, and this is a problem I would like to see addressed.
See Notredame
Except all of your examples involve a handful of people. Not once have I seen documented media releases that show someone claiming that shit was not right inside the university football system. Yes, a handful of powerful people can create a shitastic situation. What does that have to do with the community? Also what does it have to do with the NCAA? Did PSU have rules written in suggesting that the coach be the end all be all of criminal investigations?
Obviously I wasn't there, and have done a pitiful amount of research. Maybe there was indications all over the place that paterno/whoever else was covering up criminal behavior. Maybe multiple people had spoken out publicly about this shitastic situation, maybe it was common knowledge to anyone close to the program. If that is the case you are absolutely right, this is a failure of the community, and the football culture it has developed. But I haven't seen the proof yet. Pointing at handful of people and saying they did shitty things does not convince me of this.
A few bad apples with the power to silence critics, deflect inquiries and stonewall investigations.
Putting up a front of respectability and co-opting the surrounding community into defending their actions, "because if they question the leadership of PSU, they are impugning your honor by association".
When did this happen? When did the community indicate that the leadership was more important than criminal accusations?
If this is true, I find it much more convincing than anything else that's been stated. This is truly awful.
This is closer, but not quite the same. When this happened there was no clear evidence of paterno's involvement. In fact one of the most believe stories was that paterno had gone to the police (campus police?) and that they had indicated they were looking into it, but that there was no evidence. The rioters believed that paterno was innocent, not that his coaching career was more important that some silly child molestation scandal.
A few hundred idiots went out on the street shouting things. Some of them had signs.
Meanwhile, literally thousands of other students showed up at a candlelight vigil for the victims.
Some of them had signs, too.
The community raised over a half million dollars in a very short period of time following the scandal breaking for RAINN.
The pictures of the supposed "riot" were less than a block and consisted of less than 1% of the student body, significantly less than those for the opposite, they just made a better story so it got spread a lot more. Yes, there's a lot of stupid people who acted wrong in the aftermath, but attempting to paint the entire student and alumni body as complicit or in agreement with them isn't accurate.
People do not live in a vacuum.
I've discussed the point on contrition before.
I don't know what this means. Are you implying that it would have been impossible for the people involved to limit the number of people who knew what was happening to less than a handful? Seems possible to me.
Yes, we know you feel that once something bad has happened anyone even tangentially related is not allowed to take any actions to help because obviously if they really cared it wouldn't have happened in the first place. Goose.
What it means is that the idea of rogue actors is bullshit. The community chose to be blind.
That is a ridiculous statement. You could make that claim about any criminal activity ever then. Unless you have some proof that the community had any sort of information, then they didn't chose a damn thing. Instead of insinuating that they obviously had the proof, I'd like to effing see it. Otherwise I will continue to believe that the community had no idea what was going on, and the idea of rogue actors is in fact the correct interpretation.
All the stuff about 'punishing the institution' was never about anything other than sating a bunch of folks desire for public vengeance against pedophiles, and also against college athletics. The crimes mostly happened years ago; the principles in the scandal are in prison or dead, or soon will be (whichever.) The idea that the 'institution' can be taught some kind of object lesson with a penalty like this seems profoundly silly to me.
do you lack faith, brother?
or do you believe?
No, what he's trying to say is that there wouldn't have been a cover-up if they did not see some sort of benefit to attempting to cover up the actions. Whether from tarnishing of Paterno, or of sanctions brought against the school, or anything else. It's the "culture of football" argument, which has a certain degree of validity, but those who adhere to it also seem to treat individual schools in a vacuum as well. It works to a certain degree with PSU (moreso than other schools) because of how much Paterno was a figurehead of the entire football program, but the culture argument has never sat well with me. Not because it's inaccurate, mind you - I don't doubt that Curley and Schultz would have done more if there wasn't a certain degree of financial windfall at stake, disgusting as that is. But because when it's brought up in this context, it stops at the barrier of school. If we're going to spread blame around to culture, than it's shared amongst all fans of College Football, as well as all universities. When so much of the revenue which goes to an education facility are based off of the actions of a game, people start taking steps to attempt to protect it because that revenue stream is important to things beyond the game. It's the same root of the problem that a lot of people have with the athletes not necessarily being compensated for their playing, despite how much they bring to the university. And without the sort of incentives which exist in attempting to keep scandals out of the limelight, the covering up almost certainly wouldn't have occurred. But the "football culture" argument is not something limited to Penn State, it's a fact of life for what college football has evolved into for universities in this country as a whole. Doesn't make it right, nor does it justify anything, but attempting to level this as a unique problem of a single school is missing the big picture.
once again:
In what possible universe, do the (in)actions of a football graduate assistant, the head football coach, and the athletic director of a college, in response to crimes that occurred on campus, in athletic facilities, by the defensive coordinator, not warrant action by the National Collegiate Athletic Association....
Here's the god damn Freeh Report:
The bold ones: that's institutional failure.
Not only did the mechanisms to prevent this situation fail, they weren't even put in place.No one knew because there were no reporting mechanisms to follow.
They allowed the football program(and this is the coaches/trainers not the players) to opt out of the school run seminars that told them of their responsibilities under federal law to report on campus crime.
It's like not having working smoke detectors installed, and then claiming you didn't know they weren't working, because you gave all the janitors off every fire-safety day, ever.
That's funny, when the NCAA handed out sanctions I don't remember them saying it was a because the football program had allowed it's members to opt out of their clery act training, or because they hadn't provided proper instruction on whistleblower policies. Instead they said it was because children got raped and the figure heads decided not to pursue it. That sounds more like a criminal justification, rather than an institutional failure justification. I really don't buy the argument that the problem here was that the people involved didn't understand their rights well enough. The problem is that they chose to act illegally for their own benefit.
And amazingly, a lot of us have problems with what's happened at other schools as well - ND has been mentioned as a candidate for investigation by several people, and I want to see the NCAA go and clean up the mess in Missoula, and not to mention the constant raging on the football machines of the SEC. But if you are being honest with yourself, PSU had developed a culture far beyond what many other schools had. And part of that was a self-righteousness that obscured reality - as it was pointed out, Spanier regularly used PSU's reputation as a bludgeon against pushes to improve conditions for athletes. So yes, football culture is a national problem - but PSU had an acute case of it.
Institution <> community. As far as the Penn State Football Program(you know the thing the NCAA actually sanctioned).
Well a graduate assistant, the head coach, the AD, a school VP, and the school president, all had information on this.(Plus the defensive coordinator...)
Let's put this in corporate terms. A worker notices that a fellow employee is doing something against OSHA rules. He tells his foreman. His foreman tells the plant manager, the plant manager tell the regional director, and the regional director tells the company president. And then the non-safe activity kills 10 people, would you think the company was in some way liable for their deaths?
And the lack of pursuit was because institutional controls were gutted.
Of course those involved acted illegally because of there were benefits. Why the fuck would anyone do something illegal/morally wrong if there wasn't an inherent benefit. The question is whether they are persuaded to do this wrong thing because they are afraid doing the right thing would accomplish nothing and get them in trouble. That is what I am hearing from the "culture of football" argument. That the fan base basically persuaded those people involved by indicating that they didn't care about what's right as much as they cared about winning. If instead those people chose to do this wrong thing because they wanted to make more money/not have their own careers tarnished by this bad act, then it isn't a "culture of football" problem. It's a bad actor problem.
And that's why we never charge corporations for bad behaviour.
Depends. If it was company policy that the worker be doing this unsafe thing, then yes. If it was against company policy that the worker do this thing, and the president decided he didn't give a shit and bribed the 5 people who knew to not say anything, then no. Obviously a lot hinges on how easy or hard a company makes it to report these issues. If there are reasonable practices in place to make sure that workers can report unsafe conditions, but it is covered up by a handful of people anyway, then I would say it is not the companies fault.
Back to PSU, I don't believe the argument that PSU had gutted the oversight practices. I don't think there was a company wide push to make it harder to report criminal behavior. I think a few people at the top used their power to cover up what happened, and the few people below who knew what happened accepted this. If there is some evidence to support the claim that PSU removed practices/protocols that were mandatory, then I retract my position.
It's against OSHA rules, so it already illegal.
And why don't you believe the argument that they had gutted oversight practices. What makes you disagree with the Freeh report on this? The fact that much of the football program didn't even know the name of the law requiring them to report campus crimes, seems like a pretty dead give away on the bad-oversight and reporting practices. They didn't remove them, they never put them in place.
I also love how you can somehow separate the PSU/company from 'every supervisor, manager & executive in the direct chain above the worker in question'. Like if McCleary had just went to a random English Professor THEN PSU would have been duly informed. But instead just everyone from his direct boss up to the school president knew.
Isn't this always the argument though when the NCAA hands down punishments on violations? If we take that reasoning all the way to its logical end, they should never hand out punishments. And maybe there's a valid argument there, but then why have the NCAA at all?
I also doubt that the punishment came from anything but self preservation and PR for the NCAA. But I also think if you have to draw a line in the sand and tell college athletic programs that you will not fail to report sex crimes, the PSU case certainly seems like the logical place to do it.
The thing we have to think about is, what message is actually being sent to university administrators by the PSU process and sanction?
They had a long cover up at PSU, and then when the incident finally became public the people responsible were dealt with appropriately by the legal system (including civil settlements for the victims.) And following that, the university got killed in the media, killed in fundraising, and then killed by NCAA sanction.
Now put yourself in the shoes of some university president or compliance director. It comes to your attention that some university official is a child predator, and has been for some time. Based on the PSU example, a thorough investigation will result in everybody from the president to the lowest whistleblower losing their job, a public relations catastrophe and if athletics were involved in any way, massive sanctions from a mostly-unaccountable NCAA. And since you're equally fucked no matter what you do, every incentive says that you should bend heaven and earth to maintain the cover up and hope you can bury it.
The thing that's being missed when people talk about punishing the offenders in the Sandusky situation is that the conspirators were already acting irrationally. Corporations want first and foremost to make money and sometimes they'll do shady things in service of that goal, so we make the consequences severe enough that the risk makes unwanted actions cost-prohibitive (at least, that's the idea.) But every incentive in the PSU situation already said get rid of Sandusky. It said get rid of him as soon as a hint of this stuff came to anybody's attention. The coverup wasn't the result of a rational, economic decisionmaking process and trying to act as though it was is what's produced this useless penalty.
There are no doubt some public policy responses that this situation should encourage us to adopt; stronger compliance departments with better legislative requirements, whistleblower laws, better training, "awareness" etc. But precious few of the people talking about the PSU incident are interested in that stuff because it's not about that, it's about extracting a pound of flesh and/or grinding and axe against college athletics. Which isn't to say the NCAA/football/etc don't have a ton of problems, but still.
do you lack faith, brother?
or do you believe?
First off, you are missing the point that what made this so damaging was not Sandusky, but the coverup. If a university president, after finding out about such crimes, immediately brought the matter to light, they would be seen positively. It was the coverup that destroyed Penn State.
Second, they were acting rationally, in light of PSU's reputation.
It happened because Sandusky was personal friends with a bunch of folks in the administration and was connected in the community, and when push came to shove it was easier personally for them to just ignore it than it was to face the idea that they were friends/co-workers/whatever with this guy and had been for years. What I read in the emails that became public isn't a craven, coldly rational cover up, it's an unwillingness to confront the issue at all.
do you lack faith, brother?
or do you believe?
I basically took the same thing from the whole debacle. That no one wanted to touch it, instead opting to slide it along to someone else in hopes they would solve the problem.
OTOH, why Sandusky was allowed access to PSU facilities for years after the shower episode raises some troubling questions. (There's ignoring the problem and then there's ignoring the problem.) I really can't see how the NCAA had much choice other than to do what they did given the politics of the whole thing. I also don't buy into the ends justify the means mentality that even though this lawsuit is basically being brought in bad faith, the ultimate goal would solve some endemic problems within the NCAA.
The whole thing just sucks up and down.
I can agree with that very last line. My one line of reasoning with why the NCAA should not be involved in this: They cannot (or will not) consistently and fairly handle their own realm of dealing with fair competition and the amateur status of athletes. They have no right as an organization to deal in criminal matters such as this. We have a full legal and civil system that is in place and working on the matter. PSU broke several laws, but they did not break any NCAA rules or regulations, and as such, they had no place to judge or rule in this manner. They should not get to hold a member institution hostage with death penalty threats for something that does not fall under their purvey.
Meanwhile, other schools have similar cases the NCAA isn't even bothering to look at (hilariously, one of them because the school refused to perform and internal investigation, so the NCAA said they couldn't rule in the matter!). Or in another case, admitting to outright flagrant rule breaking (knowingly offering fake classes to students to help them remain eligible) without blinking an eye. The NCAA is a business that pulls in hundreds of millions of dollars a year as a non-profit organization built on the idea of exploiting the athletes of the member organizations. They do this by promoting big time college football and basketball, and then act shocked and appalled when bad things happen at those schools.
What happened at PSU was a horrible tragedy that goes so far past anything they need to be involved in it's not even funny. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, it's the local home owners association giving you jail time because someone committed triple homicide on your front lawn.
If there is a general football culture problem in America (I think there is, and it is not limited, nor expressed even close to it's worst in State College), then the NCAA is as culpable as anyone in creating and generating it. Their entire business model is based on exploiting it for their own benefit. Until they can start keeping their own house in order, in terms of policing actual cheating and eligibility rules, they don't need to be playing CSI:University.
Sorry, but what happened at Penn State wasn't a fucking tragedy. It was a monstrous act covered up by a school more interested in protecting its reputation than protecting the defenseless, backed up by a community that was more than willing to not look behind the curtain. And to argue that the protection of children, especially the protection of underprivileged children is beyond the scope of the NCAA is the goosiest of positions.
And I would say that Happy Valley was one of the most odious expressions of the culture of college football. For all the derision that guys like Spanier, Meyer, Tressel, etc. get from us, there is a fundamental honesty to them, in that they understand exactly why they are where they are and what is expected of them. But Paterno instead created the lie of the Great Experiment - creating the illusion of academics supplanting athletics, while things remained business as usual. Worse, he and Spanier played the moral scold, blocking moves to improve the lot of college football players, wielding Penn State's reputation as a cudgel in doing so.
And I want to see the NCAA get involved when schools turn blind eyes to abuses and cultures of lawlessness in college athletics. I think that the NCAA should be sending letters saying "Winter Is Coming" to South Bend and Missoula. I want this to be a start.
The NCAA doesn't actually give a shit about that. The bullshit in South Bend happened in 2010. If the NCAA cared, they would have done something. You're fucking mythical governing body that actually cares about student athletes does not exist. The NCAA is built on promoting the same culture they derided in the PSU case, and the fact that you actually bought it that they care about stopping it is hilarious.
And a large part of the NCAA not caring was Penn State and Spanier. And if you had read my past posts on all this, I've said that I want this to be a start - I want the NCAA to change course and go after these schools when they allow criminality. The fact that the Fulmer Cup is an actual thing is something the NCAA should be ashamed of.
The NCAA should be dropping hammers on other schools, like it did to Penn State.
You need to cite some sources on this one.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!