Originally Posted by
festivus
Where I think you (and T) are wrong is you are talking about this punishment as if it was designed to correct the behavior of PSU.
It is much, much more broad than that. The message to OSU, and to Oregon, and to Ole Miss, and to USC and to Notre Dame and Maryland and Duke and Miami, is that the culture around your football program may not be such that people are hurt because of the paramount sanctity of your football team.
The message is not just to PSU, and certainly not to Paterno's heirs or the PSU players, but to all the NCAA programs: If you allow people to be sacrificed to protect your team, we will hit you so hard your program will be on its knees.
*You* may not care that the wins were stripped away, but that's you. If they were my wins, I would care.
edit:
Ninja'ed by Shas.
Anyway. You might read my post and think "If the message was to schools *other* than Penn State, it's not fair to punish Penn State this severely." To which I respond "It was the Penn State community in which janitors could not go to the authorities for fear of losing their jobs; it was the Penn State community in which high ranking administrators could not conduct their own business in their own departments without freedom from interference by Joe Paterno. It was the community and the culture which made this tragedy possible; it needs to change and to heal and this is the beginning of that process. A slap on the wrist would have encouraged a continuing culture of willful ignorance when it comes to problems in or near the football program."