The End

It is a sad day to be as I am, a Penn State alum, even one who never fully drank the PSU football kool-aid and looked at the program with an eye of skepticism. I graduated from Happy Valley in 2002 while the team was going through one of their worst runs of the Paterno era. Under .500 for three of the four years I was a student and no BCS bowl appearances left Paterno answering questions about his future and his ability to coach at a high level at his advanced age. Since then he has steadied the ship on the field primarily due to a down Big 10 conference, but there has been an underlying feeling among Penn State supporters that only his retirement will allow the team to bring in a coaching staff that will embrace the forward pass and offensive ingenuity. For the past decade as complaints about the way Paterno's teams played offense the general feeling was that it was poor form to question Paterno since he was a legend and the man who put Penn State on the map. He also personally had a hand in building the college with millions of dollars going to libraries and on campus improvements for the general student body. Even if his age was a constant joke, the feeling was he deserved to go out on his own.

That has all changed this week with the revelations that Paterno was made aware of former defensive cordinator Jerry Sandusky's sexual assualt of young boys at the PSU football facility and that he only took this information to his immediate supervisor and not to the police. That would be like the President of the United States saying that he couldn't do anything in DC without getting the mayor's permission. Paterno is Penn State and is bigger than any AD, or college official even the President of the University. Paterno made this fact known when under pressure to resign in the early 2000's he flat out told the PSU President that he and only he would determine when he retired. It was Paterno's human moral obligation to report what he knew not only to the AD and President, but also to the police and he should have been following up with those parties after the fact. He might have done what was necessary by the legal definition, but he passed the buck and let everyone associated with PSU down and most importantly didn't protect the young boys who were being sexually abused by someone he knew well at his football compound under his watch. There is plenty of blame to go around in this vomit inducing incident as all of these men of power choose to protect the image of Penn State and Penn State football and in turn protected a violent sexual predator while hanging out to dry innocent young victims of sexual abuse. Paterno seemed above this, he donated most of his money back to the school, lived in the same small off campus home he had resided in for 50 years, and after a lengthy battle by the media his salary was revealed to be a 1/3rd of what most big time college coaches make, but in the end the ideal of the PSU program blinded his moral compass and allowed this incident to become a first paragraph story of his life and the end of his career at PSU.

As I said previously there is plenty of blame to go around, but it isn't really a surprise that a small town DA refused to follow up on reports about Sandusky in 1998 and that administrators wanted to keep the PSU football money making train going full speed, but Paterno as the face of PSU needed to do more then and explain himself now and his refusal to talk about what happened just adds to the carnage. He should have been in front of the media Monday morning stating what he knew, what he did, and what he didn't do. Instead, he hid behind a statement and cancelled his regular Tuesday press conference no doubt on advice from his legal team as he continued to attend practice.

The nature of this crime is the worst scandal to hit a college program, this is in a different category than selling rings for ink and paying players with cash, parties, and strippers. If an adult was beating a 10 year old in the street with a bat on College Ave. would that get reported to the police? I tend to think it might, yet somehow sexual abuse by a former coach got lost in the endless layers of college sports administration?

A full house cleaning is needed at Penn State beginning with Paterno and the college President and I don't know how anyone not related to a current player can attend Saturday's home game vs. Nebraska. PSU has one of the biggest and most devoted fan base in all of sports, but Saturday is the perfect opportunity to take a stand. Empty seats and protests outside of the stadium should be the minimum required for the PSU community as they express the outrage felt over this scandal. It is time for a new motto for the football program, "Success with honor" seems like a creul joke right now.