Scandal. It's a word we've heard increasingly used in collegiate athletics, and more specifically college football, in the past decade. Players get paid and treated like kings, coaches and agents use less than savory tactics to get the players they want, boosters do anything in their power to support the team, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes, it seems as if more coverage is devoted to the scandals of college football than to actual college football year round. But if there's one person that the sports world thought the word "scandal" would never be used in tandem with, one program that we hoped and thought we knew was clean, it would be Joe Paterno and his Penn State Nittany Lions.
The Penn State football program was supposed to be the standard of college football, the "city upon a hill," the way you were supposed to run a college football program. Its coach was the winningest coach in the history of the game, its players consistently graduated at higher rates than any other perennial contender, and it seemed as if it went about its recruiting cleanly. But what has happened is much worse than any recruiting violation, any shady booster, or any unruly or compensated player.
This past weekend Jerry Sandusky, a long-time assistant coach and defensive coordinator for the Nittany Lions and once considered to be Joe Paterno's eventual successor, was arrested for 40 counts of allegations concerning the sexual abuse of young boys over a decade and a half. Even though Sandusky retired in 1999 (a very sudden retirement, which raises questions as to whether the program knew of his disgraceful acts and forced him to resign), he was given status as coach emeritus which included perks such as an office in and access to Penn State's football facilities, where much of his abuse of children took place. What is worse, is that he found most of his victims through his charity, The Second Mile, which is supposed to help children dealing with adversity.
Now, before we get into the rest of the story, obviously the most important thing to remember is that the lives of so many children were ruined and hurt forever because of one man's villainous actions. The most important part isn't Paterno, Penn State football or the university officials involved, it's the children involved in the case. But with that point stated, the way Penn State has handled the aftermath of these events has been terrible. Obviously, the firing of President Graham Spanier is understandable being that all of this happened under his watch as President and therefore leader of the university, but to fire Joe Paterno seems to be crossing the line.
Not to understate the gruesomeness of Sandusky's acts and the effect those acts had on its victims, but to see Joe Paterno go out like this, being fired from the university that he more than anyone else helped to build into the powerhouse it is, both athletically and academically, fired from the university that he devoted his whole life to, is terrible.
Obviously Paterno could have and probably should have done more. He has always been for better or worse, the eternal optimist, the man that rarely dealt with the big problems and seemed to live in eternal paradise, when sometimes his job called for more. If he was just a regular coach, he would only be expected to report to the athletic director about the vile act that his graduate assistant, Mike McQueary saw take place, but Joe Paterno's not just a coach. He is Penn State football, and has many times claimed to lead a moral program, best shown through the program's slogan, "Success with Honor." For him not to do more with the knowledge he had, certainly was not the right thing to do morally.
But at the same time, Paterno is not responsible for these acts, and is not even partially responsible for the acts that Sandusky committed after he found out in 2002 what Sandusky was doing. Sandusky is fully responsible for every single one of the acts that he committed. Second of all, even though he was morally wrong in not pursuing justice against Sandusky when the Athletic Director Tim Curley and the Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz failed to do so, Paterno fulfilled his legal responsibility in informing his superior about the act. He is still just a football coach, whose job is to focus solely on his football team, and this inaction is only just cause for forced resignation at most, not firing.
This brings us to our next point. To repeat, Joe Paterno had been the head coach of Penn State football for 46 seasons, and had been with the program for almost 62 years. He has arguably done more for Penn State and State College than any coach in all of sports has done for a team, institution or city. He and his wife Sue sent all of their five kids to Penn State, have contributed more than $4 million to a number of academic departments and colleges within the school, and helped to raise over $13.5 million for the expansion of the library, which was subsequently named after them. Very rarely, in this day and age do college coaches put down real roots where they coach, but Joe Paterno has lived and breathed Penn State ever since he arrived in State College. So yes, Paterno was irresponsible almost to the point of committing a moral crime, but still, he is only guilty of moral irresponsibility and inaction. To fire a man like Joe Paterno for that, for doing what he was required to do, but not going the extra mile, is uncalled for. No offense to the children and the families and friends that were affected by this tragedy, but Paterno earned the right to go out on his own terms in this situation or at least make it appear that he went out on his own terms. Penn State should have at least told him of its plans to fire him (let alone fire him in person, as instead he was told over the phone that his 62 year stay with the football program was over), and let him resign immediately on his own accord, even though he deserved to have one last Senior Day with the program he built from scratch. Maybe he wouldn't have deserved the cheers that may have come with being on the sidelines for that Senior Day, or even the win that may have come from that Senior Day, but he deserved for one last time to be out there coaching the team he devoted his life to.
Sandusky deserves whatever punishment he gets. Curley and Schultz deserve whatever punishment they get. Spanier deserved the punishment he got. But Joe Paterno, the man who has done so much good, the man who helped teach young men how to succeed, the man who made Penn State, Penn State, the man who may be the most important person in Pennsylvania, after 61-plus years, did not deserve the punishment he received.
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