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

Emmert seems determined to go where no NCAA president has gone before. Not only is he willing and apparently anxious to involve his organization in a situation that does not fit neatly into NCAA enforcement bylaws, but he also seems willing to put on the Roger Goodell cowboy hat and sheriff's badge, making himself the chief arbiter of justice.
To the best of my knowledge, the normal NCAA enforcement process has not taken place with Penn State. No investigation by enforcement representatives, no notice of allegations, no formal charges against the school. Nor has there been a Committee on Infractions hearing, wherein the school is afforded the opportunity to rebut any violations it is accused of, or a meeting of the committee to assess penalties.
[Related: Penn State to learn NCAA sanctions on Monday]
The most by-the-book institution this side of the IRS appears to have thrown the book out the window. Instead, we have fast-forwarded through every customary phase of NCAA justice, alighting on something that seems to more closely approximate the NFL's current credo: In Commissioner We Trust.

COMMENTARY
The sins of the father

By Rick Reilly | ESPN.com

Updated: July 13, 2012, 6:56 PM ET




What a fool I was.

In 1986, I spent a week in State College, Pa., researching a 10-page Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year piece on Joe Paterno.

It was supposed to be a secret, but one night the phone in my hotel room rang. It was a Penn State professor, calling out of the blue.

"Are you here to take part in hagiography?" he said.

"What's hagiography?" I asked.

"The study of saints," he said. "You're going to be just like the rest, aren't you? You're going to make Paterno out to be a saint. You don't know him. He'll do anything to win. What you media are doing is dangerous."

Jealous egghead, I figured.

What an idiot I was.

Twenty-five years later, when former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was accused of a 15-year reign of pedophilia on young boys, I thought Paterno was too old and too addled to understand, too grandfatherly and Catholic to get that Sandusky was committing grisly crimes using Paterno's own football program as bait.

But I was wrong. Paterno knew. He knew all about it. He'd known for years. He knew and he followed it vigilantly.

That's all clear now after Penn State's own investigator, former FBI director Louis Freeh, came out Thursday and hung the whole disgusting canvas on a wall for us. Showed us the emails, read us the interviews, shined a black light on all of the lies they left behind. It cost $6.5 million and took eight months and the truth it uncovered was 100 times uglier than the bills.

Paterno knew about a mother's cry that Sandusky had molested her son in 1998. Later, Paterno lied to a grand jury and said he didn't. Paterno and university president Graham Spanier and vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley all knew what kind of sick coach they had on the payroll in Sandusky. Schultz had pertinent questions. "Is this opening of pandora's box?" he wrote in personal notes on the case. "Other children?" "Sexual improprieties?"

It gets worse. According to Freeh, Spanier, Schultz and Curley were set to call child services on Sandusky in February 2001 until Paterno apparently talked them out of it. Curley wasn't "comfortable" going to child services after that talk with JoePa.

Yeah, that's the most important thing, your comfort.

What'd they do instead? Alerted nobody. Called nobody. And let Sandusky keep leading his horrific tours around campus. "Hey, want to see the showers?" That sentence alone ought to bring down the statue.

What a stooge I was.

I talked about Paterno's "true legacy" in all of this. Here's his true legacy: Paterno let a child molester go when he could've stopped him. He let him go and then lied to cover his sinister tracks. He let a rapist go to save his own recruiting successes and fundraising pitches and big-fish-small-pond hide.

Here's a legacy for you. Paterno's cowardice and ego and fears allowed Sandusky to molest at least eight more boys in the years after that 1998 incident -- Victims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10. Just to recap: By not acting, a grown man failed to protect eight boys from years of molestation, abuse and self-loathing, all to save his program the embarrassment. The mother of Victim 1 is "filled with hatred toward Joe Paterno," the victim's lawyer says. "She just hates him, and reviles him." Can you blame her?

What a sap I was.

I hope Penn State loses civil suits until the walls of the accounting office cave in. I hope that Spanier, Schultz and Curley go to prison for perjury. I hope the NCAA gives Penn State the death penalty it most richly deserves. The worst scandal in college football history deserves the worst penalty the NCAA can give. They gave it to SMU for winning without regard for morals. They should give it to Penn State for the same thing. The only difference is, at Penn State they didn't pay for it with Corvettes. They paid for it with lives.

What a chump I was.

I tweeted that, yes, Paterno should be fired, but that he was, overall, "a good and decent man." I was wrong. Good and decent men don't do what Paterno did. Good and decent men protect kids, not rapists. And to think Paterno comes from "father" in Italian.

This throws a can of black paint on anything anybody tells me about Paterno from here on in. "No NCAA violations in all those years." I believe it. He was great at hiding stuff. "He gave $4 million to the library." In exchange for what? "He cared about kids away from the football field." No, he didn't. Not all of them. Not when it really mattered.

What a tool I was.

As Joe Paterno lay dying, I actually felt sorry for him. Little did I know he was taking all of his dirty secrets to the grave. Nine days before he died, he had The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins in his kitchen. He could've admitted it then. Could've tried a simple "I'm sorry." But he didn't. Instead, he just lied deeper. Right to her face. Right to all of our faces.

That professor was right, all those years ago. I was engaging in hagiography. So was that school. So was that town. It was dangerous. Turns out it builds monsters.

Not all of them ended up in prison.

I wonder when the last shoe will drop as to the involvement of the sitting PA governor who was to have launched an investigation in 1998 when he was the Attorney General of PA.

Is the state really going to stand for the massive retribution against the University when only a handful of men were responsible for the cover-up?

Due process is important in America...what Penn St should do is refuse to accept the handed out penaltys and sue the NCAA for justice. I doubt that they will. Being over eager to put this behind them will be Penn St undoing.

In a statement Monday, Penn State President Rodney Erickson said the university accepts the penalties issued by the NCAA, an indication that Penn State probably won't appeal the sanctions.

“With today’s announcement and the action it requires of us, the university takes a significant step forward,” Erickson said in a statement.

NCAA President Mark Emmert said that the severe and unprecedented sanctions issued to Penn State and its football program reflected “tragic and tragically unnecessary circumstances.”

"An argument can be made that the egregiousness and the behavior in this case is greater than any other seen in NCAA history,” Emmert said.

He continued: “No price the NCAA can levy will repair the grievous damage inflicted by Jerry Sandusky on his victims. However, we can make clear that the culture, actions and inactions that allowed them to be victimized will not be tolerated in collegiate athletics.”

Penn State was hit with a $60-million fine (the equivalent of the average of its football program’s gross revenues in one year, the NCAA stated), and its football team was dealt a four-year postseason ban and scholarship reductions for four years.

Additionally, all Penn State sports were placed on probation for five years and the NCAA vacated the football team’s 112 wins from 1998-2011, 111 of which were credited to Joe Paterno.

Paterno, who had won 409 games for Penn State in his 46 seasons as Penn State's head coach, is, as of Monday, no longer the winningest coach in the history of major college football.

Instead, Paterno, who died six months ago, is credited with 298, 12th most in the NCAA record books.

Paterno, who had won 409 games for Penn State in his 46 seasons as Penn State's head coach, is, as of Monday, no longer the winningest coach in the history of major college football.

Instead, Paterno, who died six months ago, is credited with 298, 12th most in the NCAA record books.

I think we know enough about the proposed NCAA sanctions to know that their aim is bleed the University to near death and watch them suffer for their crimes.

I'm just pissed he's dead and missed being disgraced while still breathing.