NCAA's ruling for Penn State shows its irrelevance

THE LEGAL WORDS have been stacked now with such care. The news releases explaining the legal words have been massaged just so. Nowhere do they say that the NCAA, the pig, has just been slaughtered with its own knife. But that's what happened.

The NCAA just wanted to be relevant again, don't you know. The big conferences run everything anymore, and the football behemoth has gone and swallowed the world, and the NCAA is left with its basketball tournament to run - a beloved tournament that, truth be told, isn't a pimple on football's ass. All of which leaves the NCAA with a continuing search to convince people it still needs to exist. And then Jerry Sandusky happened, and the NCAA saw its opening.

There is no need to recount the details. But when the Penn State report by former FBI director Louis Freeh cited failings by coach Joe Paterno and some administrators to deal with evidence of Sandusky's crimes, the NCAA and its president, Mark Emmert, acted.

They acted with a speed unknown in the annals of the organization. They ignored pretty much every one of their guidelines along the way. They crafted a punishment for Penn State that was an unprecedented combination of financial penalties ($60 million), competitive penalties (scholarship reductions and bowl bans), and symbolic penalties (stripping the school of 112 wins).

It was six parts public relations and four parts gall. They put together the whole thing in about 5 minutes. Emmert and the NCAA had no power to do any of this, yet they did it anyway. Penn State agreed to the sanctions just to make the whole thing go away and because it feared something worse.

But now, here we are. And as you read this, the NCAA is attempting to eat a sandwich the size of Rhode Island.

The scholarships had already been restored. The bowl ban had already been lifted. But now, because of a lawsuit brought by state Sen. Jake Corman and Pennsylvania Treasurer Rob McCord, the $60 million in penalties will be spent on child-abuse prevention within the state of Pennsylvania. Now, the 112 wins will be restored to the records - 111 for Joe Paterno, one for Tom Bradley.

Now, in the ultimate of ironies, the NCAA's recklessness has managed to push Paterno a step closer to sainthood in the public mind and to give Penn State's loyalists a platform to proclaim the school did nothing wrong.

They came to bury JoePa, not to praise him - but praise him, the NCAA has ended up doing, at least in a public relations sense, because when you give them back their wins, you make it seem as if they did nothing wrong. That is just the reality of what people hear. The truth is that the NCAA gave back the wins not because of anybody's guilt or innocence, but because everybody knew they had no right to take them away in the first place - but just try getting people to hear that explanation above the cries for the return of the Paterno statue to Beaver Stadium.

It's a neat trick, simultaneously being so brazen and so incompetent, but the NCAA has pulled it off in style.

But it just wanted to be relevant again, dammit. So what if it had to cut a corner or 12? So what if an internal email acknowledged that the whole scheme was just a "bluff," and that the NCAA expected to get away with it only because, well, because who in their right mind could argue against punishing Penn State after the Freeh report?

As it turned out, a lot of people thought the NCAA had overstepped. I am someone who thinks that the firing of Paterno was justified, and that the Freeh report is convincing. But I'm also someone who was on the Penn State campus the day the NCAA dropped the hammer on the school and who wrote about what a terrible overreach it was. Many people saw it the same way.

Now that the NCAA has rolled over - because it was going to be dismembered if the case went to trial (something else it doesn't say in the news release) - it is left embarrassed and further weakened. As part of the agreement to end the suit, Penn State had to say that the NCAA "had a legitimate and good faith interest and concern regarding the Jerry Sandusky matter," which is true enough, and that the NCAA acted in good faith, which isn't true in the least.

What nobody says is that the NCAA had the power to act on that legitimate interest and concern. Nobody says it, because the NCAA does not have that power now and never did have that power. But because the NCAA could not admit the truth, it overstepped and not only was it clobbered, it bolstered the reputations of those they sought to condemn.

Nice work, that - a staggering work of unprecedented arrogance. For the NCAA, it would be a fitting epitaph.

On Twitter: @theidlerich