If everyone agrees that football became too central of a focus, then isn’t handling this scandal via football penalties just an exacerbation of the problem?
This is a criminal matter, a civil matter, a Department of Education matter and, most importantly, a matter that victims of the players will struggle to deal with for the rest of their lives. It’s serious. It’s sickening. It’s societal.
To boil it down to a decrease in grants of aid or recruiting visits is to trivialize it even further. For a moment, just forget about football.
The NCAA tried this with Penn State and since then my thinking has changed. The actions of Jerry Sandusky were horrific, but removed from the emotions of the day, penalizing a football team for such criminal depravity was the NCAA trying to seize a moral high ground.
It’s unlikely it caused much healing among Sandusky’s victims. Instead, it missed the point. If Penn State allowed football to get too big, then why honor that by making Penn State football the target. If anything it galvanized some fans who sadly used the sanctions to play the victim card, like going 10-2 rather than 7-5 is some kind of inalienable right.