The Second Mile, a charity founded in 1977, began as a group foster home to boys of absent and dysfunctional families. From there it grew to include Foster Care and Big Partner-Little Partner-like activities aimed at a broader spectrum of financially underprivileged children.

Gerald Sandusky, former assistant coach of the storied Penn State football program, founded The Second Mile. Sandusky is currently awaiting trial on forty counts of sexual abuse against the young boys he met through his Second Mile program.

A grand jury report released last week detailed accounts of eight of Sandusky’s victims: six victims who were forced to shower with Sandusky (four of these instances include Sandusky hugging the boys in the shower), three counts of Sandusky either giving or forcibly receiving inappropriate genital contact, three victims who experienced some form of oral sexual contact and one eyewitness account of Sandusky performing anal sex on a victim, known as Victim Two. Sandusky’s victims ranged from 8 to 15 years of age.

This terrible story is the worst scandal to ever come out of college athletics, and one of the single worst things I’ve ever heard, period. The acts of Jerry Sandusky alone are nearly unbearable to recount; if you can make it through the 23-page Grand Jury report without needing at least one break and a strong drink, you’ve got a stronger stomach than I.

But while Sandusky’s actions were unquestionably vile and unthinkably perverse, equally disgusting was the lack of action on the part of Penn State’s higher-ups.

Mike McQueary, a Penn State graduate assistant back in 2002, was the eyewitness who saw Sandusky performing anal sex on Victim Two. He reported what he saw to Penn State’s Head Football coach Joe Paterno, who in turn reported to Tim Curley, Penn State’s Athletic Director and Paterno’s immediate superior.

Curley, along with Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, talked with the eyewitness McQueary. Schultz and Curley told McQueary that appropriate actions would be taken. This was in March of 2002.

Neither Schultz nor Curley questioned McQueary about the incident again. No action was taken regarding the incident until December 2010, when McQueary testified before a Grand Jury.

Both Curley and Schultz were found, by the same grand jury investigating Sandusky, to have committed perjury in their testimony and were also found to have broken Pennsylvania law by not reporting Sandusky’s actions with Victim Two.

Taking a broader look at Division I athletics, this whole horrible episode doesn’t immediately make any sense, especially when compared to other recent scandals.

A short list of shame for other Division I programs includes: Reggie Bush and USC, Ohio State and Jim Tressel, the University of Miami, even Clem Haskins and our own Golden Gophers were sunk by a case of academic fraud back in 1999.

All of those scandals covered up mutually beneficial illegal relationships between a school and student(s), with the former experiencing a far greater benefit in each case. Schools with All-American athletes and nationally competitive programs are essentially guaranteed drastically increased revenue from ticket sales and donations. But why do these terrible and corrosive stories of corruption occur almost exclusively in Division I college athletics?

Division I schools, much more than smaller colleges, have shifted to depend far too heavily on athletics to build their image of success. For these larger schools, the rules and NCAA regulations have increasingly become secondary annoyances hindering a new primary objective: creating an image of an institution’s success and superiority via athletic dominance.

Sandusky retired in 1999, and what is so baffling about this whole thing is that he was protected even after Penn State was no longer benefiting greatly from their relationship with him. Sandusky was first accused of improper intimate contact with a minor in 1998, and was protected by Schultz and Curley four years later in 2002 after retiring and getting caught in yet another situation, one that was inappropriate at best, and disgustingly criminal at worst.

Penn State, like Ohio, Miami, USC and our own U of M, was depending heavily on its athletics program to make the school’s name synonymous with success. Penn State officials were so unwilling to risk harmful association with a predatory pedophile that they protected that pedophile and his image in order to protect themselves and their own.

While it is definitely the worst scandal in the history of college sports, the Penn State case isn’t fundamentally different from other recent collegiate scandals—wrongdoers were protected in order to build or sustain an institution’s favorable image. In protecting Sandusky, Penn State showed us yet again that an iconic athletics program transcends both rules and morals. Penn State’s now tarnished image was once so important that multiple high-ranking school officials willingly ignored Sandusky’s perversely destructive behavior just to prolong the school’s elite status.