The allegations against Penn State coaches and officials have altered the landscape of college football. (Allen Mock via Creative Commons)

Perhaps we should have seen this coming.

Tattoos, boosters, recruiting firms, yachts, greased palms and John Junker. The list goes on and on.

We’ve come to expect college-football programs to break the rules, but we turn the other cheek because the game means more to us than that.

And oh, what a game it is. 

 It’s triple overtime. It’s 90-yard touchdown runs. It’s game-winning fifty-yard field goals. It’s fourth and one from the opponents’ 40-yard line with a minute to go and down by six.

But it’s also much more than that. 

It’s the way it makes us feel on Saturdays. It’s the pride. It’s the anticipation of walking into a stadium on a crisp fall afternoon with 80,000 others, as the smell of hot dogs and burgers wafts through the air. It’s the rumble of a marching band as it takes the field. It’s the student section. It’s the old-timers returning to campus.

But this. 

 This is not how it’s supposed to feel. These rules were never meant to be broken. But, perhaps we should have seen this coming.

After all, transgressions of this magnitude can only be built on the backs of smaller ones. A culture of corruption takes time to build, and college football has been traveling that road for quite a while. Just ask SMU.

Once the first domino falls, it becomes harder and harder to stop, especially when everyone else is doing it.

But this. This is something else entirely, right? This has to be an isolated incident.

An isolated incident in the one place we were sure it could never happen – at a school Mike McQueary used to boast to recruits has "never been investigated or sanctioned for any major NCAA infractions." I guess we know why, Mike.

If the cancer has spread to Paterno and Penn State, then the game's condition has gone from critical to grave.

Why has a college football been allowed to get away with so much for so long?

From the administration’s perspective, a high-profile, winning Division I-football program leads to bigger conference television packages, bowl-game payouts, more alumni donations, and more student applications due to increased publicity. For the head coaches, it means they hold a hefty bargaining chip when the time comes to renegotiate their six and seven-figure salaries.  

This was certainly the case in 2002 when McQueary allegedly witnessed Jerry Sandusky molesting a child in the Penn State locker room, and there's even more money at stake now.

The University of Texas will reportedly receive $11 million annually from ESPN to broadcast all of the school’s sporting events on the newly-launched Longhorn Network, in addition to another $4 million per year paid to the school’s marketing agent IMG. Notre Dame recently announced plans for its own channel too. 

This type of 24-hour coverage will provide a huge boost to Texas’ recruiting efforts, not to mention its bottom line. However, the Longhorn Network has created much discontent among other Big-12 schools that claim Texas now has an unfair advantage in the conference. As a result, Texas A&M and Missouri have jumped ship to the SEC, in the hopes of securing more money in new deals. Conferences across the country are now trying to build their ranks and attract bigger TV contracts.

This year, Big-10 teams will receive payouts of $22.6 million from the conference, with $7.9 million of that total coming from the conference television network, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. With income like that, teams can't afford scandals. Penn State officials made a choice to protect the system rather than Jerry Sandusky’s alleged victims. The fear of becoming a “have-not” in college football was so great that they sold their soul to the devil.

In order to find the root of a problem, we are often told to simply “follow the money.” Unfortunately, the NCAA has followed the wrong trail. The money exchanging hands at the top levels of college football is far greater than that which Reggie Bush received from sports agents, or Ohio State players received for selling their jerseys, yet the NCAA only seems to care about those.

If college football continues to ignore the problems at the top in favor of blaming their side effects, then the game we know and love will soon be completely unrecognizable. 

What must be done in order to get that feeling back?  

Some level of financial parity must be restored so that college football can be allowed to find its sanity and its soul.

It’s time for the NCAA to be reminded that college athletics is supposed to exist as an alternative to professional sports rather than a mirror. They must set a higher bar for athletic programs, officials, players and themselves. These so-called stewards of the game need to act like the leaders they claim to be and ensure that this never, ever happens again. 

Did the NCAA create the monster that, allegedly, is Jerry Sandusky? Of course not. 

 Did their cutthroat-business mentality foster a culture of fear that led to a university-wide cover-up? Yes. 

The NCAA has failed college football fans on many levels. Apologies won’t change what happened, but they will help us turn the page so that we can work towards making Saturdays feel right again.

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