Ben, I've seen this said several times. What does it mean? I'm not familiar with the term as it applies to a college.
The death penalty is the popular term for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)'s power to ban a school from competing in a sport for at least one year. It is the harshest penalty that an NCAA member school can receive.
It has been implemented only five times:
The University of Kentucky basketball program for the 1952–53 season.
The basketball program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) for the 1973–74 and 1974–75 seasons
The Southern Methodist University football program for the 1987 and 1988 seasons.
The Division II men's soccer program at Morehouse College for the 2004 and 2005 seasons.
The Division III men's tennis program at MacMurray College for the 2005–06 and 2006–07 seasons.
It was made famous from the SMU scandal in the 80's.
SMU, (Southern Methodist University), back in the ‘80s had a solid football program.
They were caught paying players around 750 a month to play ball, and a whole slew of other recruiting violations, pay to play, you name it, SMU was in on it.
The program was suspended for all their home games for a year. All their players were given scholarships to play elsewhere. Their entire staff was fired and let go, and they were prevented for two years from offering scholarships to players.
SMU chose not to field a team for the away games, and chose not to field a team the next year because they could not be competitive. The program, only 3 years afterwards was able to field a team filled with freshmen, and two years after that, and 5 years after the ban, they were able to have all scholarship players again.
The entire conference went down and SMU, even downgraded only just 2 years ago they were finally eligible for a bowl game, and lost.
As the others have mentioned, this would be a lenient option for PSU. So we shall see what happens. This scandal is way, way beyond what was going on at SMU.