If it is the responsibility of the NCAA to ENFORCE academic standards re: the member schools, then the NCAA needs to put it into their rule book and by-laws. North Carolina fought their case breaking no NCAA rules since the NCAA had none on academic requirements in their rule book for their member institutions. That is the reason they were not penalized in this case. If the NCAA had tried to penalize UNC, they would have taken them to court and won.
If Penn State's BOT had the smarts and guts, it would have done the same thing on the penalties the NCAA made up to sanction PSU. NCAA made up rules to sanction Penn State. The sad part is Penn State just accepted the penalties.
Penn State's BOT not only accepted the penalties, it
invited them by using the findings of a Freeh Report it commissioned for
itself (the University was
not Freeh's client) as a vehicle to falsely and wrongfully incriminate the football program and Joe Paterno in the public eye and thus hopefully deflect public attention from The Second Mile, where several powerful members had personally served as trustees, or had a spouse or adult offspring who served -- during the period when Sandusky was actively mining the place as his own personal victim farm. My own belief is that the BOT leadership was willing to do whatever it might've taken to keep anything resembling a
real investigation as far as humanly possible from TSM, lest they be personally exposed to breach-of-fiduciary-duty risk there, with possibly-very-severe legal penalties and significant personal embarrassment.
There may have been other reasons for their eagerness as well, but those are speculative and never proven. In the event, the yellowest of journalism, driven by a 24 - 7 news cycle, was allowed to eagerly and uncritically seize upon the Freeh Report Party Line and proceed to wrongly and wrongfully destroy the personal reputation of an innocent man who had done nothing more than, correctly, forward the one hearsay report he ever received concerning Sandusky's conduct in the shower to his administrative superior and then try to stay out of the way of any criminal investigation, understanding, unlike most of general public, that Sandusky had not been a PSU employee at the time he received the report and that criminal investigation is generally not an area of expertise for a football coach -- no matter how famous.