NCAA's Penn State email trouble starts in presidents' outboxes

Let's not pretend the notion that Penn State's arm was twisted into unprecedented sanctions over the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal is something revelatory. Let's not get hysterical over the idea that putting competitive restrictions on Penn State football was primarily a public relations ploy for the NCAA to flex in front of a media that questions its existence more and more each year.

We've known those things for a while, intuitively and anecdotally, long before a handful of e-mails between NCAA staffers came to light Wednesday as exhibits in a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania Senator Jake Corman against the NCAA and Penn State. The fact the NCAA already walked back nearly all of its penalties says more than anything in those e-mails about why their intent was misguided in the first place.

The rest of the noise today is mostly phony outrage, which is typical when it comes to anything related to the NCAA. The question, though, is who are we supposed to be mad at?

And as usual, the people who are most to blame are the ones who always skate by.

The NCAA is in a seemingly endless series of messes because university presidents, by and large, have no clue what they're doing in running the enterprise of college athletics. They are intelligent people with massive, complicated jobs, but the majority of them either have no interest in the athletic realm or the time to deal with it effectively. They want athletic departments to make money and not cause any embarrassment, but for the past 20 years these institutions have needed pragmatic people who understand the nuances of college athletics to guide the NCAA in the right direction.

And they have failed.

What becomes very clear in reading through an e-mail exchange between former NCAA vice president of enforcement Julie Roe Lach and vice president for academic and membership affairs Kevin Lennon is that the NCAA was under significant pressure in July 2012 to do something about Penn State on the heels of Louis Freeh's independent investigation into the Sandusky scandal.

On the day the Freeh Report was released, in fact, Oregon State president Ed Ray — then the chair of the NCAA Executive Committee — sent an e-mail to NCAA president Mark Emmert, his deputy Jim Isch and former enforcement head Julie Roe Lach that basically directed them to come up with a way to sanction Penn State.

"The sounds of silence are not good," Ray wrote. "If Penn State could have Louie Freeh conduct an investigation over the last year, why haven't we done anything?"

Ray went on to connect the Penn State issue with changes to the tougher penalty structure his committee had been working on for coaches who broke rules.

"Announcing in three weeks the sweeping changes in enforcement, culture and penalties we intend to implement over the next two years while remaining silent on the Penn State matter could easily invite cynicism even from those who are rooting for us to get this right," Ray said.

And with that, the gauntlet had been thrown down for Emmert and his staff: Figure out a way to make us, the university presidents, look like we care about integrity in college sports.

If nothing else, that is how the sausage gets made at the highest levels of the NCAA and why college presidents have preferred one of their own be in the top spot ever since Cedric Dempsey, a former athletics director, retired in 2003.

From one powerful college president (Ray) to another (Emmert), something had to be done.

Another president, Penn State's Eric Barron, reacted Wednesday to the emails. Along with Board of Trustees chair Keith Masser, Barron wrote, "We find it deeply disturbing that NCAA officials in leadership positions would consider bluffing one of their member institutions, Penn State, to accept sanctions outside of their normal investigative and enforcement process.

"We are considering our options. It is important to understand, however, that Penn State is in the midst of a number of legal and civil cases associated with these matters. We therefore have no additional comment. We also want it to be clear: Penn State's commitment to the fight against child abuse and to the implementation of best practice governance, ethics and compliance programs and policies remain steadfast."

Following Ray's call to action, a subsequent e-mail thread between Roe Lach and Lennon, which was partially redacted, has received most of the attention because of some out-of-context buzzwords that purportedly embarrass the NCAA.

That's a fundamental misreading of the situation.

Roe Lach and Lennon knew this was a tough spot for the NCAA because Penn State hadn't broken rules in a traditional sense and that Roe Lach's division — which is responsible for presenting cases to the Committee on Infractions — would very likely lose.

At a time when people were so outraged over Sandusky that many clamored for Penn State football to die and the culture around the program to be overhauled, the back-and-forth between Roe Lach and Lennon strikes me as measured, strategic and thoughtful in meeting their directive to "do something."

There was even pushback from Lennon on the idea — which Roe indicated came from Emmert and other presidents — that Penn State had gained a competitive advantage that would justify sanctions. They were also clearly concerned the impact of acting without due process on future issues.

The presidents who ran the executive committee, however, had no such concerns. And no matter what negotiation tactics were used to coerce school leaders to sign a consent decree that included unprecedented penalties, blame them for taking the cheap public relations victory over the long view.

It wouldn't be the first time.

Presidential missteps — from realignment to foolish legal strategies in defending amateurism to autonomy — have taken the NCAA in a direction from which it may never recover. Their desire to look good, to give the public a veneer of integrity while bathing in excess and profit, always comes back to bite them.

This is much bigger than whether Emmert keeps his job over a ham-handed strategy in sanctioning Penn State. Until college presidents figure out that they're not equipped to run a semi-professional sports organization, replacing one with another won't fix the fundamental problem.