@betarhoalphadelta called it "one of the most egregious college football scandals (he'd) ever seen.
You keep coming back to that statement, so I do want to soften it a little bit with some context.
I'm younger than a lot of you folks here. In that way, I haven't been following college football as long or as closely as some of you just based on my age.
I'm older than some folks here. But unlike many of you, I did not grow up in a household that cared about college football. It was the Chicago suburbs and my parents went to colleges without football teams, so the fall was about the Bears, not Illinois or Northwestern or even Notre Dame (we weren't Catholic or Irish after all). Especially since one of my formative memories was the '85 Bears winning the Super Bowl when I was 7.
I didn't start my college football fandom until my sophomore year at Purdue, 1997, as we sucked in 1996 so I didn't attend any games. And in 1996 I was in the dorms. In 1997 I moved into the fraternity house, got season tickets with them, and that's when it really started. Even then, I mostly thought about Purdue and the Big Ten.
So I haven't seen or paid attention to TONS of college football scandals. I mean, a couple of the big ones were Reggie Bush, Cam Newton, tattoogate, and of course the Penn State mess that wasn't really a "football" scandal at all. It just happened within the football program. I'm probably missing a few, of course. Even going to basketball, the Fab Five is ancient history to me and I have zero emotional response to it despite it being as I understand it a pretty major scandal.
And yes, I do think it happens everywhere. Do I think any Purdue boosters are throwing down the sort of dollars that reportedly lured Cam Newton? No, of course not. Our boosters don't care that much. Do I think it's a virtual certainty that many Purdue athletes over the nearly 30 years that I've followed the sport have received impermissible benefits. Of course. There are too many places where it could happen under the radar that I'm not going to claim some moral high ground just to be proven wrong down the road.
This was different. It was a complex, orchestrated scheme, that
had to involve multiple members of Michigan staff directly. And on top of that, it was directly about gaining a competitive
on the field advantage far beyond any sort of effort any team had ever made to decipher opponents' signs, including blatantly violating the rule against advanced in-person scouting.
From a
moral perspective, this scandal doesn't even come close to potentially harboring a pedophile like Penn State. From a
football perspective, however, it does.
