Ex-Brown Hooper Joe Paterno Back in NCAA Football Child Abuse Headlines

If you had a pulse in the last few years, you know Joe Paterno became the only major-college coach to reach the 400-win plateau before he was fired by Penn State trustees after the arrest of long-time assistant coach Jerry Sandusky on child sexual abuse charges. But what you might not know is Paterno, who died 2 1/2 months after his dismissal, was a basketball letterman for Brown in the late 1940s. Paterno's scoring average of 7.3 points per game in 1947-48 was second highest on the team.

The NCAA, usually more concerned with highest bidders and vital politically-correct issues such as Indian nicknames and transgender restrooms, had no choice in the wake of the scandal other than slapping Penn State with serious sanctions resembling a major earthquake hitting 7.3 on the Richter Scale. But similar to Paterno going overboard in trying to preserve a "success with honor" image, the rush-to-judgment NCAA seemingly embarked upon a slippery slope with its timely and wide-ranging penalties. After everything subsequently surfacing, it was risky recently for PSU's president to step out on a think limb saying he was appalled by media coverage surrounding allegations Joe Pa knew about Sandusky's subterfuge as far back as the mid-1970s.

It was also disconcerting when a TV ban was shunned in favor of unilateral action dictating that something didn't occur on the field or court such as negating Paterno's victories since the late 1990s. The NCAA tried this history-revisionist sanitizing in basketball in the 1970s by acting as if Centenary's Robert Parish and Minnesota's Mychal Thompson didn't exist - ignoring their statistics - because those schools were on probation. The NCAA's "Grand Experiment" ploy discounted Parish's achievements, but CollegeHoopedia.com lists him as the nation's top rebounder in 1974-75 and 1975-76 and will continue to cite Paterno as the all-time winningest football coach in his Brown University basketball bio. What's next for the NCAA, pretending Thompson's son (Klay) didn't play for Washington State and become an NBA splash-brother teammate of Stephen Curry?

Moreover, a total of 11 Final Four teams have had their NCAA Tournament participation vacated. But how many more achievements would have been vacated if the NCAA truly addressed scholastic fraud and feckless drug testing with investigators as competent as former FBI director Louis Freeh? Shouldn't the NCAA also go back in time and vacate the Nittany Lions' 2001 Sweet 16 appearance after leading rebounder and second-leading scorer Gyasi Cline-Heard tainted the team by being sentenced to 16 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges of conspiring to distribute crack cocaine?

Mark Emmert, who previously called Paterno the "definitive role model," seemed to be on a self-promotion "Star Trek" of sorts, going where no NCAA president has gone before. But what truly would have been unprecedented would have been penalizing one of his peers in the egghead old boys club. Why didn't Emmert also pummel ex-PSU president Graham Spanier by piously reducing number of graduates during his tenure, reducing his fund-raising prowess, fining him a portion of his pension, etc.? At least Kenneth Starr, the former independent counsel who assembled a report serving as the basis for President Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998, was removed as Baylor's president and the football coach dismissed in the aftermath of a probe finding the university mishandled accusations of sexual assault against FB players.

The depravity exhibited by Sandusky, one of the latest best arguments against human cloning, was repulsive and warranted a harsh response. But don't stop there in trying to drain the swamp of a culture of corruption. After all, the NCAA ran the risk of having egg on its face when Penn State players, aware of vultures circling before the Nittany Lions' body was cold, succumbed to a pervasive sense of entitlement and transferred to recent renegade football programs. If you don't think recruiting is cut-throat, remember the looters and grave robbers descending upon Unhappy Valley like flies on a corpse. Does the NCAA really believe its image is improved when standout RB Silas Redd transferred to USC?

Delusional comes to mind if you don't think PSU boasts more academic integrity among its revenue-producing sports than 90% of the members of power conferences. Since the NCAA treated Freeh's work as gospel, it seemed the governing body should have used a portion of the first installment of the $60 million fine and promptly dispatch him and an optometrist to Syracuse's Hoop Kingdom to separate fact from fiction. Either Jim Boeheim saw a former ball boy in his longtime assistant's hotel room on the road or he didn't. Maybe the bespectacled coach can prove he was in a zone staying in his own room reading how to improve the school's drug-testing policy. Funding could have also helped provide clarity regarding bogus classes at North Carolina and recruiting regaling at Louisville.

Keeping in mind a striking number of shameless coaches would be electrocuted if they took a polygraph test, more questions were raised than answered with the NCAA's display of unilateral power. Unless the excessive number of liberal lunatics in academia also blame all of their woes past, present and future on dogmatic Donald J. Trump, the NCAA is positioning itself to pick winners and losers akin to stimulus money from the Obama Administration. How far will the NCAA's reach be under the following set of theoretical circumstances?

• How many championship trophies could be confiscated if there are deathbed confessions acknowledging booster Sam Gilbert's influence during UCLA's glory days under legendary coach John Wooden?

• Will Coach K's victory total be modified downward like Paterno if it is unearthed years from now that recruiting visits to Duke perhaps were sex-capades comparable to the albeit embellished lacrosse boys gone wild or are we supposed to believe this activity only occurs at The Ville dormitories? It could "never" happen, but what if an underachieving McDonald's All-American is more concerned with making a $100,000 Happy Deal for some bling at an upscale New York jewelry store?

• What if there was an erosion of academics for athletes at North Carolina making their diplomas worthy of a sheet of Charmin stemming from funneling many of them toward some scholarly major called African & Afro-American Studies?

• What if Kentucky earns a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for most times going on probation?

• How many times does a prominent coach need to be caught with his pants down before the NCAA intervenes?

• Why doesn't the NCAA establish parameters regarding "exceptions" - scholastically suspect "studs" who don't meet a school's normal admission standards but secure entry because of their special talent?

• Should the NCAA refuse to grant Final Four press credentials to local media that didn't uncover major basketball program transgressions going on right under their noses?

• Should the NCAA, since there doesn't appear to be any statute of limitations, refuse to conduct business with ESPN and its parade of pitchmen until the cable network takes down its "statue" of former commentator Jim Valvano for one of Michael Sam kissing or Bruce Jenner entering restroom of choice? The Nationwide Leader has a "Jimmy V Week" culminating with an early-season two-night classic to enhance cancer research fundraising for a foundation named after an individual who joins John Calipari (UMass/Memphis) and Jerry Tarkanian (Long Beach State/UNLV) as the only coaches to have multiple schools under their watch forced to vacate NCAA playoff participation. Despite not boasting Freeh's resume, a private attorney retained by N.C. State was convinced that the institution could successfully sue Valvano for failing to ensure the academic progress of his student-athletes. Previously, Valvano ran afoul of the NCAA at Iona.

• Should the NCAA enter the political process by finding out what Pennsylvania politicians linked to Penn State school knew about Sandusky and when did they know it as governor and state attorney general?

Amid the PSU controversy, comedian Albert Brooks tweeted that the Paterno statue should have been left up but eternally "have him look the other way." Elsewhere, an artist removed a halo painted above a local mural of Joe Pa.

How many other schools and media outlets have been "looking the other way" or hero worshiping a false idol? And where should the NCAA's monitoring and oversight obligations begin and end? Can anyone say with a straight face it ain't so?