Update: Penn State BoT committee that will vote on the next football coach's contract posts, removes potential meetings due to 'IT error'

5:51 p.m. ET update: In a statement, a Penn State spokesperson says four potential meeting dates of the university’s Board of Trustees’ Community on Equity and Human Resources were posted to the board’s online scheduling website earlier Friday “as the result of an IT error.”

“Those meetings were posted as the result of an IT error while the website was being updated and were quickly removed,” Wyatt DuBois the Senior Director for University Public Relations in the Penn State Office of Strategic Communications, said in an emailed statement to BWI.

A previous version of this story reported at 11:30 a.m. ET that the university’s Board of Trustees’ Committee on Equity and Human Resources has posted potential meeting dates for next week amid the school’s football coaching search, which looks likely to end with the hiring of Iowa State’s Matt Campbell. No agenda was initially available with further details about what the meeting(s) might be about. But it is the committee that will eventually vote on the financial details of the contract to be offered to whoever athletic director Pat Kraft selects as the replacement for James Franklin. The dates listed now are Dec. 8 – 11 (which is next Monday through Thursday).

By 12:55 ET p.m. ET, the posting was updated with times for those potential meetings. They were as follows:

Mon. Dec. 8 – 10:45 – 11 a.m. ET

Tue., Dec. 9 – 2:45 – 3 p.m. ET

Wed., Dec. 10 – 9:30 – 10 a.m. ET

Thur., Dec. 11 – 10:45 – 11 a.m. ET.

At 4:40 p.m. ET, this story was updated to note that the all of the aforementioned listings were removed from the online schedule. As of 6 p.m. ET, no new dates have been added.

The rest of the original story is below:

It’s important to note that nothing could happen on any of those dates. Back in January, the same committee put six different dates on the calendar to be ready to vote on Jim Knowles’ Penn State contract. It ultimately did so on Jan. 27. It had previously set four possible meeting dates before that one. It also had another one scheduled for the next day if needed. Doing so allows the Board to meet its Sunshine Act obligations while also being ready to make things official the second they are able to. More dates could be added in either direction: Pennsylvania law requires 24 hours’ notice for a special meeting, which this is.

If that’s too many words, we’ll make it simple: The search could end before or after the first or last dates listed above. But, it does not have to.

More: What has to happen for the Penn State football coaching search to officially end? Will it involve the Board of Trustees? Here are the details

Kraft has been looking for the next leader of the Lions since firing Franklin back on Oct. 12. He, of course, is already employed again. He is the new head coach at Virginia Tech. As for the latest on Kraft’ search, you can visit The Lions Den message board to learn what we know as we know it.

“When you make these types of decisions, and we make big decisions all the time, I make decisions that no one knows about our athletes and where we are going,” Kraft said in October. “Anything this significant just doesn’t come on a whim. You have to have scenarios and we do. How is this going to go; what if this happened. But looking at where the program was and where it is and where we want to be as a program, I just felt there was no other course. 

“I felt it was time; now, remember we’re in a different era of football and there are a lot of things that come with this new era in transfers and everything. So that probably was down the road in the thought process, but I did feel like for our student-athletes and the staff and the program and our fans, there just wasn’t a choice.  And by the way, look, when you make that decision, you make the call, I have to be the leader, I have to make hard decisions. So that’s why we; I felt like it was appropriate.”