I predict - Sandusky will never go to trial and never see a jail cell.

Freeh Report investigators interviewed her, Triponey said, although Triponey said she didn't have any knowledge of issues related to Jerry Sandusky. The questions were about the general culture of Penn State, which she described as "insular and secretive," a culture she said extended far beyond the athletic department. She's also talked to questioners from several other investigations, although not the NCAA, she said.

"I do believe Penn State ought be held accountable for some of what's happened here, but I don't know what that means in terms of a sanction," Triponey said. "I do believe the NCAA has to take some leadership here, and that's not just about Penn State. This is a wake-up call that we all need to pay attention to."

Most important, she said of Penn State, "You've got to change the culture, and the culture is deep. It's not just the leaders. It permeates the place. I think they have an interconnectiveness in their passion for their football program. But I'm not sure that's a genuine sense of community. It's a sense of pride. It's a sense of prestige."

Does anyone else have mixed feelings about the NCAA sanctions against Penn State football? On the one hand, I’m persuaded that the university’s leaders tacitly allowed Jerry Sandusky’s abuse of children to go on for years because they were blinded by a “culture of reverence for the football program.” Josh Levin argued last week that this calls for sidelining the Nittany Lions for a season or two. I see the argument for that, as long as the players can transfer to other schools without having to sit out a season.

The NCAA did provide for transfers without penalty today. But I’m still queasy about how it went about grabbing the moral high ground. The $60 million fine Penn State will pay is supposed to go to “an endowment for external programs preventing child sexual abuse or assisting victims.” That sounds unassailable—except why is the NCAA setting up such an endowment? Shouldn’t this be part of the settlement the university will surely have to reach with Sandusky’s victims? I’m not sure what the NCAA is doing in preempting that process. It makes more sense for a judge overseeing all this litigation to approve one global resolution, after the parties have hammered it out. I’m all for setting aside money for prevention along with compensation. But I don’t see why the governing body of college sports should butt in to the judicial system here.

That’s especially the case given the NCAA’s suspect history and continuing questionable treatment of individual athletes. If you’ve been reading Joe Nocera’s work on this in the New York Times, you know what I’m talking about. The governing body of college sports has a lot to answer for, and all too often seems to put sports ahead of education. So it’s galling to hear NCAA president Mark Emmert now intone, invoking the Penn State sanctions, that “football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people.” Please. Of course it will, every other day of the year.

It’s also odd that the NCAA acted without the usual process of a hearing in front of its Committee on Infractions. Emmert decided that Louis Freeh’s damning report about the university, which Penn State’s own trustees ordered, would take the place of further examination. Why bypass the usual process— what’s the rush?

I also don’t quite understand the idea of “vacating” all of those wins going back to 1998. Maybe the problem is that vacate is such an odd word here. But I’m also not sure what I think about penalizing all the players and coaches who made those victories happen. It just doesn’t seem like the right way to rectify the wrongs.

The NCAA also banned Penn State from postseason play and reduced the team’s annual scholarship allotment from 25 to 15, with each penalty in effect for four years. I see the point: Make the university itself suffer, by crippling what has been one of its greatest assets. And yet, once more, I’m not even sure how much I can get behind this. Why penalize the current and future athletic department, which is no longer led by the people who failed to stop Sandusky? I’d rather see former Penn State President Graham Spanier prosecuted.

The NCAA is coming down not on the individual wrongdoers, but on every Penn State fan. I know some of them are acting crazy in their slavish adoration of JoePa. But many more are surely already punishing the university and themselves. That, plus the civil lawsuits, should be enough.

Shes a blogger, her opinion is worth about what her blog is worth. She doesnt have any responsibility to get anything " right" she merely has to provide gainsay of anything that was decided.

Bazelon is a writer and senior editor of Slate.[1] She has written articles about controversial subjects, such as the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld trial[2] and post-abortion syndrome.[3] Bazelon edits Slate's legal columns, "Jurisprudence", and is co-editor of its blog on women's issues, XX Factor (also known as DoubleX),[4] and regularly appears on The Political Gabfest, a weekly Slate podcast with David Plotz and John Dickerson.
She is also a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.[4] Before joining Slate, Bazelon was a senior editor of Legal Affairs.[4] Her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, as well as other publications.[4] She has worked as a reporter in the San Francisco Bay Area and, in 1993 and 1994, as a freelance journalist in Israel.[5]
Bazelon is also a Senior Research Scholar in Law and Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School.[1] Bazelon and former New York Times legal correspondent Linda Greenhouse are affiliated with the Law and Media Program of Yale Law School.[6]

As long as players don't practice or play games with Penn State between now and the start of the 2013 season, they can jump schools without penalty, the NCAA said. Incoming freshmen also are released from their national letters of intent so they can play for and receive athletic scholarships from other schools.

Coaches from other schools will be allowed to contact and recruit Penn State players until classes start at Penn State on August 27. For the 2012 season only, schools not facing sanctions of their own will be allowed extra scholarships to make room for players they pick up from Penn State.

Although the sanctions will make it tough for the Nittany Lions to compete at the highest levels of college football for the foreseeable future, it could be a good thing for the students of Penn State.

“The school meekly accepted its punishment,” writes Levy et al, “pledging to hold itself to high standards of honesty and integrity.”

There is no doubt that this will be painful for the Penn State football program, painful for the school and painful for the businesses in College Station. Although there are many who bemoan the decision of the NCAA (including Paterno’s family), I’m convinced that the manner in which the university accepts these sanctions could prove valuable to the students who will soon leave the school to become the captains of industry tasked with eventually leading organizations around the country.

Actually strike that....another lesson here is that the new leadership of Penn St is no better than were the old leaders of Penn St at protecting the university and those connected to it.

This will be a lesson learned by schools who get in trouble down the line.

Combined, those two factors have created a scenario that might be even worse than the loss of scholarships and bowls themselves: Penn State may struggle to find anyone willing to take the remaining scholarships that they held on to.
As reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer and other sources, the prized members of Penn State's recruiting class of 2013 -- prospects who would be college seniors in 2017 -- have almost universally softened their commitments to the school and program. While plenty remained loyal to the school throughout the Sandusky trial and subsequent Freeh Report, the NCAA's decision to essentially cripple the program without killing it outright appears to have been a step too far for some top recruits.
Most prominent among those prospects is Christian Hackenberg, a Fort Union (Va.) Academy superstar who is universally considered one of — if not the — top quarterback prospect in the Class of 2013. Hackenberg had long been considered a solid Penn State commit, but immediately appeared to back off that commitment after participating at the Elite 11 quarterback camp, where he starred. According to Rivals.com national recruiting analyst Mike Farrell, Hackenberg is now considering Auburn and South Carolina. More ominously for Penn State, the passer told Farrell that he "wants to play in a bowl game."
That in itself would rule Penn State out.

Penn State faced the threat of a four-year ban on playing football before the NCAA imposed sanctions this week over the school's handling of the Jerry Sandusky child molestation scandal, a university spokesman said Wednesday.
David La Torre said the potential for the multiyear "death penalty" was floated during discussions between Penn State President Rodney Erickson and NCAA officials before Penn State was hit Monday with a $60 million fine, a four-year bowl game ban, reduced football scholarships and the forfeiture of 112 wins.
The school trustees met with Erickson on the subject at a State College hotel Wednesday and afterward issued a statement calling the NCAA punishment "unfortunate" but better than the alternative - the so-called "death penalty."
The penalty hasn't been used since the NCAA suspended Southern Methodist University for the 1987 season. SMU then sat out the `88 season on its own and has never fully recovered its status in college football


Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/football/ncaa/07/26/penn-state-death-penalty.ap/index.html#ixzz21hQdpKoZ

On Monday, the National Collegiate Athletic Association made a remarkable — and disturbing — decision. As one of the sanctions against Pennsylvania State University, it determined that all of Penn State’s football victories from 1998 to 2011 were to be “vacated.” Whoosh! As a result, Joe Paterno no longer holds the major college coaching record for career wins. Someone else now has that honor. George Orwell would be amused.

In his magnificent dystopia, “1984,” Orwell understood well the dangers of “history clerks.” Those given authority to write history can change the past. Those sweat-and-mud victories of the Nittany Lions — more points on the scoreboard — no longer exist. The winners are now the losers.

What was most galling about Emmert’s press conference was its sanctimony. He kept talking about the “values” that athletics was supposed to embody, about how college sports is supposed to be an integral part of academic life and how it should never overwhelm the mission of the university. “Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people,” he said.

But at big-time sports schools, football is always placed ahead of everything else. The essential hypocrisy of college sports is that too many athletes are not real students — and no one cares.

Coaches make millions and lose their jobs if they fail to win. Universities reap millions by filling stadiums and making attractive television deals. They serve as the minor leagues for the pros. Everybody knows this — including the NCAA.

The notion that the Penn State case is going to change all of college sports is absurd. College football almost can’t help but corrode academic values. Nothing that happened Monday is going to change any of that

The essential hypocrisy of college sports is that too many athletes are not real students — and no one cares.

Four years was way out of line and never would have happened if PSU had demanded due process. The first major error was accepting the Freeh report as fact but even after that by fighting the university could have stalled the NCAA long enough to see were the facts really are.

The NCAA set out to humiliate the alumni as retribution for what the NCAA considers their roll in the sports culture at PSU ....