The NCAA’s Counterintuitive Leadership

The much anticipated announcement by the NCAA’s sanctions against Penn State University in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse conviction and the report by Louis Freeh regarding the cover up, resulted in prime example of counterintuitive leadership.

 

During the announcement, NCAA President Mark Emhert boldly proclaimed, “Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing, and protecting young people.”

Yet the sanctions he went on to announce do exactly that!

The sanctions include: a $60 million fine, equal to one year’s revenue from the football program, which will be placed in a fund to aide victims of sexual abuse nationally. Penn State will be banned from Bowl appearances for four years and will have their football scholarships reduced from 25 to 15. There are a number of compliance agreements and oversight stipulations as well.

 

Where it gets interesting is the fact that the NCAA will vacate all of Penn State’s football wins from 1998 – 2011. I get the fine and bowl and scholarship stuff, but why the collective punishment of the student athletes who earned the victories on the field in those games? What does that do to educate, nurture and protect those people who worked hard to earn those victories? Those students had nothing to do with the cover up, perpetrated by the University’s leadership, of the sexual abuse perpetrated by Sandusky, yet the NCAA has seen fit to penalize them.

This flies not only in the face of common sense, but the statement made by Ehmert. This amounts to the NCAA aiding Sandusky and Penn State to once again screw young people! The focus and blame should be placed on Sandusky who committed these perverse crimes and those in leadership positions who made the choice to cover up those crimes. Until that happens, untold damage will continue to be done to the value of the education and degrees being EARNED by students of the University.

A Failure to Lead…Not a Failure of Leadership

The headlines speak volumes; Fox News; Report by former FBI director finds Penn State concealed child sex abuse, ABC News Report: Paterno Concealed Sandusky Abuse, and CNN (with bad choice of lead) Probe: Penn State Showed ‘total disregard’ for victims.

The report in question is the one released today by former FBI Director, Louis Freeh, outlining his investigation into Penn State University’s mishandling of the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal.

In short the report concluded: “In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at the university – Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley – repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse.”

In an amazingly dead on comment, a janitor at the University concluded that ‘the University will close ranks to protect the football program” after another janitor witnessed Sandusky sexually assaulting one of his victims.

I previously wrote a piece that hinted at this conclusion; that the University was more concerned about their public image and protecting their crown jewel, the Football Program. How many historic examples can we point to that show the cover up is always worse than the crime. For what would have amounted to a short term hit, that could have been easily remedied with a strong public relations campaign and community outreach; the alleged leadership of the University created an in-excusable firestorm that will likely do damage to the University as a whole and the football program in particular.

While Sandusky is an undeniable jizz who should spend the remainder of his miserable life in the worst hellhole of a prison, I think the case could easily be made that former University president Graham Spanier, former VP Gary Schultz, athletic director, Tim Curley and yes even Joe Paterno are deserving of a cell down the hall. Their utterly repulsive lack of action turned them into pimps for Sandusky serial child rape.

How those who directly witnessed Sandusky rapes and those who chose to cover them up didn’t call the police, let alone commit blunt force trauma on Sandusky is beyond comprehension. The fact that this cadre of despicable scumbags could feel so little for the victims is almost beyond explanation.

I originally called this a failure of leadership, but the University’s desire to cover up is so pervasive that it really amounts to a failure to lead. Think about how deep mindset extended for this cover up to remain so bullet proof for so long. The fact that no one cracked!  is astounding. No one stepped out of line and did the right thing, all in a effort to protect the mighty blue and white.

Despite the fact that I have a child finishing a degree at the University, I don’t feel sorry for the University when it comes to the all out legal onslaught that they will face from Sandusky victims; you reap what you sow.   

The Penn State Mess…A Failure of Leadership

As the Penn State sex abuse scandal continues to spiral out of control I can’t help but think of the clichéd old line about the cover up being worse than the crime; although if the allegations are proven true, that will be a difficult case to make in this instance. All too often the actual victims of the alleged crimes have been forgotten about in the media swirl around the cover up.

While I don’t want to forget about those victims, I do want to focus on how the cover up was truly a failure of leadership that created the current maelstrom that we are confronted with.

If the allegations against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky had come to light at the time the original events are said to have taken place, I have no doubt that there would have been a backlash against the football program and there would have been short term damage that would have impacted the recruitment, booster support and national standing.

If the University had stepped up and done the right thing, any damage would have been short term in nature. I can’t begin to guess what the thought processes of the leadership at the school might have been when it was determined that they would as quietly as possible sweep the eye witness allegations aside and cover up it all up. I would give good odds that trying to avoid that damage and form a protective shell around the University’s cash cow had to be part of the motivation for it.

This needless to say was drastically, dramatically short-sighted on their part. What was called for was certainly more than just following the ridiculous law of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which mandates a bare minimum reporting standard of merely alerting the next person up the food chain and nothing more.

Quite frankly I can’t imagine what the command structure or thought process was that prevented the Penn State graduate assistant who allegedly witnessed that sexual assault from stepping in and kicking the living daylights out of the attacker or reaching for the phone to dial up the local police; I’ll leave that for another debate.

What was called for was a clear, measured response: that means involving the appropriate authorities, like the Pennsylvania State Police who have the experienced investigators to take on this type of probe and are free and clear of the questionable encumbrances of the University police force. A critical communications plan should have been activated; again bringing in reliable outside expertise would help to establish a clear timeline and set forth the steps that the University had undertaken to address the allegations.

While it certainly would not have been a priority the University could have limited any negative for Sandusky by pointing out that these were allegations and that the responsible step was to have a complete investigation.

This measured response would not however include taking the overstep that Duke University blundered into, when members of their lacrosse team faced allegations of rape, which included pulling the plug on the lacrosse program. When the allegations fell apart, Duke was left holding the bag; where the mere implication of a crime was enough to illicit an over-reach.

This measured and timely approach would have limited the negative impact on the entire University and the football program. Instead the leadership of the University decided on a path that lit the fuse on a much larger and more impactful time bomb that finally exploded this past week. I say finally, because it was absolutely, without a slightest doubt going to happen. Anyone who knows anything about sexual predators knows that these are not one and done offenders, they repeat their vile crimes again and again.

Now the devastation to not only the football program but the entire University will be almost immeasurable, not to mention the alleged damage that Sandusky has been allowed reek on new victims in the interim. By taking immediate action, the leadership of the University could have actually been lauded for doing the right thing.

It’s unfortunate that colleges and universities envision themselves to be bastions of high standards and that acting out and outright crimes are outliers rather than occurrences that happen at the same frequency as they do out here in the “real world.” Despite any number of examples that prove that the need to be direct in their response, these cover ups will continue to happen and morph into full blown crisis’s.