The start

By Adam Cancryn

The NCAA penalties applied to Penn State must be the beginning of something larger.

This is a start.

On Monday, the NCAA slapped Penn State with the stiffest set of penalties for a D1 school in a quarter century. Each one of the sanctions struck at the core of the monolith of unchecked power known as the university football program, and together, they served to cripple that program. Penn State football's recent past, obliterated. It's foreseeable future, gone. Right now, there is no hope left for football in Happy Valley.

And that's as it should be. How do you punish a program filled with men who stood knowingly yet idly by while that same sense of hope was snuffed out in child after child over the course of 13 years, and maybe more? What is adequate justice? Can that even be achieved? It's a question that might never be satisfactorily answered.

The NCAA tried, though, and in doing so performed as respectably as could be expected. Its penalties were harsh, but well thought-out. They were designed not for maximum shock value, but to hit those responsible with all its might.

Vacating wins is normally a hollow exercise, one ignored by the institution at fault and its fans. But here, that simple sanction has a brutal effect. It succeeds in wiping out the remnants of Joe Paterno's legacy, eliminating his much-revered title as winningest coach in college football. Stripped of 13 years of wins, he now sits a forgotten 12th on the all-time list. Gone also are his bowl wins and milestones over that period that served as Paterno's canonization. The last chapter of his football resume sits empty now, a stark mirror of his morals.

In an extra twist of the knife, the last quarterback to lead Paterno's Penn State to an official victory is Mike McQueary, the man whose initial report about Jerry Sandusky went unheeded.

The scholarship losses and bowl ban strikes at the future, erasing Penn State from contention until at least 2020, by some estimates. It's the "new death penalty," Yahoo!'s Charles Robinson said on Twitter: Severe enough to gut the program, yet not permanent so as to make a martyr out of it. At the same time, all current players are given a potential escape route from the cloud that covers Penn State. They can transfer elsewhere with no eligibility penalties. It's not perfect, but it's the best of a bad situation.

So this is a start. It's a chance for the NCAAto remake itself as the fair-minded regulator of college athletics, rather than the corrupt handmaiden to big-time sports, a role it's played far too well in years past. The NCAA has failed at nearly every attempt to police and punish its member universities, and a misstep with Penn State would have been both easy and ruinous. Indeed, several writers seemed to have their condemnations of the organization ready to ship no matter the final outcome.

Yet the NCAA demonstrated the kind of measured response it has often lacked. Its consent decree from Penn State was perhaps the most crucial part, given the questions around its use of unilateral power. And while cleaning up college sports is like taking a mop to a flash flood, there is a glimmer of hope that this might mark a turning point. The NCAA now has the opportunity to start doing its job in full, if it wants.

This is a start. Toward a culture change at Penn State, toward reform throughout college sports. But it's just that: A start, and nothing more. The university, the town of State College, the Pennsylvania authorities and the collegiate athletic system must take it from here. The entire Penn State Board of Trustees must go. Criminal charges must be filed against those — all of those — who broke the law to cover up Sandusky's crimes. The culture of hero worship and hush-hush attitudes in State College and every other university community must be destroyed. And within those schools, the sports-above-all mentality must change.

Right now, all of that is more a wish list than an imminent reality. One only needs to look to the NCAA's massive TV contracts, or peek at the vilest reactions to Penn State's sanctions, to grasp how ingrained the current system has become. But until that changes, we won't be done. These penalties and hard words won't be enough. Aided by an age of unprecedented power, profit-taking and muddled priorities, countless children saw their shot at a normal life end. Out of that end must come the start of a new, better era.

Adam Cancryn is an editor and co-founder of Began in '96.