Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

DN Editorial: Corbett's NCAA lawsuit loses sight of the real victims

CONFUSION was our initial reaction to Gov. Corbett's decision to sue the National Collegiate Athletic Association over the sanctions it imposed on Penn State following the Sandusky scandal.

CONFUSION was our initial reaction to Gov. Corbett's decision to sue the National Collegiate Athletic Association over the sanctions it imposed on Penn State following the Sandusky scandal.

We were confused because Corbett the governor, who was once Corbett the attorney general, is also Penn State trustee Corbett, and those NCAA sanctions were accepted by PSU trustees quickly after the NCAA issued them in July. And although it's permissible for the governor to bring such a suit and not the attorney general, it is very unusual.

Two weeks from now, a new A.G., Kathleen Kane, will take office. Kane, a Democrat, has vowed to investigate why it took the A.G.'s office under Corbett so long to investigate the Penn State case. It's safe to say it would be unlikely for her to bring the kind of suit Corbett announced Wednesday. In fact, the governor didn't inform her of this suit.

But as confused as we were by Corbett's news conference, we fear we're not half as confused as Corbett himself.

He says he's bringing this on behalf of the commonwealth as governor, not as trustee of Penn State. The trustees were not invited to join the suit. Nor were they in attendance at the news conference, though half the population of State College appeared to be - students, business leaders, athletes and politicians stood behind the governor as he made his remarks. In Corbett's explanation of the antitrust suit filed in federal court, he alluded to how the NCAA has harmed the citizens of the commonwealth and comprises an attack on the past, present and future students of PSU.

Corbett said, "PSU has been at the eye of a media storm, subject to disparagement for the actions of a child predator." Further, he said, PSU was left to "clean up this tragedy created by a few."

Maybe that's not confusion, but rather a bad memory. So we'll remind Gov. Corbett that the predator was Jerry Sandusky, but also implicated was the culture of football-as-god, an institutionalized acceptance that the football program was more important than anything else, including the lives and rights of children. The NCAA alluded to this culture when it announced its sanctions.

And yes, the sanctions were harsh, including a $60 million penalty, and the NCAA is hardly a group to make a moral point about priorities of college sports, but at least it correctly acknowledged that the root of the problem went beyond a single individual. It's too bad Corbett seems to have forgotten this.

In fact, his emphasis on the economic power of Penn State in creating jobs and livelihoods for many, which he claims the NCAA has imperiled, seemed a rather offensive distortion of who exactly has been victimized by the Sandusky scandal - an offense further compounded by general counsel James Schultz when he pointed out that PSU's football program is the second-most-profitable in the country, and that the NCAA's hit to those profits are imposing "collateral damage" to the citizens of the commonwealth, including business, tourism and restaurant owners.

This misguided suit delivers its own damage to those who were subject to unspeakable horrors that were allowed to happen in the name of another winning season.