Corman Comes to the Realization: PSU's Sandusky Punishments Were All About Image

Well, this isn't shocking for some of us, but I guess it is to the State Senate's New Majority Leader, Jake Corman:

Needless to say, Pennsylvania state senator Jake Corman is more than a little ticked off.

(From his quotes in the ESPN article)

Clearly the more we dig into this, the more troubling it gets. There clearly is a significant amount of communication between Freeh and the NCAA that goes way beyond merely providing information. I'd call it...coordination. Clearly, Freeh went way past his mandate. He was the enforcement person for the NCAA. That's what it looks like. I don't know how you can look at it any other way. It's almost like the NCAA hired him to do their enforcement investigation on Penn State.

At a minimum, it is inappropriate. At a maximum, these were two parties working together to get an outcome that was predetermined.

Corman went on to express his anger with the situation, and illustrate his thoughts on the NCAA's perceived focus on preserving their image.

I'm angry. When you read the other communications we've seen, the NCAA is saying we have an image problem. So it looks like the NCAA was looking to improve its own image at the expense of Penn State. And to do that, they were orchestrating an outcome with Freeh to make it happen...A lot of people were hurt by the sanctions brought down by the NCAA, and to think it was achieved possibly by this coordination by Freeh and the NCAA makes me very, very angry.

As we continue examining these emails, we are greeted with even further evidence from the NCAA members themselves, that they were very aware that this case was likely not one that should be handled by them, as it simply landed outside of their jurisdiction.

The article and new emails continued to hit on the fact that the NCAA seemed to be driven more by their desire to improve their image over anything else, by taking advantage of an easy target in Penn State.

I'm not shocked at all. The handling of this entire scandal by both the NCAA and the PSU Board of Trustees was about protecting themselves and their images, and appearing to do something about the problem. It was never really about the victims of Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State students, or anyone else who needed an advocate. By the way here, I happen to agree with Corman's overall position that the NCAA sanctions were ridiculous, however, that misses a major point in all of this: all of this was to cover what was likely a deeper problem, with trustees involved too closely with Sandusky, either personally as friends, or in a professional capacity with his charity. Perhaps more important to point out here: Governor Corbett was trying to grandstand on this issue too at one point, and Corman was silent about that at the time.