The tie that binds

Here is a dark narrative for you this day, and let's see if doesn't sound familiar.

It begins with a serial pedophile employed/affiliated with a state university, utilizing university resources while he sexually abuses young people on school grounds. When the victims lodge complaints, they are not taken seriously by the head coach of the program involved, and other school officials.

Eventually, the perpetrator is sentenced to what amounts to a life sentence in prison, and the university officials involved in enabling him wind up in court themselves, while the NCAA imposes  the harshest possible punishment.

Penn State, right? That whole sordid Jerry Sandusky business?

Wrong.

Michigan State. And Larry Nassar.

Who this week literally cannot face his dozens of victims, sitting in a courtroom with his face in his hands as one woman after another comes forward to tell the world what he did to them as children. One of Nassar's young victims wound up committing suicide. The father of another killed himself when he couldn't cope with the guilt of not initially believing his daughter.
  
There will be just shy of a hundred such stories, before it's all over. The damage done to them by Nassar, an alleged doctor who used his position to sexually abuse girls as young as 6, is incalculable.

And some of it he did on the grounds of Michigan State University.

Twenty years ago, Michigan State employed him to treat both university athletes and young athletes in a gymnastics program affiliated with MSU. He operated out of an office in the basement of Jenison Fieldhouse. There -- according to two of his victims in an ESPN Outside The Lines piece -- he abused several young girls.

Among them was Larissa Boyce, 16 at the time. She says when she went to Michigan State gymnastics coach Kathie Klages to complain, Klages said she didn't believe her, that Nassar was someone she "trusted and knew for years."

A second victim, meanwhile, says when she complained about Nassar, she was asked who she had told, and then told not to discuss it further.

"They just kept it quiet, and that is what's so hard -- knowing that if adults were to make the right decision and do the right thing at the right time, that the abuse could have stopped," the second gymnast told OTL.

And who does that sound like, boys and girls?

Thaaat's right. It's Penn State and Sandusky all over again.

What separates one from the other is only the complete spinning out of the narrative; no Michigan State officials have yet been sued and hauled into court, though that is surely coming. And the NCAA hasn't dropped the hammer on the Spartans, nor even picked it up.

It will be interesting to see what happens, if and when the NCAA does pick up the hammer. There is, after all, a school of thought out there that the organization overstepped its authority when it injected itself into a criminal matter. And yet, it has established a precedent.

How can it punish Penn State for Sandusky, and not punish Michigan State for Nassar?

They are, after all, virtually identical scenarios. How can the NCAA's reaction not be identical as well?