Editorial: Corbett embarrassing

The NCAA needs some oversight.

It has the ability to arbitrarily fine its members, leaving schools with no choice but to accept punishment or be forced into less-profitable leagues like the NAIA.

The government might have a role to play in breaking up this monopoly. The organization favors team and business interests over the players, taking only limited action in protecting players from concussions, dangerous pain killers and exploitative colleges. These students need protection.

Enter stage right Gov. Tom Corbett. At a press conference on Jan. 2, he announced he would personally be advancing a lawsuit against the NCAA.

He alleged that the NCAA violated its own bylaws when it sanctioned Penn State with a $60 million fine and other damaging restrictions. He mentioned the antitrust elements to his legal justification.

It’s unclear how legitimate his complaints are. The NCAA might have reached beyond its jurisdiction by issuing the sanctions, but as the governing body of voluntary, consenting members, the NCAA mighty have justification. Corbett must walk through very muddy legal waters to win.

But in his moral justification for the lawsuit, he brushed over the actual crime the athletic organization was seeking to punish, instead focusing on the “collateral damage” being done to small businesses — claiming the NCAA overlooked the larger impact of their sanctions. He claims the organization’s motivation in punishing Penn State was to “enhance the competitive position of certain NCAA members.”

The governor’s statements indicate two things: A. Tom Corbett is probably the most detached, ineffective communicator to have led the Commonwealth’s executive branch since we have been alive.

B. A lot of people still don’t get it. Including the governor.

By insinuating that the motivations for the sanctions were some grand plan to kick Penn State while it’s down, the governor is just stoking the hyper-paranoid attitudes of many in Happy Valley who believe we were circling and waiting for the school to have scandal. He is appealing to those who bomb every message board and party conversation with alleged irregularities in the Freeh Report. He wants votes from Pennsylvania’s own constituency of Bigfoot and UFO enthusiasts.

For this reason, his lawsuit does, as the NCAA says, represent a “setback to the University’s efforts” to move forward.

The sanctions themselves, regardless of their as-yet-undefined legal legitimacy, were the appropriate counterweight to the scandal itself. For years, Penn State earned millions of dollars and dozens of players by playing up its clean-cut, no-scandal football.

Any “collateral damage” could be fairly interpreted as reimbursement for those years living off an unwarranted reputation.

As to the health of the school itself, the four-year bowl game ban, changes to player agreements and vacation of all wins from 1998 to 2011 do not represent insurmountable challenges to the school. Game-day attendance only dropped slightly this year, and long-term fans who remained committed after the scandal itself are unlikely to quit because of these sanctions. ESPN ranked Penn State’s 2013 sanction-burdened recruiting class as 24th in the nation.

The school will go on. The communities will continue.

For Gov. Corbett to call Penn State a victim shows that he doesn’t fully appreciate the cultural problems that led to the scandal in the first place. Even if his legal arguments against the NCAA are legitimate, and even if his lawsuit brings change to the leadership and organization of the college athletics governing body, his insensitivity and deafness to the nature of the Penn State scandal and lack of openness to an appropriate institutional response make this court case inappropriate and societally detrimental.

That, of course, says nothing of his bold politicalization and blatant flip-flop on the issue. But to use Corbett’s words, that might be “piling on.”