ESPN: No death penalty for Penn State football, but punishments will be unprecedented and severe

[qazplm]

4. easy

if you are just out for one year and then back, you can still recruit reasonably well. The program doesn't take much of a hit. Several programs have had death penalty hits and come back fairly quickly from it.

if you are going to miss multiple years of bowl games, and lose multiple scholarships for a multiple years, your program is likely to be highly unsuccessful for as long as a decade after the imposition of sanctions. No recruits will want to play for you, and you wont be able to sell them on the future of your program, and meanwhile, the esteem of your program from an athletic pov is dropping like a stone, you are in a sense, forgotten.

And thus PSU just becomes another school instead of a football power, with no guarantee of ever returning.