The Lions' Pride

The numbers sent around during the dark years were bad. Lots of money was lost because the team stunk and you couldn't get $500 a night with 2 nights for a hotel room.

This is the inherit risk you take when your whole business model revolves around 6-8 weekends a year.

The people who are calling for the death penalty have no clue in which what types of cases a death penalty is considered. As heinous or horrific as this event is/was, it doesn't fit the scope. Something about "repeat offenders of NCAA guidelines" is a major factor. Cue me in on our history with the NCAA.

Then you don't understand the definition of Football Factory...noone ever said football wasn't a money maker.

Football factory would be a school with loose academics for athletes that has a sole purpose of training athletes for the NFL. PSU has put players into the nfl but has a graduation rate higher than the overall college, which is an exceptional undertaking.

Football is a business and money maker for a school and local community. The 2 issues are exclusive of each other.

good points.....didn't really spend too much time thinking through the issue. Sadly an issue like graduation rates is lost nationally. Fans of the programs know about this but outsiders do not typically know this. Most would view PSU as a football school certainly. From the outside looking in, the expectations of PSU football are high. Compete for and win league titles, major bowl games and national titles. Also with one of the larger stadiums in college football and with PSU sending a number of players to the NFL you could see how an outsider could view PSU as a football factory. It might be better to call them a football school.

This thread has a very, very good premise. I have been meaning to bring up PSU's football value each time I see the death penalty discussed, but for some reason I have never bothered to do so. The SMU death penalty was in 1987 and the program is just, and I mean just, starting to crawl out from the dead. This is 2012. College football is a farrrrrr bigger business than it was in 1987. The statistics on PSU's football value are remarkable. I remember somebody posted an article on this sight about PSU football's projected financial loss over the next couple years...forgive me if the #'s are off, but I want to say we were projected to lose in the 30M range and such a fall would still have us above OSU and in the top 10 range. THAT IS SO MUCH MONEY. The times are far different, and when you take some of this into account, it makes you wonder who on earth the death penalty would be in the best interest of. When players had nothing to do with this and you consider the people the football value spreads to...hotels, restaurants, etc...that's hundreds of thousands of innocent people suffering, and then I'm no revenue sharing expert but I imagine it would result in a loss for some of the other Big10 schools as well. These facts put me more at ease when I hear the death penalty mentioned.

Rant on towards your agenda, you can't argue with the facts of graduation rates. Student-athlete means students first not necessarily Rhodes Scholar. One does not need to be a Rhodes Scholar to graduate.