The committee gave Penn State a $60 million sanction, a four-year football postseason ban and a vacation of all wins dating back to 1998. Penn State must reduce 10 initial and 20 total scholarships each year for a four-year period. The athletic program will also be put on probation for five years and must work with an athletic-integrity monitor of NCAA’s choosing.

The chair of the NCAA Executive Committee was none other than Oregon State University President Ed Ray.

Ray started as a member of the Division I Board in 2007, representing the Pac-10. He then was put on the Executive Committee immediately because of his economics background, and was eventually asked to become chair of the executive committee, so he could lead the search to find a new president for the NCAA, which ended up being current president Mark Emmert. Ray’s duration as chair of the Executive Committee comes to an end this month.

The Daily Barometer’s Warner Strausbaugh sat down with Ray to discuss his involvement in the most unprecedented case in NCAA history. Note that some of President Ray’s answers have been shortened due to space.

WS: At what point did the Executive Committee decide that action did need to be taken, that the NCAA needed to step in?

RAY: Well, we took up the issue after the Freeh Report came out, and it’s important to remember that Penn State University and its board commissioned the Freeh Report. And when it was put out, [they] didn’t editorialize or sugarcoat it, they just made it available to everybody without prior approval. And they accepted its findings.

So it was clear once the Freeh Report had come out [that] there were certainly matters revealed there that suggest really inappropriate behavior at every level of the university. Certainly in athletics, but also higher up in the university.

It was clear to us when that report came out and the university accepted its findings that if we went through the traditional enforcement process — normally we would do an investigation — we would be replicating an incredibly exhaustive effort by the Freeh Group, which is probably deeper and more extensive than any investigation the NCAA has ever done­ — and they had unprecedented access to documents at Penn State.

WS: Some would argue that a two-year death penalty would be less severe than the sanctions that were handed down. What do you think about the death penalty versus what ended up happening?

RAY: Life has taught me not to decide what other people should have done. All I know is we really focused on the facts at hand that the institution, its board and the NCAA could see from the Sandusky investigation, the trial and the Freeh Report. We put together a package that we thought had the right balance of punitive actions and corrective actions and asked them, “Do you want to consent or do you want to go a different route?”
But I will say to this point, we never talked about the death penalty or this other package. It was always about a package that presumably would include all of the corrective things, because they’re sensible and helping them get to a better place.…
So for us in the Executive Committee and the Division I Board, the question was: Should the death penalty be part of a package? Not an end in itself. …
Overwhelmingly, we voted no, but there were votes for the death penalty, so it wasn’t unanimous.

WS: The words “unprecedented’”and “non-traditional” have been thrown around a lot with this case, a lot of it because of using the Freeh Report and not an NCAA investigation, but also because of it not having to do with what’s happening on the field. With this, it wasn’t something that was happening on the field, so why did the committee and the Division I Board still feel necessary to have the four-year bowl ban, to have the scholarships reduced over the years, to have the probation for the program?

RAY: Our sense, and one of the reasons we were interested in taking up this case, was because this wasn’t just a lack of institutional control of athletics, where people are cheating, coaches are lying or whatever. … The sense here was that it was beyond lack of institutional control of athletics. This went to the issue of institutional control of the institution. That if you read the constitution and by-laws of the NCAA, we talk about responsibility and accountability for acting with integrity, civility, honesty, being collaborative, being forthcoming to protect the core values of all intercollegiate athletics. This university violated these basic values. Not just through what happened in connection with athletics, but at the university large.

So why punish athletics at all? Maybe you shouldn’t be involved at all? Well I’ve told people, and this is just my opinion of why I felt comfortable with us getting involved, if you think about it, starting in 1998, think about vacating the victories, the bowl wins and so forth. Beginning in 1998, people knew or had a good idea that inappropriate behavior was going on at the expense of innocent young children. And that powerful people who you would expect to look after them failed miserably. … So starting in 1998, they did not do the right thing so they could get football victories, so they could attract scholarship students that, so they could go to bowl games, so they could establish the kind of victory records that they did. …
I think I’ve heard nobody question the $60 million. The idea is that’s what they make [per] year in football, you know what, it’s time to give back. So let’s take that money and make sure it goes into an endowment for programs to help abused children, maybe save children from further abuse as well. …
But the issues of the scholarships and the probation were really all about [the idea that] winning at any cost is not acceptable.

WS: I saw an Outside the Lines interview with the Big Ten Commissioner [Jim Delany] and he said athletic directors were concerned about how steep the punishment was. Where does the NCAA go from here?

RAY: We’re proposing penalty guidelines that are more severe than the penalties that would’ve been assigned to cases historically. … We had a meeting in August of 2011 with basically 50 university presidents and chancellors, where we basically said, “We’re done. This is not acceptable. We don’t like where we are. We want things to be judged more quickly, and we want the consequences to be more substantial.”
And so I think we are moving in that direction, but we’re going to do it in a very clear way, where everybody’s going to know what the risks are for particular kinds of violations.

WS: Using the Freeh Report as opposed to an NCAA investigation, is that a one time thing, or is that something that could happen again?

RAY: Well it’s unusual because if you think about it, what did we do? We went to a consent decree, they signed it, we signed it … on the basis of a report that they commissioned and that they put out in the public without trying to editorialize or sugarcoat. And they accepted the findings of the Freeh Report. … I don’t know that in other cases people will be as forthcoming or as collaborative.

When we talk about the death penalty and whether it should be in or out, there were a couple people who said, “Well look, Rod Erickson and the board governors at Penn State, they’ve been incredibly open and transparent and forthcoming. The Freeh Report was commissioned by them. They had unprecedented access to university email and files, and they just put their report out there. That needs to be acknowledged.” So some people said, “I might favor the death penalty if they hadn’t been so forthcoming.”

WS: [Penn State head football coach] Bill O’Brien was on ESPN doing a media circuit, and he actually said he needed to leave Bristol and go back to State College because he said there were so many coaches recruiting his players on campus. Did you guys anticipate that at all, just having it being a free-for-all with all these coaches trying to recruit players?

RAY: What we focused on was not all of the ramifications of trying to mitigate the harm to players [who] had no involvement, and in no way did we want to see [them] harmed by this anymore than was unavoidable. That’s why we took unprecedented action to say that student athletes who stayed there, as long as they were in academic good standing, whether they played on the football team or not, could keep their scholarships. And for those who wanted to transfer, instead of the usual ‘You have to sit out for a year, you could lose a year of eligibility,’ we [wanted to] make sure they were held harmless as much as we could hold them harmless.

The point of that flexibility that we gave the student athletes was all about caring about the student athletes. There’s almost nothing you can do in this life that doesn’t have other consequences.

WS: Any closing thoughts?

RAY: I’ll go back to what I said at the press conference and this is the fundamental story here that I hope doesn’t get lost — and we’re talking sports so that’s always the case — the real story is that very powerful people who should’ve cared and taken care of innocent young children failed to do that. That’s the tragedy. That’s the biggest tragedy. It’s not whether they have 15 scholarships instead of 25.


Warner Strausbaugh, sports editor
news@dailybarometer.com
On twitter @WStrausbaugh