NCAA president Mark Emmert has not ruled out drastically punishing Penn State football in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

Emmert gave a candid interview Monday on PBS' "Tavis Smiley," claiming that he still is waiting for Penn State's official response to the Freeh report and acknowledging that the NCAA has not eliminated the possibility of imposing severe sanctions against the school's storied football program.

"I've never seen anything as egregious as this in terms of just overall conduct and behavior inside a university and hope never to see it again," Emmert said during the interview. "What the appropriate penalties are, if there are determinations of violations, we'll have to decide.

"We'll hold in abeyance all of those decisions until we've actually decided what we want to do with the actual charges should there be any. And I don't want to take anything off the table."

Emmert gave the interview four days after Penn State released the scathing internal report by former FBI director Louis Freeh. The report concluded that late football coach Joe Paterno and other top Penn State officials concealed Sandusky's abuse of children to shield the university from bad publicity, exhibiting "callous and shocking" disregard for child victims.