Penn State Scandal: Nittany Lions Should Dissolve Football Program

Penn State needs to fire its football program. Drastic times call for drastic measures, and Penn State needs to first and foremost regain its integrity.

Anything short of this is going to leave the university open to the perception that it is still putting the success of the football team above all else.

If the Penn State board of trustees is committed to the statement: "We are committed to restoring public trust in the university," which was issued in a press release and found on ESPN, it needs to stop playing football—at least for a couple of years. 

This is a necessary action to make the following statement from trustee Paul Silvis, from the above linked article, a reality:

"

It's just shameful what happened. We need to focus not on football, not on Paterno or any of that crap. It's about putting systems, procedures, checks and balances in place so this can never happen ever again.

"

Checks and balances are a start, but as we've seen a system is easily corruptible when dealing with the money and power that comes with a football program.

This scandal has disturbingly illuminated the fact that the football program trumps everything else at the school. This is what happens when a university president sweeps the accusations, which pointed to a football coach being a child molester, under the rug.

Penn State president Graham Spanier has been the man in charge of ensuring the betterment of the university as a whole. He felt the best way to do that was to ensure the success of the football team, and that led him down a morally corrupt path.

Now that the grim details are coming to light, it seems clear the actions of Spanier, and those working under his supervision, acted with an unfathomably self-serving agenda.

And he did all of this under a board of trustees that now expects people to believe it will be beyond corruption because it put in a system of checks and balances. A system it is only implementing now that it is caught up in the most heinous scandal in the history of college sports.

That is not going to cut it.

Penn State needs to prove it is committed to getting back to being about academics and integrity first and foremost.

Simply firing the people involved is not enough. This would do nothing to curtail the perception that the new regime would be just as quick to bend its morality to the needs of the football team.

As it is, it is to easy for people to be cynical of their intentions. Sure, they would have new system of checks and balances presiding over new employees in place, but with the lure of the kind of money the football program is generating it would be to easy for that system to again become corrupt.

According to CNN Money, the Penn State football program generated a profit of $50,427,645 over the course of the school year ending in 2010.

This was the third-most profitable program in the nation.

The massive profits of the football have clearly dictated the morals, or lack thereof, for this school. Is the public supposed to believe that has changed because of a statement?

The continued generation of this profit opens Penn State up to further corruption, and an educated public will not be eager to place trust in the notion that Penn State is committed to doing the right thing. 

And why should it? Had you asked anyone on the Penn State board of trustees before these allegations came to light, he or she surely would have said integrity and the trust of the public are top priorities.

No university has ever violated the trust of the public to this degree. The ensuing reaction needs to be equal to the action. Penn State has to take an unprecedented measure to restore that trust.

The loss of profits the football team generated would cause a complete downsizing of the athletic department. It would free up the board and the university to focus on academics and integrity, which would ensure that a foundation was built to allow people to believe this was an institution devoted to the greater good.  

Anything less would be a Band-Aid, and consequently a failure.

Penn State owes this drastic step to the public, it owes it to the alumni and current students, it owes it to the alleged victims of Jerry Sandusky, and it owes it to itself.