EDITORIAL : THE USA TODAY, USA

Can NCAA really change football-first culture?

The NCAA's unprecedented crackdown on Penn State fits the school's reprehensible conduct. The four-year ban on postseason bowls, a drastic cut in football scholarships and a $60 million fine send a strong message that no child's safety should ever be compromised to protect the reputation of a big-time athletic program.

OPPOSING VIEW: Penn State deserved 'death penalty'

But as fitting as the punishment is, this single action shouldn't be confused with tough leadership from the NCAA. Hitting Penn State hard and fast for the Jerry Sandusky scandal was easy. The NCAA would have been pilloried if it had done any less. In fact, some critics say it didn't go far enough.

Although NCAA leaders talked Monday about ending Penn State's "football-first culture," they might have pointed a finger at themselves for standing by while that culture grew out of control at universities across the country. Time after time, the NCAA has dawdled through investigations, focused on picayune violations of its rule book (an absurd 434 pages long) and handed down sham punishments.

Consider that the NCAA is still investigating allegations from last summer that 72 Miami players took money, prostitutes and other benefits for years from a booster who's now in prison. Or that five key Ohio State players were allowed to play in the 2011 Sugar Bowl despite being suspended for trading championship rings and memorabilia for tattoos and other benefits.

The implication? Big winners can skirt the rules.

For a time in the 1990s, college presidents tried to take back their sports programs from free-wheeling coaches, athletic directors and boosters whose influence obscured the real purpose of college: education. But their assertion of power quickly bled away as money from TV contracts continued to swell.

USATODAY OPINION

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As NCAA President Mark Emmert acknowledged as he announced Monday's penalties, "One of the grave dangers stemming from our love of sports is that the sports themselves can become too big to fail, indeed too big to even challenge."

Give the NCAA credit for moving quickly and decisively in the Penn State case — and for resisting calls to impose its "death penalty" to shut down the Nittany Lion football program for at least a year.

The death penalty would have hurt a lot of people — players, employees and local businesses — who have no culpability. And the only previous invocation of the death penalty, a one-year shutdown of Southern Methodist University's football team in 1987, devastated that program while having little deterrent effect on other schools.

Penn State officials, no doubt relieved to have been spared the death penalty, accepted the punishment and agreed not to appeal. Appropriately, the $60 million fine against Penn State, an amount equivalent to the football program's annual revenue, is to be used to endow programs to prevent child sexual abuse or assist victims.

That's a hopeful sign that some good could come of this fiasco, as is the involvement of college presidents in fashioning the sanctions against Penn State. Now the question is whether the NCAA and the presidents truly have the courage to promote the sort of cultural change that's so badly needed in big-time college sports.

What Sally Ride meant to USA

As astronauts go, Sally Ride was a far cry from those chosen for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. She was not a fighter pilot but a physicist. She wasn't known for fast driving and hard partying. And, of course, there was the obvious: She was a woman.

In 1968, as the Apollo program was gearing up for a trip to the moon the following year, it would have been unthinkable that she could be an astronaut. Ten years later, she was.
Ride, who died of cancer Monday, became the first American woman in space when she flew on the seventh shuttle mission in 1983, five years after being accepted into the astronaut corps.
More than anyone else, she represented NASA's shift from an agency immersed in a strategically important moon race with the Soviet Union to one pursuing a long-term goal of engaging the public on the worth of space exploration and space-based science. Her background and gender spoke to this. But so, too, did her career. After two shuttle flights, she led the agency's first strategic planning exercise, proposing robotic missions into deep space and for Earth observation purposes, and human trips back to the moon and to Mars. (Only the robotic elements have come to pass.)
Perhaps more important, Ride was a marker of changes in American society. If it is unthinkable that she could have been an astronaut in the 1960s, it is almost as unthinkable that she could have had a Stanford Ph.D. in physics then. Not long before she went off to college, women were openly being told not to major in fields such as physics, chemistry and engineering. Employers would not be interested in them, was the reason. And neither would graduate programs.
In this regard, Ride was a pioneer long before going into space. Had she never joined the space program, she would have served as a role model to women interested in science or other fields dominated by men. That she did is testament to her perseverance and to a maturation at NASA and in American society.