A very intense debate took place during last week's discussion as to whether or not the statue of Joe Paterno outside of Beaver Stadium should come down.

We’re now seeing some movement on the part of the student body to distance itself from the scandal that has enveloped the University and the football program.

Already there’s a move underway to change the name of the camping area where students hang out to buy prime tickets to Nittany Lions’s tickets from 'Paternoville' to 'Nittanyville'.

The also-renamed Nittanyville Coordination Committee said Monday that student officers decided the name change would "return the focus to the overall team and the thousands of students who support it."

On its website, the student organization that runs makeshift campgrounds said that "since it was unlikely another coach would stay as long as Coach Paterno had, changing the name for each new coach would be impractical."

"Now, it's a new era of Nittany Lion football," committee President Troy Weller said in a statement released Monday. "And by changing the name to Nittanyville we want to return the focus to the overall team and the thousands of students who support it. We thank the Paterno family for their gracious assistance and support over the last several years."

Students at this year's encampment plan to donate some fundraising proceeds to a child abuse prevention and treatment center.

But in saying “…we want to return the focus to the overall team and the thousands of students who support it….”, is it possible that in order to fully return the focus to the overall team, a clean break needs to be made of the past?

In my mind, that would involve the unthinkable.

The NCAA needs to impose, at the very least, some sort of a death penalty, along the lines of one imposed against Southern Methodist University in the '80s!

The president of the NCAA says he isn't ruling out the possibility of shutting down the Penn State football program in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal.

In a PBS interview Monday night, NCAA President Mark Emmert said he doesn't want to ''take anything off the table'' if the NCAA determines penalties against Penn State are warranted.

The last time the NCAA shut down a football program with the so-called ''death penalty'' was in the 1980s, when SMU was forced to drop the sport because of extra benefits violations. After the NCAA suspended the SMU program for a year, the school decided not to play in 1988, either, as it tried to regroup.

''This is completely different than an impermissible benefits scandal like (what) happened at SMU, or anything else we've dealt with. This is as systemic a cultural problem as it is a football problem. There have been people that said this wasn't a football scandal,'' Emmert said.

''Well, it was more than a football scandal, much more than a football scandal. It was that but much more. And we'll have to figure out exactly what the right penalties are. I don't know that past precedent makes particularly good sense in this case, because it's really an unprecedented problem.''

I completely agree with NCAA President Mark Emmert.

The scandal goes way beyond sports.

This was a moral failing on the part of those who were in the best position to step up and do the right thing to put some kind of a halt to the abuses that had reportedly been taking part on the campus.

Since sports always seems to defy any kind of moral compass, don’t you feel it’s time that a message is sent to the sports world in particular and to society a a whole? Handing down the death penalty to Penn State sends a message to the sports world know that this type of behavior that allows administration officials to stand on the sidelines while immoral acts are being committed, all in the name of saving the reputation of a sports program, will not be tolerated.

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