In 2012, Penn State was disciplined with some of the harshest sanctions that have been imposed on an NCAA member school since the SMU case—including a four-year bowl ban for the football team—for school officials' failure to report former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky's numerous instances of molesting children. Hours after the sanctions were announced, school president Rodney Erickson said that had Penn State not agreed to a sweeping consent decree implementing the sanctions, it would have faced a multi-year suspension of the football program without any preliminaries. Erickson subsequently told ESPN's John Barr that Penn State was facing as long as a four-year ban from play. Erickson also told ESPN's Don Van Natta that he had been prompted to start negotiations after NCAA president Mark Emmert personally told him that a majority of the NCAA leadership wanted to shut the football program down for four years.