Sorry Ohio's Image in your eyes would get tainted.  A player on the current PSU roster should be left in purgatory?  The coaches re-recruiting these kids are helping the young men out.  If you are a DE, DT, kicker, returner, or a fast wideout and excelled at PSU you can go play the game you love and make an immediate impact on the new program.  If you bleed PSU than stay; if you like your degree from PSU and don't want to play than take the option the NCAA charted.

Get on the phone MAC coaches and pick up some of these guys and up the playing level of the conference. 

I think they lost 30 over 3 years. PSU is losing 20 per year. But the killer is the open hunting season on current players at PSU.

Don't get me wrong; I would love to see the MAC start to become relevant and this is a good opportunity to do so.  The younger players are the ones who are more likely to transfer, and they could start for several teams in this conference.

I guess the idea of our coaches poaching a program that's down because the NCAA is allowing it doesn't sit right with me.  If a player wants to transfer without penalty, that's fine.  But to openly say "open the floodgates!" on recruiting from another squad, meh.  If a player wants to come to our schools, we should be all hands on deck to pick them up before others do.  The whole thing just doesn't sit right with me.  It's not like if we do this I'll be that guy and yell GO BACK TO STATE COLLEGE or call for Franks head or something like that, and I'd welcome any player that would become part of the Bobcat family.

And no, I'm not naive enough to think that others won't be doing it.

The real killer along with the schollie reduction is the Bowl Ban. (It was open season on USC players too)

USC kinda got lucky they were able to stagger the bowl ban and scholarship losses. This past year was the first year with the reductions, but the bowl ban is done. So the recruits won't notice the difference. In addition, USC will start feeling the scholarship reductions in 2-3 years.

With Penn State 4 years is a LONG time and they got a relatively no name coach versus USC getting Kifin. Plus just the nature of the problems is easier to gloss over. USC was paying players... not going to stop kids from going there. PSU's issues... that scares parents.

Now that makes perfect sense.

Thanks for clearing that up. I remember "15" during the presser and was wondering why no one had reported that number since.

Now, it is crystal clear.

I really hope Frank is contacting some of their guys and selling this team's potential to be special.

I hate being in the position of defending Penn State, but until convinced otherwise I think this was a HUGE overreach by the NCAA. I still fail to see where the NCAA gets jurisdiction to penalize the program.

Our society is based on rule of law. Although it "seems" right sometimes to loosely interpret established rules and laws, there are significant consequences for doing so. This is a very slippery slope.

I still haven't heard what specific NCAA rule(s) was/were violated by Penn State. (& no, I'm not convinced by "lack of institutional control" unless I see a definition how the definition applies to a violation of a specific NCAA rule).

I'm obviously not saying that people didn't break laws and that said individuals should be punished according to established law for those violations. They should be. Neither am I defending the actions of members of the Penn State administration.

A crime was committed in a football facility, covered up by several high ranking administrators at the university, including the head football coach.  Maybe I heard this wrong, and if so I do apologize, but I heard that in the course of the original investigation they were going to go to the police, but decided to keep it "in house" after talking to Paterno.  That's enough for me to think it was in their jurisdiction, but I'm by no means an expert on this stuff.

Now, a question I pose, did covering this up give PSU a competative advantage?  If the answer is yes, then there is no reason for the NCAA to stay out of it.

OSU did not get penalized for tattoos - oh never mind, if you still don't understand that you never will.

sigh..thanks for the imput...and missing the point.

if you'd like I can re-edit to include 'lying over' for you.

Interesting article regarding the "true costs" of penalty on ESPN: http://espn.go.com/blog/playbook/dollars/post/_/id/796/true-costs-to-penn-state-unknown

I would hardly say the penalties are "so harsh that the death penalty may have been perferable"...now if the Big Ten would have kicked them out of the conference.

Erickson is saying he agreed to these penalties rather than not having a football team for up to four years.

You would be right if the NCAA was a state/government that had to abide by laws. But the NCAA is an association, ie a club if you want to think of it this way. Moreso it is a private club and allowed to set up their own rules/regulations/ethics to regulate their members. While there is no specific rule in this case, god help us if they had the foresight to think of this exact situation. They do have some rules that probably give them broad powers in case of unknown items. This is why alot of contracts have ethics clauses. Basically saying if you do something so bad, and out of the rhelm of thinking this could happen, we can punish you. In the NCAA's case, they do have an ethics clause, which this case probably falls into.

It's not like Emmert had this power to do this, he was given special authority by the NCAA presidents, ie the 'representives' of all the members had to decide this was against the ethics of the whole group.

Could Penn State thumb it's noses at this and go to court saying there is no rules regarding this? Yep, they could, and they could probably win. BUT, I am sure the NCAA has rules that allow them to kick out members, and this could have forced the NCAA to look into those measures. Basically telling Penn State if you don't want to abide by the decisions of this organization, then we will vote you out of this organization.