The penalty on Penn State is severe, which it should be

It wasn’t the “death penalty,” but for some it’s death by a thousand cuts.

The NCAA did not shut down Penn State’s football program, but it imposed penalties that will reverberate for years. Indeed, stripping the Nittany Lions of their victories may seem like a symbolic gesture, but it rewrites the record books. Legendary coach Joe Paterno is no longer the winningest coach in college football history. It is a title that will not be attached to his name into posterity.

Paterno doesn’t have to live with that. He died in January. But his increasingly shrill family members — who seem to show more concern for his legacy than for the suffering of the young victims of assistant coach Jerry Sandusky — will eventually come to understand that action (or inaction) has consequences.

Among those consequences, the NCAA:

Imposed an unprecedented $60 million fine.

Banned Penn State for four years from postseason play.

Cut in the number of football scholarships it can award.

Erased 14 years of victories, wiping out 111 of Paterno’s wins.

In addition, the Big Ten said Penn State will not share in the conference’s bowl revenue during the NCAA’s postseason ban. That will cost Penn State another $13 million.

‘Panicked response’

A statement issued by the Paterno family characterized the NCAA sanctions as a “panicked response to the public’s understandable revulsion at what Sandusky did.” That view suggests that the public is not equally repulsed by the circumstances that allowed Sandusky to molest adolescent boys on the Penn State campus and elsewhere, even after Paterno, Penn State President Graham Spanier, former athletic director Tim Curley and former vice president Gary Schultz had reason to know that boys were not safe in Sandusky’s presence.

Suggesting that those four men are anything but complicit in Sandusky’s abuse of boys ignores a considerable body of evidence included in the report by a team of investigators headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh.

That the effects of the NCAA sanctions will have repercussions on others who did not enable Sandusky cannot be denied. The budgets of other sports at Penn State are likely to suffer, unless Penn State uses tuition money to subsidize their operations. Football players who are at or planned to attend Penn State face difficult decisions about their future. Businesses that thrived on income generated by Penn State fans will see their bottom line shrink.

But all of that prosperity was an outgrowth of a culture that put football near the top of Happy Valley’s food chain. Those who profited by it are bound to suffer.

In the larger sense, that culture has been nurtured by the very entity that now condemns it, the NCAA. It has done more than its share to push college football into the same money pit in which major professional sports compete for market share.

The Penn State tragedy has evolved into an examination of priorities and values. And the lesson to be learned is that when the leaders of any institution become so consumed with winning that they are blind to evil in their midst, something terrible is bound to happen.