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hen Gene Marsh got the call on the morning of July 17, he was holed up in a one-room cabin -- with no running water and no toilets -- in woodsy Chebeague Island off of Maine. "A shack fit for the Unabomber," says Marsh, a 60-year-old tart-tongued Tuscaloosa, Ala., lawyer. Only six days earlier, he had been hired by Penn State to help negotiate sanctions from the NCAA in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal. On the phone was Donald Remy, the NCAA's general counsel. The news was grim. Remy said Penn State was facing an unprecedented punishment: a multiple-season death penalty, no football for years.

"Are you overselling this?" Marsh asked.

"Absolutely not," Remy said.

As he sat in his cabin, "I just imagined an empty stadium," says Marsh, a former chairman of the NCAA's infractions committee who has since defended many schools and coaches

before it, including former Ohio State coach Jim Tressel. "I thought about the wind blowing through the portals and all the economic and social and spiritual ramifications of that empty stadium. And this would last years?"

That same morning, NCAA President Mark A. Emmert called Penn State President Rodney

A. Erickson and told him the majority of the NCAA's Division I board of directors -- 18 university presidents -- had coalesced around a decision: Shut down Penn State's football program for four years.

This moment didn't feel like the beginning of a negotiation to Marsh. "In federal bankruptcy court," he says, "there is a concept of a cram-down -- a judge tells creditors, 'Here's the deal, this is all you are going to get, a few pennies on the dollar, and you should be happy with that.' You know, take it or leave it, because you don't really have any choice.

"Well, this was the NCAA equivalent of a cram-down."

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o understand how Penn State arrived at that moment, one has to return to last November.

The Nov. 5 arrest of Sandusky and the perjury charges against athletic director Tim Curley

and Vice President Gary Schultz had sent Penn State's 32-member board of trustees reeling. The shock wasn't just how little the board had known; it was that even knowing just a little, they still did nothing. Boards of major public universities typically are engaged: They hire and fire the leadership, raise big money and look out for financial and other damage. But after being briefed about the Sandusky criminal investigation by then-President Graham Spanier at a May 2011 board meeting, Penn State's trustees were so incurious about the matter that none of them posed follow-up questions at meetings in July and September.

Even worse, a handful of trustees, including then-board chairman Steve Garban and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, who had opened an investigation into Sandusky in 2009 as the state's attorney general, knew more details and the danger facing the university but said nothing.

Emmert, the former president of the University of Washington and chancellor at LSU who once said big-time football was critical to the latter, had become president of the NCAA in 2010. Already during his tenure, the organization has been criticized for its slow, sometimes toothless reaction to a number of football improprieties, including a scandal at the University of Miami involving payments and prostitutes and one at North Carolina in which athletes were suspected of attending bogus classes. Emmert had been outspoken about the NCAA's need to reform its enforcement procedures, which typically ran through the NCAA's infractions committee and could drag on for months and even years before they were resolved. He is often characterized by members of the media and some fans as either tone-deaf, powerless or stubborn. Despite that criticism, he crisscrosses the country, imploring anyone who will listen that the NCAA stands for education ahead of athletics and high ideals above all else.

The scandal at Penn State, Emmert told colleagues, offered an opportunity to take a bold stand. He was determined to open an aggressive inquiry that would not follow the usual NCAA procedures and would focus not on infractions but on systemic failures and "loss of institutional control."

On Nov. 17, Emmert sent a letter to President Erickson, the soft-spoken longtime No. 2 at Penn State who'd agreed to fill in at the top job the previous week, when the crisis began. (Spanier had been fired.) Emmert asked the university to explain its actions in the Sandusky matter and, signaling his intentions, excerpted a part of the NCAA's constitution, Article 2.4, that rarely if ever comes up in investigations.

It covers "fundamental values" for all those associated with athletic programs to follow. Those principles of respect, fairness, civility, honesty and responsibility, Emmert wrote, represent "the bedrock to the foundation of intercollegiate athletics; and the membership of the association has made clear through the enactment of relevant bylaws that they are expected to be respected and followed."

Shortly after writing the letter, Emmert spoke with Erickson, who told him that Penn State was planning to do its own investigation and asked Emmert to hold off until the university finished its probe.

Led by senior linebacker Michael Mauti

(center, in blue), the bulk of Penn State's

roster gave a full-throated pledge

of allegiance to its team two days after

sanctions were announced. AP Photo/The Centre Daily Times, Nabil K. Mark

"They argued for us to not get involved, to wait," Emmert says. He agreed under one condition: Penn State had to share its findings with the NCAA. Emmert says he was impressed by the university's "willingness to be totally open and work with us at every step of this process."

A few days later, Penn State trustees announced the hiring of Louis B. Freeh, who had served as FBI director from 1993 to 2001, to investigate the scandal, including the university's response, and make recommendations to ensure something like it doesn't happen again. Trustee Ken Frazier vowed that Freeh's investigation would show no favoritism toward anyone at Penn State, including trustees. Several trustees said the looming NCAA inquiry was one factor in their deciding that a sweeping probe was necessary. Frazier, the president and CEO of Merck & Co., had recommended Freeh, several trustees said.

"Our mandate is clear," Freeh told reporters at a Nov. 21 news conference. "We have been tasked to investigate the matter fully, fairly and completely."

On Nov. 28, Emmert spoke with Frazier by phone to discuss how the NCAA and Penn State would proceed following the investigation, an NCAA official said.

The announcement of Freeh's probe bought time for the trustees and university officials to try to move beyond a disastrous month for Penn State. Even more important, NCAA officials could now stand by and let Freeh and his investigators do their work for them.

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very two weeks last winter and spring, Penn State's general counsel updated the NCAA general counsel on Freeh's progress. Nothing substantive, Emmert says. "No details -- just

a status update."

During a news conference in Philadelphia on July 12, Freeh released the 267-page report.

It found that Spanier, Curley, Schultz and coach Joe Paterno had known about Sandusky's conduct before he retired as assistant coach in 1999 but failed to take action. The four men "failed to protect against a child sexual predator harming children for over a decade." The report also blamed the trustees for fostering a "football first" atmosphere and for failing to create "a 'tone at the top' environment wherein Sandusky and other senior university officials believed they were accountable to it."

Mark Emmert was at home, in Seattle, as he read that appraisal. "I was struck by how thorough the investigation was," he says. "We could not have duplicated it if we had done

our investigation."

As Freeh spoke, the Penn State board of trustees watched the telecast inside a conference room at the Radisson Hotel in Scranton, Pa., where they were beginning two days of regularly scheduled meetings. Several trustees interviewed for this story say they don't believe any of the trustees had the time and opportunity to read all 267 pages of the report during that hectic day. "Most of us skimmed it, if that," says one trustee. "I read about 50 or 60 pages, and that took about two hours."

Yet at 11:30 that morning, Karen Peetz, the chairwoman of the board, was huddled with members of her 11-member executive committee and other trustees to write a statement for the media to be delivered later that day. At 3:30, Peetz and Frazier told reporters that the trustees accepted full responsibility for the school's failures outlined in the Freeh report. Emmert would later speak of the trustees' "acceptance of the report." But no vote of the full board was taken. Trustees say the day was so chaotic that the board never discussed the report's contents.

"We didn't formally accept the report," a trustee says grimly, "but everyone thinks we did, and that's all that matters." The next day was chewed up with hearings on budget and other matters; the findings again weren't discussed by the full board.

Emmert said he read the report in its entirety the day it was released and reread it twice that weekend. Ed Ray, the Oregon State president and chair of the NCAA executive committee, said he was appalled by the findings of inaction by university leaders after Sandusky's crimes came to light. "Nobody made a phone call, for god's sake," Ray told USA Today.

Emmert called Erickson on Friday night, July 13, to say his board and executive committee had decided to accept the Freeh report, just as Penn State had seemingly done the day before. Penn State had spent a total of $6.5 million on the inquiry, and its findings would now be used by the NCAA as its own investigation against the university.

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his spring, on the NCAA website, a page defined the various penalties facing universities that are found to violate the NCAA's rules. The first definition was this: "Death penalty: a phrase used by media to describe the most serious NCAA penalties possible. It is not a formal NCAA term. It applies only to repeat [offenses] " But sometime shortly after the Freeh report was made public, the webpage was removed. Bob Williams, an NCAA spokesman, says the page can now be found at a new link.

Whatever the reason for the webpage's removal, the old rules and procedures were being ignored. Marsh spoke on Monday, July 16, with Penn State's general counsel, Stephen Dunham, and outside counsel Frank Guadagnino, who prepared for discussions that week on what the penalties might be. Typically, sanctions are decided by the infractions committee process; neither the full NCAA board of Division I presidents nor its executive committee takes part. In this case, both groups were being consulted via conference call with Emmert. Marsh said he and his colleagues quickly concluded that there was no use trying to persuade the NCAA to go the traditional route. "Their minds were made up," he said.

Still, in phone calls Tuesday morning, July 17, through late Thursday, July 19, the lawyers pleaded with the NCAA to consider abandoning the death penalty. Marsh, a partner in the law firm of Lightfoot, Franklin & White in Birmingham, Ala., carried a handwritten list of mitigating circumstances he brought up whenever he spoke with Remy and Remy's colleagues:

• Penn State had commissioned the Freeh report.

• Penn State waived attorney-client privilege, allowing the findings to be made public.

• The trustees accepted responsibility for the many shortcomings identified in the report.

• Paterno, Spanier, Curley and Schultz were no longer affiliated with the university.

• Penn State's football program was not a repeat offender, having never been found guilty of a major NCAA infraction.

• Penalties would harm many people who were not responsible: current players, the new coaching staff and, in lost dollars, central Pennsylvania residents.

• Penn State would pay enormous financial penalties, to the NCAA, in civil litigation and to the Big Ten.

• Penn State was going to implement most, if not all, of the Freeh report's 119 recommendations for reform and would also agree to an athletic integrity agreement with the NCAA.

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mmert and Erickson say they also spoke several times that week about the sanctions. Erickson says he made his case directly with Emmert for the NCAA to avoid the death penalty. As arguments were made, the two also discussed sanctions that included a financial penalty, a lengthy postseason ban, the loss of scholarships and the vacating of victories. "The whole process was very fluid," Marsh says. "People had strong feelings, and no one quite knew how it was going to end."