The National Collegiate Almighty Association

“While the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it seems/It would be easier sometimes to change the past.”                                       --  Jackson Browne

What is the most powerful force on our planet, or maybe the cosmos?  Evidently it’s the NCAA.  Apparently they have two powers no other earthly body has: they can change the past and they can punish the dead.  Yes, the old Soviet Union and many other dictatorships have tried, airbrushing out the now-out-of-favor from photographs, altering historical records, and such.  Countries try to change the past: Turkey insists it never practiced genocide on the Armenians.  But there’s always someone, often the world’s majority, to call them on it.

In ancient times – what we used to call the Dark Ages -- some nations and religions would dig up corpses and drive stakes through their hearts, burn, or hang them for purported misdeeds.  You’d think we’d be beyond such primitive thinking. 

But the NCAA has borrowed from the playbooks of the Inquisition and the Stalinist era in its sanctions against Penn State.

True, sports authorities have sometimes changed the past, but with great inconsistency.  Sign a wrong scorecard in golf, and you either get the poorer score you signed, or forfeit if you signed a better score than you made. So your birdie is now a par, your par a bogie.  But that’s in the rulebook.  For decades, almost every sport refused to change a wrong call in the immediate past, except for umpires in tennis over-ruling line calls.  Now we have instant replay in one baseball event, and many football, basketball, and hockey situations.  But baseball refuses to correct an obviously wrong call, even when it costs a player a perfect game and does not alter the game’s outcome in any way.  And soccer absolutely will not sanction corrections, even though its referees have an impossible real-time job.

Sports also change the past when a violation has been discovered that falsifies the game’s outcome – ineligible players, drug enhancements, etc.  Of course they do this with total inconsistency too:  Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark McGwire still hold over a dozen home run records despite steroid use, while cyclists and Olympic athletes are stripped of their titles for the same infraction. 

In the so-called real world, very few democracies change the past because of later discoveries.  Imagine if they did: Colin Powell stripped of his rank because he later told the UN that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction on railroad cars.  Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s names removed from all airports and other public buildings if future documentation proves them complicit in Iran-Contra.  Let’s not even mention J. Edgar Hoover.

One fundamental principle in our civil and criminal society is that the dead cannot be held accountable for their misdeeds. When Ken Lay died in prison, his conviction was vacated, not because of any new evidence, but because his appeal had not run its course.  You can’t try a dead person, so you can’t convict him.  Innocent until proven guilty, especially in the afterlife.

Now we come to Penn State.  Because of allegations that involve one deceased coach and one former coach, a team loses thirteen years of games that it once won, perhaps the largest reality alteration in the history of sports. Who can doubt that the punishment is aimed primarily at the late Joe Paterno, condemned in the Freeh report post-mortem by the testimony of the indicted and disgraced living?  During the years of the forfeits, Penn State players won two Butkus awards (Lavar Arrington and Paul Poslusny).  If they made no  tackles in those years, do they forfeit the awards as well?  Does every Penn State player who was drafted in those years get undrafted because he did nothing during his college days?

            This is not to excuse anything done by Joe Paterno or anyone else at Penn State.  As Marc Antony said of Caesar, “If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath [he] answered for it.”  But to pursue a man beyond the grave serves no rational purpose: does the NCAA really think we need to deter future sports programs from similar behaviors?  Does it claim that if Penn State had turned in Sandusky in 2001, when the crime occurred in the athletic facility, its football program would have been devastated retroactively to 1999?  Do we benefit as a society by punishing the dead and by imagining that a declaration can alter history, even the small history that is college sports?  I think not.  The best thing about the NCAA decision is its fine of Penn State and designation of the money for abuse prevention.  Most of us hope we can change the future: only time travel movies try to do it by changing the past.