The debate over the place of college sports in American culture began well before the Penn State child sex abuse scandal. As TIME's Sean Gregory has pointed out, big-time college teams are essentially professional franchises housed on college campuses, and calls for change have been growing. In August 2011, a former University of Miami football booster came clean to Yahoo! Sports about the eight years he spent providing players with booze, meals, prostitutes and entertainment. Then, in October, Pulitzer-prize winning author and civil rights historian Taylor Branch published a scathing indictment of the NCAA in Atlantic magazine titled, "The Shame of College Sports." Calling the NCAA a cartel, Branch made the case that college sports' governing body, while proclaiming amateurism its highest ideal, exploits athletes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. If nothing else, perhaps the Penn State scandal — the largest, and some believe the biggest, in college sports — will change our values; it's certainly changed the conversation.