A team carries 105 players. Of those 85 are under scholarship and a travel squad is 56 players. It appears Penn State will lose at least 20 players this season alone. They can potentially lose up to 40 or 45 according to some commentators. College coaches are crawling over the campus like cockroaches at night in HCP’s kitchen. So here’s the question- at what point does Penn State have to shut down the program with player defections? I work with a 2-time all American small college linebacker and he states that at their level, most freshman are not physically able to play much and if they lose too many skilled scholarship players there will be serious safety issues and they will have to close down the program. Maybe this is what the NCAA wanted all along. My co worker opines that if 30 scholarship players leave they will start considering closing the program down and will have to at 35-40 players. Any thoughts on this?
I posted this on another thread that I thnk the NCAA should not have handed down sanctions first, PSU should have, and they should have death penaltied their football team for five years. Shown they give more a shit about what happened then the NCAA does! It's a sign of class and accountability! This is the biggest black eye ever put on a school that plays D1 football and they should have governed themselves first!!! PSU needs some years to focus on other things but football and let this ugly time period go away. They have a wonderful school and that's where the focus needs to be now. Instead we'll watch this team essentially rot right before our eyes for the next 4 years, with no chance of doing anything and keeping the low grade stomach ache of what happened there always present. Shut it down! Let the school and country heel from this tragic event!
I don't know if I prefer the Death penalty approach or maybe a long term approach that would both penalize the school and make it hurt for a longer period of time without shutting down the program. It's a hard decision. Also, not withstanding the heinousness of this crime(s), I think it's not as dramatic as your last sentence indicates. No disrespect intended, but criminals are found in nearly every entity and if the primary option is to shut down the entity, we'd have no catholic church, boy or girl scouts, or government as well as hundreds or thousands of other businesses.
I don't know man, this Sandusky has been doing some wicked shit for almost 40 years..... PSU needed to be well more proactive than the NCAA first on these issues in dealing with their football program and athletic department as a whole. They lost institutional control without a doubt! In this case PSU has to lead by example, outside of taking down Paterno's statue what have they done? This PSU problem was not a sports one, so the NCAA shouldn't have been involved, it was a school and criminal issue spanning a couple of decades and PSU should have addressed it head on upon Jerry's conviction! I'm not saying shut down PSU, I'm saying the football program where these crimes centralized for 40 some years..... It's a surgical approach to the university as a whole and one that with the football teams revenue tells the nation that PSU takes these types of crimes upon it's citizens very seriously!!The football program from the coaches to the janitors turned their backs on horrific crimes and that department needs to be closed till the fear of losing your job pales in comparison to witnessing a felony and saying nothing at the expense of our youth. The fact that the NCAA had to tell them penalties need to be imposed makes me wonder if PSU gets it at all what's been going on here! Some might say is this fair to the current players or the past players, what did they do? Well the current players can transfer to any school they like and get a clean start, and the past players can come to grips with the fact that Jerry was using their facilities as a coach, and later as a man using PSU to market his summer camp to do some pretty awful shit all while Paterno swept it under the rug as to not draw negative attention to his football team and his winning %! IF I was an alumni of that school it would be hard to pick tradition over doing the right thing here! PSU has more to worry about than just losing games now, they have 40 years of victims that will be coming out of the woodwork and class action suits in waves! 60 million in fines will seem like a gift when the attorneys for these poors kids get done!
