Benner again misses mark

Once again, Bill Benner [July 30] misses a key point in the NCAA’s handling of Penn State when he applauds the NCAA’s “courage and swift response” in his hypothetical reaction to it being his son subjected to sodomy in the Penn State locker room showers.

Quite the contrary, rather than applause, the NCAA is worthy of contempt for its slow, cowardly and lawyered-up process and response.

It was last November that IBJ published my letter to the editor in which I made the point that the NCAA’s convenient deference at the time to the “justice system” neither passed the smell test nor masked the NCAA’s broken moral compass in dealing with this sordid affair.

And here we are eight-plus months later and under the cover of the “justice system” the NCAA belatedly imposes a fine that’s a rounding error in Penn State’s endowment and (gasp) retroactively adjusts the football team’s record. As stated in my earlier letter, not quite “Profiles in Courage.”

Back in November, Benner offered the following quotes: “To sin in silence when they should protest makes cowards of men” (Abe Lincoln) and “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” (Edmund Burke).

Yet no reference in Benner’s latest column to the cowardice underlying the delay of the NCAA’s “justice.” Regrettably, I find his tone to represent quite the opposite theme.

Benner is a key reason I read IBJ and I am a fan, but perhaps on this topic he is giving us a view inappropriately influenced by his day job in external affairs with a collegiate athletics conference. If, heaven forbid, his son had indeed been one of the Penn State victims, I bet he would have wanted more from the local sports scribes.

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Connie Stone