As required by the Consent Decree of July 23, 2012 between Penn State and the NCAA, the Athletics Integrity Agreement is now a reality and it has been released to the public after a month of diligent effort. I’ve made a copy of it available here for your perusal. This copy must have been pre-signed by Jim Delany, commissioner of the B1G; the lines for Hot Rod Erickson and Deutschmark Emmert are blank. Yeah, blank is a good description.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet — I’d have no objection whatsoever if someone wants to abstract it and summarize it in the interest of saving me the trouble. Otherwise, if you have any comments on it at all, I’d love to read them.
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Joe says
Lot’s of reporting and bureaucracy and councils and more reports and quarterly this and yearly that, but two things stuck out to me.
1. Looks like if we behave ourselves and eat all of our vegetables for the first two years and demonstrate via compelling evidence (whatever the hell that’s going to be) PS can request and the monitor recommend that his stay be shortened from the mandated 5 years or eliminated completely. Naturally the NCAA and only the NCAA can approve this request. However the rest of the bullshit in the consent decree would remain.
2. PS agreed to adopt mechanisms designed to ensure staff, players and certain others “do not permit their collective or individual reverence or deference towards any individual, team or other aspect of the athletics department to undermine” aspects of NCAA, Big Ten and university rules.
So can you tell me who the hell are “certain others” and how this will be objectively measured? This is not only football, this is every team!
Maybe we can measure using some combination of the following:
-Attendance at pep rallies?
-Stadium/arena crowd noise levels?
-Margin of victory?
-Did we send Emmert and Delaney a card on their birthdays?
I’m sure there are others, but I guess we’ll need to develop an empirical equation that can determine a “reverence rating” for each sport (the equation would certainly be different for golf than football I would guess) and use this to report back to the NCAA.
What the hell is this shit? Can you imagine measuring if reverence of the men’s BB programs at Duke, Kentucky or UConn is excessive? Maybe we should ask Alabama or Ohio State what formula they are using to measure reverence of their football programs and how they are keeping it under control.
If this is going to be crammed up our arse, it should be crammed up every other NCAA members arse too for the good of the game!
For the love of God, I’m beginning to think a four year death penalty or joining the NAIA would have been the better options!
The Nittany Turkey says
I finally got around to reading your response. Apologies for my tardiness, which also applies to my forthcoming last-minute game prediction for OU.
It was interesting that with respect to (1) no one at the BoT table was able to answer the question about how much the compliance officer would be paid. (A follow-up question about what George Mitchell is being paid also met with double-talk.) If Erickson and Peetz don’t know the answers to these questions, who does?
I found the mention of reverence and deference in (2) to be a rather comical allusion to Joe Paterno, but sadly it almost has the feel as an obligatory mea maxima culpa in the form of “in order that it might never happen again.”
“Certain others” in the same vein is no doubt is an oblique reference to Paterno’s kids. We can’t have our spawn making us feel important anymore. Also, Brent Musberger. He is no longer permitted to apply his famous superlatives to Penn State.
The NCAA expresses its reverance ratings in terms of dollars. So, I suppose that it would be easy to generate a statistical model that would provide for objective measurement. It would be a great linear programming project for a graduate student. You’d have to include constraints for basketball tournament revenues and all — if a school generates a lot of that scratch, then their allowance for football reverence is greater, and so forth.
You know damn well that we’re special. The NCAA looks upon us differently than other NCAA members — because they can! They’ve got the weight of public sentiment behind them and they damn well know how to use it.
We must be strong though. All of our words will nothing to mitigate the damage that has been done by the Erickson/Peetz laser focus on the future [with abject, obsequious, yet dismissive apologies for the past].
—TNT