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Eagleman, The competitive advantage comes from protecting Penn State football through the cover-up, not the actual crime itself. How many players would have changed their mind about going to Penn State if it had become known for having a pedophile connected to the program? It was admirable for those current players to come together and make a statement to the media, but how many of them would have chosen to attend Penn State having that knowledge coming out of high school? And how much money would have been lost if the truth came out earlier? And, according to the Freeh Report, that was the entire purpose of covering up that information. Not to protect Sandusky or any other person specifically, but to shield PSU football from the fallout of public scrutiny and possibly earlier NCAA violations from having Sandusky around. Here is a statement from Ed Ray, chairman of the NCAA Executive Committee: "Penn State did a hell of a lot of recruiting between 1998 and 2012 of very top football athletes, played in bowl games, had great records during some of those years," he said. "I don’t know if a lot of that would have been possible if the truth had come out over the last 14 years." The other major part of this is a university president (Spanier) and VP (Schultz) using their positions of power on the academic side to protect the football program. Say what you will about the NCAA, but one it's main purposes is to enforce the rules of student-athletes as 'amateurs', and sports should serve the university. The involvement of Spanier and Schultz, using their offices at the university to protect football, completely flips that upside down. In Schultz's case, he protected Penn State football to the point of breaking the law. Usually I would agree that the NCAA being a joke, if we're talking about something like players being paid. In this case, with leaders at a university covering up the sexual abuse of children in favor of a sports program, they should have hammered Penn State. I would have been in favor of a 2-year death penalty.