No NCAA outcry about Penn State?

No NCAA outcry about Penn State?

Perhaps it was publishing deadlines that led Bill Benner [Nov. 14] and the IBJ to miss the local angle to the Penn State scandal.

NCAA President Mark Emmert issued a statement [Nov. 10] noting the NCAA is “actively monitoring developments” and “as the facts are established through the justice system, we will determine whether Association bylaws have been violated and act accordingly.”

A non-lawyered up translation: “We ain’t touching this with a 10 foot pole … not our problem!”

Not quite “Profiles in Courage.”

The NCAA statement falls nicely within the culture of cowardly silence widely being pilloried at the core of this sordid affair. Borrowing from Benner’s headline, complicit media cowardly silence should correspondingly bring shame to local scribes.

For perspective, had a grand jury report “alleged” that Jerry Sandusky had paid for a Nittany Lions tattoo rather than engaged in child sodomy, the NCAA would be piously and sanctimoniously condemning “student athlete” corruption and the serious violation of its cherished “Association bylaws.”

There are only two reasonable explanations for Emmert’s statement: 1) sodomizing young boys in NCAA member institution locker room showers violates no “Association bylaws,” or 2) “Association bylaws” have been violated, but the NCAA has opted for a weasel- over a character-based response.

Either way, the convenient deference to the “justice system” neither passes the smell test nor masks the NCAA’s broken moral compass.

Again, from Benner’s column:

Said President Abraham Lincoln, “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” And from Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Benner and IBJ, you can still do the right thing: Make us proud and speak truth to power!

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Connie Stone