“You’re making a deal with the devil,’’ said Sol Gittleman, a Tufts University professor and longtime critic of the college sports industry. “It’s big-time money, and these programs become larger than life. It has nothing to do with higher education.’’
With the exception of the University of Connecticut basketball teams, there are no Penn State-like powerhouses in New England, where college teams - at least in the big money sports of football and basketball - are not nearly the fan draw, or booster obsession, that they are in other parts of the country.
Yet even here, aiming high in sports is often seen as a way to raise a school’s profile and attract strong students and faculty. Boston College enjoyed a huge lift in its national profile, and growth in its applicant pool, in the era of Doug Flutie and the 1984 Miracle in Miami.
More recently, the college joined the Atlantic Coast Conference in search of a more prominent platform, especially for its basketball and football teams. And the University of Massachusetts, eyeing the example of rival UConn, is stepping up a level in football in hopes of greater prominence.
The question for many now is how priorities at Penn State got so skewed - it was, after all, a school that prided itself on running a clean program - and whether there are lessons for college athletics generally in the disaster that struck the place they call Happy Valley.
“It’s very hard to grasp that the culture at Penn State allowed this,’’ said Mark Emmert, president of the NCAA. “Certainly something went terribly awry. You can’t allow one person, or any one program, to be seen as more important than the institution as a whole.’’
