It's easier to call for shutting down Penn State football when you live somewhere else

Is there any way Penn State voluntarily suspends its football program for a year or more?

What state university with a BCS program would ever have the courage to do that, no matter how heinous its crimes against the NCAA, against the law, against humanity?

Since the 2012 football season is just six weeks away and training camp opens in early August, is there any way in the world the NCAA temporarily closes Penn State football for the coming season? What, you're going to give a Big Ten member a rebuilding job of at least a decade? You'll suddenly give 12 of your other members open-dates in football and stop them from shaking their money-makers?

Good luck selling that to Iowa, which has a home game against Penn State on the night of Oct. 20.

Sorry, Hawkeyes. No game. It's only a 6-game home season. Refund your fans for that seventh game and find another way to recoup the lost cash for your athletic department.

Sorry, Johnson County and other surrounding Iowa counties. From the rental-car agencies at the Eastern Iowa Airport to the folks selling turkey legs across the street from Kinnick Stadium, you all lose out that weekend.

So there's that. But as for whether the school should pull the plug on football for at least a year, that's a question that is polarizing people.

Josh Levin of Slate.com wrote "Shuttering Beaver Stadium for two years would take Penn State football down a peg. It would also punish loads of hard-working athletes who have done nothing wrong, as well as all the fans who live and die with the Nittany Lions. But that will be a far better result than the alternative-allowing a pedophile-sheltering athletic department that was bent on self-preservation to succeed in having itself preserved."

Dave Zirin of TheNation.com argues: " ... call for the heads of the real enablers. They should call for the resignation of the Penn State Board of Trustees including board member Governor Tom Corbett. They should call for the abolition of the NCAA. They should call for anything other than the destruction of Penn State football: an action that would bring vengeance without justice."

After a few days to think about this following the release of the Freeh Report, I'm afraid I'm perched on the fence. I hear the arguments of both sides, and I can see a lot more gray area than blue-and-white.

I don't think a single current Penn State football player should be punished because a former school president and former school athletic director and former head football coach made amazingly wrong and harmful decisions about a former school assistant coach who was convicted of 45 counts of sex crimes against children.

Should an entire university -- a university that has an enormous amount of things in which to take pride -- be tarred and feathered because some of its leaders were more consumed with protecting their own football program and their own interests more than protecting innocent kids? No.

But I also don't know how the NCAA can ever again place a sanction on any athletic program that commits NCAA violations if it doesn't turn the lights out on Nittany Lions football for a while.

No matter that Penn State may not have technically violated NCAA rules. How do you give SMU football the death penalty 25 years ago and not Penn State today when SMU's transgressions were nothing remotely near the realm of covering up for someone who raped children?

But then I come back to wondering what would really be gained by suspending the program? Wouldn't it mostly be symbolic, without doing any actual good for anyone other than to momentarily satisfy the outraged?

Then I think about the outraged, all of us. I think we've looked at now-misnamed Happy Valley and said those people just don't get it, or at least they didn't get it. They were blind with loyalty to their football god Joe Paterno, blind to the point of refusing to believe anything negative about the man who became an old fool, blind to believing he wouldn't put his football team ahead of the greater good.

And I wonder, what if something similar had happened here, or there, or wherever people in power were more obsessed with protecting themselves than helping bringing a serious wrong to light? Many more schools than Penn State that have university presidents who would fear for their safety if they made life uncomfortable for their football programs.

What if Iowa's football program had a horrific scandal approaching the scale of Penn State's? Would the percentage of Iowans who think the Hawkeyes' program should go away for a year or more be as high as the percentage of Iowans who think Penn State football should now go away for a while?

It seems unlikely, much as we may like to believe otherwise. It's always easier to throw verbal stones at someone when the target is way off in the distance rather than on your block.

But if you lived in State College, you'd probably think putting a "Closed" sign on Beaver Stadium would serve no purpose other than to add to the pain and disgrace the community and university have already endured.

Yet, if something really belongs at a state institution of higher learning, doesn't it need a greater mission than simply staying in business?

It will be fascinating to see who makes the ultimate decision about the fate of Penn State football, and how harsh that decision turns out to be. But none of it will cause an iota of damage compared to what already has been done.