Penn State Football: How Badly Do NCAA Sanctions Hurt Recruiting?

Wow. Talk about "unprecedented."

Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA, has laid extremely crippling and severe sanctions upon the Penn State football program:

• $60 million fine
• Four-year postseason bowl ban
• Reduction of 10 initial and 20 total scholarships over four years
• Vacation of all wins from 1998-2011
• Five years probation

No, Penn State did not get the death penalty, but this basically puts the football program in critical condition.

Recruiting will become extremely difficult for Bill O'Brien and his staff. And that's not just because of the tarnished reputation that PSU will have moving forward.

For starters, let's examine the four-year postseason bowl ban. If you commit and sign this year and the coming recruiting cycle, what will you be playing for?

It certainly won't be for a Big Ten championship, a berth in the Rose Bowl or a national title.

Sure, school pride and personal pride are great, but recruits want a chance to compete for titles and bowls, and they won't be afforded that if they sign up to play in Happy Valley.

You sign with Penn State this cycle, you work hard and lift weights all winter, battle during spring ball, early-morning lifting in the summer, offseason film study, go through a grueling training camp, work hard each in-season practice and fight to win each Saturday. Yeah, your pride will be fine, but you'll always want to compete for more, as in a bowl game and/or championship.

Another key element to this announcement is that returning players at Penn State are free to transfer and play at an FBS school this fall.

The scholarship reduction is also a severe blow. If you look at USC, I think Lane Kiffin and his staff would tell you this stipulation has made life most difficult for them.

The Trojans have only about 74 players on scholarship this year. The cap is 85 scholarships. Penn State will only be allowed 65.

They will lose about 40 scholarships, as they will only be allowed to sign 15 recruits per cycle for the next four years.

Depth is going to be a big-time problem for the Nittany Lions.

The coaches at Penn State are going to have to battle the tarnished and embarrassing reputation on the recruiting trail, plus the scholarship reductions, plus selling a recruit on coming to play for basically nothing for a program that technically has not won a game since 1998.

Even if they are the preseason No. 1 team in the country, USC still has big-time depth problems on their roster.

You can only imagine what Bill O'Brien will have to endure. 

Even the $60 million fine will affect recruiting, because you have to imagine that the recruiting budget for the program will be affected since the fine is so great.

So maybe the Nittany Lions are forced to reel in their recruiting proximity to just the east coast and Midwest.

Maybe there's a greatly reduced number of recruiting trips to distant hotbeds such as California, Texas and Florida.

It just so happens that those three states are the top three hotbeds for high school football talent. 

This is devastating for Penn State, and the only thing that I can imagine would have been even more crippling to the program would have been banning them from being seen on TV.

Recruiting is going to take a substantial downfall in Happy Valley, and it will be twofold. 

First, take a recruit that is a high school senior or junior now. Why would you go to Penn State?

You have no bowl game to play for, the atmosphere is down, the reputation of the university and its football program is tarnished. You won't have much depth to help you win, and there are so many intangible obstacles.

4-star DL Greg Webb is already gone to North Carolina, and I expect stud QB Christian Hackenburg to bolt as well. Just yesterday, Hackenburg told Scout.com that he'd stay committed if it wasn't a four- or five-year bowl ban.

Well, it is just that, so one would have to believe Hackenburg will look elsewhere.

However, here is where it gets really interesting. Say you're a 10-year-old stud Pop Warner recruit around the Northeast or Midwest.

You're too young to realize how bad this situation is and how bad these sanctions are. However, the sanctions are so severe that the on-field product of Penn State football will not be winning many games or playing in any bowls for a while.

So by the time you develop into one of the best recruits in the country and Penn State starts recruiting you in 2018, 2019, 2020, etc., you will have become accustomed to seeing Penn State lose games, not win any bowls. You'll note that the USCs, Alabamas, LSUs, Floridas and Michigans of the world are the winning programs.

So why would you, a top-notch prospect, go to Penn State when you've grown up watching them struggle? You wouldn't; you'd go to to the school you've come to know as having a winning program.

My point is that this is very close to recruiting death.

Sure, Penn State will sign about 15 solid football players each February, but that alone will be tough, depth will be next to nonexistent, recruiting will get tougher because you won't be winning much, and the public perception of the program will be negative.

Based on the sanctions by Emmert and the NCAA, one can't fathom why any elite recruit would sign with the Nittany Lions right now.

Again—wow.