[2569] Historical revisionism and NCAA’s pretension
July 24th, 2012 by Hafiz Noor Shams
What Jerry Sandusky did was wrong. Although I am sympathetic of Joe Paterno, his failure to report Sandusky is a grave moral lapse. Sandusky deserves to be punished, and so too Paterno.
But I ultimately think the punishment meted against Paterno and Pennsylvania State University is just too much. I agree with an opinion at UMGoBlog.com that the NCAA has stepped out of their authority to punish Penn State.
But out of all things, what I find most distasteful now is the attempt at historical revisionism.
There are several cases of revisionism. One was the removal of halo from a painting depicting Paterno. Second was the removal of a statue of Paterno. This appears to have caused a lot of grief among the students there. Three, the worst of all lot, is the stripping of wins by Paterno from 1998 and 2011. All those 112 wins and two Big Ten championships. With the stripping, officially, Paterno is no longer the winningest college football coach in NCAA history.
So, suddenly, all those wins mean nothing. The 2005 and 2008 championships are vacated and oh, to make it better, Ohio State University is now the sole champion for the respective year.
One just cannot lose a conference championship just like that and much less two.
You might as well remove all, statues, of, lion, at Penn State. Let us pretend that Penn State does not exist.
But people were there and they saw it. All the Big Ten school alums who watch football know what they saw. I remember Paterno. The wins did happen.
As somebody mentioned it on Twitter earlier, the stripping is a case of NCAA pretending that the wins did not happen.
Official NCAA record does a shit job at recording history. And right now, the unofficial history is the truth.
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