Last July, the NCAA leveled Penn State University’s football program with sanctions for its involvement with and cover-up of the Jerry Sandusky rape scandal. The sanctions vacated 14 years of wins, banned the school from participating in bowl games for four years, and levied $60 million in fines. With the exception of the so-called “death penalty” it leveled on Southern Methodist University in 1986, it was the most far-reaching punishment the NCAA had ever issued.

This morning, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) announced at a press conference that his state was bringing an antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA to challenge those sanctions. Flanked by area business owners, state politicians, and Penn State students, Corbett called the NCAA’s actions “overreaching and unlawful,” and accused the organization of overstepping its legal bounds in punishing Penn State.

The lawsuit may be futile. Penn State, after all, agreed to the sanctions, though Corbett reasoned that it did so only to evade the “death penalty.” Corbett’s motivations, meanwhile, seem far from pure. He has an election coming up in 2014, and he’s about to become the subject of another investigation, as incoming Attorney General Kathleen Kane (D) has promised to probe his role as attorney general in the investigation and cover-up of Sandusky’s crimes. And there are plenty of other questions to be asked. Neither Penn State nor the current attorney general are party in the suit, which only contributes to the feeling that the lawsuit is more exhibition than substance. It is also unclear how expensive the case will be for taxpayers at a time when the state is already facing a multibillion-dollar budget gap.

Despite the facts against the case and the murky questions that remain, though, it is hard to argue that the NCAA and president Mark Emmert didn’t leave the door open to such a suit when they punished Penn State. And as such, it’s hard to imagine that the organization and Emmert are getting anything else than what they asked for.

The NCAA’s punishment of Penn State was sloppy. It reeked of desperation, a public relations ploy to comfort everyone into thinking that it had done something — anything — to address the Penn State problem. The NCAA never conducted its own investigation, instead relying on the Freeh Report commissioned by the university. There was no hearing before the Committee on Infractions, no notice of allegations, no charges against the school, all typical components of an NCAA case. In announcing the sanctions, which he seemed to reach unilaterally, Emmert never specified which NCAA rule Penn State had broken.

That is the heart of Corbett and Pennsylvania’s suit. “The NCAA has punished Penn State without citing a single concrete NCAA rule that Penn State has broken, for conduct that in no way compromised the NCAA’s mission of fair competition, and with a complete disregard for the NCAA’s own enforcement procedures,” the complaint states. In doing so, the complaint asserts that the NCAA, acting as a trade association, violated antitrust law in a way that will have a “devastating, long-lasting, and irreparable effect on the Commonwealth, its citizens, and its economy.”

That the NCAA violated antitrust law, that its members essentially conspired to decimate Penn State football, is “going to be very hard to prove,” ESPN legal analyst Roger Cossack said this afternoon.

Regardless of whether Pennsylvania wins the suit, though, the NCAA’s sloppy punishment has indirectly turned this into an even bigger mess than it already was, and it could get even worse. The lawsuit could jeopardize the investigation Kane, who takes office this month, has promised to lead, giving Corbett an easy out to avoid commenting on a pending issue and perhaps preventing the public from learning exactly how far into the state government the vines of the Sandusky scandal stretched. Corbett isn’t a hero here, and I’m still not sold that this lawsuit should have been filed. But it is now entirely and unfortunately possible that the NCAA’s punishment may inadvertently cause more problems in the clean up of Penn State than it ever hoped to fix.

Looking at the world of college sports, and a casual observer may presume that the child rape scandal that enveloped Penn State University last winter has been settled. Jerry Sandusky is in jail for the rest of his life. Joe Paterno is dead. His statue no longer stands in front of Beaver Stadium. The NCAA placed crippling sanctions on the football program Paterno oversaw, and the football season is nearly two-thirds gone. Some semblance of normalcy–or at least a new normal–has returned to Happy Valley.

That casual observer would be wrong. Pennsylvania Attorney General Linda Kelly announced Thursday that the state was bringing charges against former Penn State president Graham Spanier, the man who oversaw, overlooked, and may have ignored the entire scandal. Spanier will face eight counts, five of them felonies: two for endangering the welfare of children, one for perjury, one for obstruction of justice, and three others for conspiracy. Former Penn State athletic director Timothy Curley and former university vice president Gary Schultz were also charged for endangerment and perjury, adding to the charges they had already received.

It’s all a stark reminder that Penn State’s very public shaming is far from complete.

“This was not a mistake, oversight or misjudgment,” Kelly said at a news conference Thursday. “This was a conspiracy by top officials at Penn State.”

The man who molested 10 young boys over a decade-long period during which he worked and was associated with Penn State is behind bars. But the men who the state of Pennsylvania believes played an extensive role in allowing Sandusky’s crimes to continue may yet join Sandusky there.

There are still facts of this case to be learned, information about how men in very high places failed, and what mechanisms or reporting requirements might have forced them to uphold their responsibilities. We will still learn about why that failure took place, how an entire institution of higher learning failed to protect the most vulnerable people on its campus and in its community. About why football was so important that it took precedence over the safety and welfare of children, about how the same failures can be prevented in the future.

Football, and some sense of normalcy, may be back at Penn State. The pain, the reckoning, and the education that will come from all of this, however, is far from over.

I haven’t read Joe Posnanski’s entire biography of Joe Paterno yet, but I was really struck by this section of the excerpt published in GQ:

On Monday, the family tried to persuade Paterno to read the presentment. He objected that he already knew what was in there, but they told him there was no room left for illusion. D’Elia would remember telling him, “You realize that the people out there think you knew about this? They think you had to know because you know about everything.”

“That’s their opinion!” Paterno shouted. “I’m not omniscient!”

“They think you are!” D’Elia roared back.

Later, D’Elia described watching Paterno read the presentment: “What did he know about perverted things like that? When he asked Scott, ‘What is sodomy, anyway?’ I thought my heart was going to break.”

One of the consensuses around Penn State seems to have been that, Sandusky or no Sandusky, Paterno stayed on as head coach longer than he should have. That quotation alone is a reminder that, for all that we praise old-fashioned values, there can be willful ignorance or dangerous squeamishness that goes along with being old school. If you want to lead, especially on a college campus, and maybe especially if you’re running an athletic program, you really can’t afford to be delicate about sex. The world changes, and you can’t hold it back or close your eyes to it.

Much of the response to the Penn State scandal seems to come from a sense that actors with some control over the governance and judgement of Penn State ought to be taking some sort of action. As my colleague Travis Waldron has pointed out, the harsh fines, bans, and vacated wins the NCAA imposed on Penn State’s football program seemed more like an attempt to make up for the organization’s own burnishing of Joe Paterno’s legacy than a response that would have a meaningful impact on the conditions that allowed Jerry Sandusky continued access to Penn State facilities and the legitimacy his Penn State connections conferred upon him. The decision to remove Joe Paterno’s statue was not the result of a long-considered process, but an immediate need to act. And at first glimpse, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education’s warning to Penn State that its accreditation could be in danger might seem like a similarly punitive action. But the questions the Commission needs to ask are reasonable ones, and working them through with Penn State could help that community and the general public learn more about the university’s future.

Accredited colleges need to be financially stable and in compliance with government requirements, and it’s reasonable that the Commission would want to be reassured of Penn State’s ability to meet those requirements. The NCAA fines alone come to almost half the $136.3 million in gifts to the university in fiscal 2011. Then, there’s the inevitable civil suits against Penn State, which is one of several schools not considered part of Pennsylvania’s state government, and thus covered by sovereign immunity, which would protect it from being sued. It looks like Penn State will try to offer compensation to Sandusky’s victims, but we’re a long way from knowing whether those victims will want to go to court instead, whether any of them would participate in a compensation fund, and what either the compensation or the damages handed down by a jury would look like, though it’s likely to be an extremely expensive process.

Penn State isn’t broke—it had $4.6 billion in revenue in fiscal 2011, and as of last September, the university’s endowment stood at $1.83 billion. But it’s not unreasonable for the Commission to inquire—especially given that Penn State’s insurer, the Pennsylvania Manufacturer’s Association, is trying to deny the university coverage on the grounds that Penn State concealed the risk Sandusky posed to the institution—how Penn State plans to assume the costs of the scandal. If Penn State dips into its endowment to compensate victims, how will that lost potential for income affect programs and staffing? If giving rates slow, whether because alums are horrified at what their university let take place, or because, as inexplicable as it may be to outsiders, loyalists believe the university treated Joe Paterno unfairly, what is the university’s long-term financial plan?

Beyond the question of finances, Pennsylvania state law requires “Licensees who are staff members of a medical or other public or private institution, school, facility or agency, and who, in the course of their employment, occupation or practice of their profession, come into contact with children shall immediately notify the person in charge of the institution, school facility or agency or the designated agent of the person in charge when they have reasonable cause to suspect on the basis of their professional or other training or experience, that a child coming before them in their professional or official capacity is a victim of child abuse.” And the Clery Act requires universities to report sexual assaults (and other kinds of violence) on campus if they want their students to be able to use federal financial aid and can fine schools heavily if they fail to comply—the Education Department is investigating Penn State for violations of the Act. Given the failure of Penn State officials to abide by their state and federal obligations in the Sandusky case, and the fact that abiding by government requirements is one of the things universities need to do to remain accredited, it’s reasonable for the Commission to want to see a plan for how Penn State plans to make sure the law is obeyed in the future, and even to interrogate the integrity of the university’s reporting in assault cases that don’t involve the football program.

What would be unfair is for the Middle States Commission on Higher Education to pull Penn State’s accreditation simply because it feels the need to do something, punishing current students by making their degrees worthless. But if it moves forward with the clear goal of preserving what makes Penn State a good school and incentivizing Penn State to become a safer place with a healthier culture, an inquiry into whether the university is meeting the standards for accreditation could play a useful role in Penn State’s reconstitution of itself in the wake of this terrible blot on the school’s collective character and history.

Before NCAA president Mark Emmert handed down the sanctions last week, I was not as fiercely opposed to the idea of punishment as others, including Dave Zirin and Pat Forde, two writers I admire and respect. Though I agreed with both that NCAA sanctions were a generally bad idea, I viewed it as inevitable that the NCAA would do something because, as I’ve written before, to do otherwise would have seemed, to most, like a dereliction of its duties.

Regardless of how anyone feels about the NCAA’s decision to punish Penn State, though, it is undoubtedly worth a look at the implications of that punishment and how it was determined, delivered, and carried out, and whether the punishment of Penn State should be aimed at simply punishing the institution or at generating large-scale reforms at both Penn State and within college sports as a whole.

If you think the point of punishing is simply to be punitive, you undoubtedly support the NCAA’s decision, and any questioning of that decision is likely to look like a blustering defense of Penn State. That’s fine, I guess, but it seems to me that the focus on punishing Penn State has lost sight of the fact that punishment isn’t enough. Punishment should not come for the sake of punishment, it should not come to make us feel like we’re doing right, and it shouldn’t come because not punishing would cause a public relations nightmare. Punishment needs to be rehabilitative, and it needs to be aimed at preventing similar situations in the future.

The NCAA’s method of punishment, however, is too often astounding in its ability to be punitive and equally astounding in its inability to be effectively punitive. That is, it focuses too much on the punishment and not enough on rehabilitation and prevention to ensure that similar actions aren’t repeated imminently thereafter.

Take past NCAA sanctions as examples. In the 1980s, the NCAA gave Southern Methodist University’s football program the “death penalty” and leveled the University of Kentucky’s basketball program over impermissable benefits provided to players and recruits. Less than a decade ago, it hammered Baylor University’s basketball program for its role in a massive cover-up of the murder of a former player. In the last decade, the NCAA has placed sanctions on both Florida State University and the University of Georgia due to academic fraud that took place in their athletic departments.

And yet, little has changed. Multiple big-time programs — most notably the University of Alabama and University of Southern California — have been hit over impermissable benefits received by players since the SMU and Kentucky scandals (Kentucky, incidentally, repeated similar violations in its football program a little more than a decade later). The NCAA is currently investigating the University of North Carolina in what may turn out to be the biggest academic fraud case in the history of college athletics. And Penn State spent more than a decade covering up major crimes, undeterred by the Baylor sanctions.

I don’t trust that the NCAA’s treatment of this scandal is any different. This scandal happened at Penn State, and as such, the focus has remained on that institution. But this scandal could have happened and could still happen in hundreds of other programs, and because of that, focusing on Penn State’s culture isn’t enough. If we want to prevent a similar scandal from happening elsewhere in the future, it’s worth examining the similar “sports first” culture that persists throughout top-tier college sports and how the NCAA, the punisher in this instance, helped create, foster, and incentivize that culture.

If the point of the punishment is simply to be punitive, the NCAA’s actions will almost certainly accomplish that goal. But if the point is to generate the type of culture change that is desperately needed not just at Penn State but throughout the NCAA, I’m afraid the organization’s unwillingness to acknowledge its own place in that culture will cause it to fall far short of that aim.

That the NCAA relied heavily on the report produced by former FBI director Louis Freeh and his team to level the Penn State football program earlier this week is hardly a shock or a secret — the report, as NCAA president Mark Emmert said, was “vastly more involved and thorough than any investigation we’ve ever conducted.”

But the Freeh Report, commissioned by Penn State’s Board of Trustees, was never meant to investigate whether the football program violated NCAA rules, according to a source from Freeh’s team reached by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Freeh Report, the source said, was an investigation into “how Penn State operated, not how they worked within the NCAA’s system,” and it “was not meant to be used as the sole piece, or the large piece, of the NCAA’s decision-making.” Instead, the source said, the report “was meant to be a mechanism to help Penn State move forward. To be used otherwise creates an obstacle to the institution changing.”

Looking through the Freeh Report, it’s hard to dispute that point. The report is a legal investigation meant to lead to changes that prevent another such institutional failure, and it includes specific recommended changes to Penn State’s administrative and academic culture to achieve that goal. In no way does it examine Penn State’s role within NCAA bylaws or whether it might have broken NCAA rules.

Given that, it seems a thorough investigation into whether, and how, Penn State violated NCAA rules should have been in order, especially before the program was hit with massive fines, bowl bans, and scholarship reductions. Some sort of investigation was begun — Emmert delivered questions to Penn State in November, and the university was reportedly set to deliver its formal response around the time Emmert handed down the sanctions — but it was abruptly aborted, a fact that always seemed odd, especially when Emmert struggled to name specific bylaws Penn State had violated. The reasoning the NCAA uses to justify going forth with the sanctions before it conducted an investigation is shoddy, at best, as Emmert said the Freeh Report provided all the information he and the organization’s Executive Committee needed to know.

The fact is, there are multiple investigations going on at Penn State. To produce the Freeh Report, investigators combed through millions of emails and conducted a thorough investigation. The Department of Education is now carrying out its own investigation into whether Penn State violated federal law by not reporting crimes committed on campus, and deep investigations will continue to take place involving the federal charges facing two former Penn State officials. And the NCAA has even reserved the right to conduct a more complete investigation and bring more punishments to the table for individuals once the legal process is completed.

For whatever reason, though, the only organization to have punished Penn State thus far did not conduct its own investigation and instead relied on a document we now know was used outside its stated purpose. That’s a step that, frankly, does absolutely nothing to dispel the notion that the NCAA has overstepped its legal bounds to hand down a punishment because it felt it had to do something and because, with football season just weeks away, doing nothing might have seemed like an abdication of its duties, even if that something ignored its own role in the creation and fostering of the culture it says it wants to change.

The NCAA must certainly feel good about itself after it leveled the Penn State football program this morning, fining the university $60 million, banning it from post-season play for four years, reducing its scholarship allotment, and vacating 14 years of wins, punishments that will ultimately decimate the program for years to come. The Jerry Sandusky child rape scandal that led to the sanctions brought down Penn State’s president, athletic director, legendary football coach and other officials, and letting the Nittany Lions return to the gridiron as if it never happened would have seemed like an abdication of duties. Penn State, most assuredly, deserved to be punished.

Just not by the NCAA.

In laying out the sanctions this morning in Indianapolis, NCAA president Mark Emmert called for a change in the Penn State culture that led to the cover up of Sandusky’s crimes. What he didn’t acknowledge was how deeply involved the NCAA has been in creating and fostering that culture, and as a result, he handed down a decision that reeks of hypocrisy.

Take, for instance, Emmert’s opening remarks, in which he decried the culture of “hero worship” that led Penn State officials to believe they were invincible and others to believe their idols could do no wrong. But in 2010, Emmert engaged in his own “hero worship,” calling disgraced former Penn State head coach Joe Paterno a “terrific example of everything the NCAA stands for.” Paterno, Emmert added, was the “definitive role model of what it means to be a college coach.” He was, of course, until he wasn’t, a fact Emmert’s own “hero worship” blinded him to.

Oregon State University president Ed Ray, who doubles as the chairman of the NCAA’s Executive Committee, got in on the hypocrisy too, announcing that the Penn State sanctions send the message that university “presidents and chancellors were in charge.” He made no mention of the fact that Graham Spanier, the ousted former president of Penn State who played an extensive role in the cover up, once chaired the NCAA’s Board of Directors and held a seat on the Executive Committee. Spanier, just a year ago, was “in charge.” How comforting.

Or take Emmert’s later inability to describe the exact NCAA bylaw Penn State violated — an answer that would have made it clear that the organization wasn’t massively overstepping its legal bounds in the name of public relations.

And though there were dozens of mentions of Penn State’s “culture” and how it needed to change, neither Emmert nor Ray acknowledged their organization’s role in creating the “football first” culture that helped create the scandal. The NCAA has absolved much of its management of college football, outsourcing its postseason to money-making entities like the Bowl Championship Series and other bowl games that often cost its members money. And as revenues for its biggest programs — Penn State included — exploded and created even more incentive to win games at all costs, the NCAA fed the beast, helping enhance and promote bigger athletic spectacles.

Massive public outcry, meanwhile, has already forced changes at Penn State, where Sandusky is headed to prison, former athletics director Tim Curley has been charged, and Spanier could soon face a lawsuit of his own (Paterno died in January). The Dept. of Education is investigating the university, which commissioned the Freeh Report to uncover exactly how deep the scandal went. It removed the statue of Paterno standing outside the stadium on its own, and it will almost assuredly pay heavy civil penalties to Sandusky’s victims.

The university may not have decimated the program on its own, but new administrators faced with public pressure could have made institutional changes to refocus the school’s culture. It could have made sure that football at Penn State, good or bad, champion or loser, would forever be a reminder of what happens when priorities are imbalanced, when football is too important, when the people we are supposed to help become the people we end up hurting. It could have taken positive steps to prevent future incidents by diverting funding from football to awareness programs and other initiatives to prevent child rape and foster education among its fans and students about molestation.

The NCAA, for its part, could have turned it gaze inward and examined its own role in creating the football first culture that made such a devastating scandal possible. Instead, it demolished Penn State for abdicating its responsibilities as an academic institution without acknowledging that it incentivized such abdication.

Penn State, without a doubt, needs a culture change. What Mark Emmert either refuses to acknowledge or does not understand is how desperately his own organization needs one too.

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on whether the statue of Joe Paterno standing outside Penn State’s football stadium should stand or fall, and I find the competing arguments — that it should be immediately removed or that it should stand, at least for a little while, as a shameful reminder of Penn State’s mass institutional failure — interesting and compelling in their own right. There are conflicting reports about whether the statue is coming down this weekend, but either way, this latest protest is another shameful chapter in an ongoing series of them for the university and its students:

A group of Penn State students have started a vigil intended to protect the Joe Paterno statue from vandals.

Seniors Mike Elliot and Kevin Berkon formed the group after they saw a plane fly over the campus earlier this week displaying a banner that read: “Take the statue down or we will.”

Clearly, at least for some students, the necessary realignment of Penn State’s cultural priorities that should have taken place after this scandal hasn’t yet happened. It’s enough to make you wonder if any of this would have been necessary had anyone in State College rushed to defend Jerry Sandusky’s victims with the same vigor these students have for defending a man whose reputation was shattered long before his statue will be.