While trying to justify their historic sanctions against Penn State in court, the NCAA released emails that showed just how close they came to shutting down the storied football program.

According to the Associated Press, the email correspondence between Donald Remy, the NCAA's chief attorney, and a lawyer representing Penn State, were submitted as court documents Thursday. Two Penn. officials are challenging the legality of the NCAA's $60 million fine levied against the school.

The emails were from July 17, 2012, a week before the NCAA announced the fine, a four-year bowl ban, four years of reduced scholarships and 211 vacated wins from 1998 to 2011. Most members of the NCAA executive committee would rather have given the football program the "death penalty," which would have been to shut it down all together.

As a result of the lawsuit, other email correspondences have become public, such as a series of internal memos that suggested the NCAA questioned the Penn State sanctions. One email in particular categorized the sanctions as a "bluff" toward the school, but the newly disclosed emails suggest that Penn State's "cooperation and transparency" swayed the NCAA away from the death penalty.

"When taken out of context, some of this material creates a misleading impression of the important issues related to the consent decree between the NCAA and Penn State," NCAA spokesperson Erik Christianson said in a press release. "The NCAA believes the full story will emerge at the trial scheduled for January 2015."

The fine and vacated wins are the only sanctions that have lasted, as the NCAA has ended the bowl ban and restored Penn State's football scholarships for next season.

However, a recent report from ESPN's "Outside the Lines" revealed the Freeh Report was not the independent review Penn State paid for. Louis Freeh, the FBI's former director, and his firm were hired by Penn State to review the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal, but certain obtained documents showed that Freeh got help from the NCAA.

Freeh's report was released ahead of the sanctions and implicated several Penn State officials to have contributed to a cover-up of Sandusky's crimes, intentionally or not. The NCAA then used the Freeh Report as the basis for the sanctions.