Here's a quote from the article by Nebraska's chancellor in support of the sanctions. Maybe it's just me, but when someone is being blackmailed it doesn't really make it a legitimate "agreement" (To be fair, I could picture Spanier saying something like this if the roles were reversed.) "I think it ought to be clear what the NCAA did at its core," said Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman said. "It entered into an agreement with Penn State. If that's true, I'm not going to stand back and critique an agreement between two parties about what's going to happen. It's not Pandora's Box. Some of the comments that were made about it made it larger than that."