By Fitzgerald Cecilio

Indianapolis, IN

Already faced with lawsuits from victims of Jerry Sandusky's sexual abuse, troubles keep piling up for Penn State as the NCAA is threatening to inflict the "death penalty" on the school's football program if it fails to properly explain the manner it handled the scandal.

"I've never seen anything as egregious as this in terms of just overall conduct and behavior inside a university and hope never to see it again," NCAA president Mark Emmert said in an interview with PBS, referring to the findings of former FBI director Louis Freeh regarding the incident.

Freeh, in his report, said late head football coach Joe Paterno, along with former president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and former vice president Gary Schultz, conducted a cover-up of abuse allegations against Sandusky, who was convicted of 45 counts of child sex abuse.

"What the appropriate penalties are, if there are determinations of violations, we'll have to decide," said Emmert, who added that he wouldn't equivocally take a possible death penalty to the football program off the table.

Emmert said the NCAA would wait to hear Penn State's response to the Freeh Report before making any decision.

"We'll hold in abeyance all of those decisions until we've actually decided what we want to do with the actual charges should there be any. And I don't want to take anything off the table," Emmert said.

The death penalty was first applied to SMU during the 1980s after repeated violations of the NCAA rules but Emmert said the Penn State situation is diferent.

"This is completely different than an impermissible benefits scandal like happened at SMU, or anything else we've dealt with," Emmert said. "This is as systemic a cultural problem as it is a football problem. There have been people that said this wasn't a football scandal.

"Well it was more than a football scandal, much more than a football scandal. It was that but much more. And we'll have to figure out exactly what the right penalties are. I don't know that past precedent makes particularly good sense in this case, because it's really an unprecedented problem," he added.

 

 

NCAA Considers 'Death Penalty' for Penn State Football