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http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/12/us/pennsylvania-penn-state-paterno/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
http://www.wingheads.com/index.php?showtopic=68529&st=30&gopid=234978&#entry234978
As an alumni who never knew anything but Paterno as PSU's head coach, and by the time I was there (early '90s) the mythology of JoePa was already well entrenched, I'm still processing exactly what this means retrospectively. I suspect it's going to be one of those things that looks contradictory at first - JoePa the forger of young men's character, demanding class and education as well as football, vs. JoePa who participated in covering up ongoing child abuse - but actually makes a kind of sense:
I can believe that Paterno, half not wanting to believe what he was being told by multiple sources, sensed a threat in Sandusky's activities to the thing he loved most - the football program - and to all the good he thought he was doing with it, and so wanted that threat to go away as quickly and quietly as possible so that the program wasn't tarnished. That was the priority, as near as I can tell: preserve the program at all costs, justified in the name of everything Paterno believed he was accomplishing. And it became something straight out of a Greek tragedy - by totally losing perspective on what was more important, by choosing to cover up rather than confronting a terrible thing, everything Paterno did and worked for is now tarnished with a black brush of evil.
Perspective. If permanently dissolving the PSU football program, or even all college football, or even all football, could prevent even one more boy from having to go through the torture that Sandusky's victims went through, would that be worth it? How about if doing that prevented what happened to *all* the victims since '98? Isn't there a point where you have to say, no, football just isn't that important. And I think that point is way, way short of the line where someone, anyone, ends up scarred for life.
For Paterno, the program was his life, his legacy. I suspect a lot of coaches have this problem - Lombardi, George Allen, Vermeil before his burnout. This skewed his sense of right and wrong, and those kids paid the price. For myself, I did buy into the JoePa persona, even when I was probably old enough to know better, to know that everybody is a mix of good and bad, and of contradictions. Its something I think all PSU fans will have to confront eventually about this: did we help build up JoePa and the program to the point that it became this larger-than-life thing that a lot of people at Penn State, including Paterno, thought was more important to keep safe, at any price, than some nameless (to them), faceless (to them), kids' lives?
This is hardly something limited to Penn State - if you've been in a major college football stadium filled to capacity on a Saturday, you know that its a huge deal to a huge number of people. The question becomes, at what price? If not a child's innocence, is there still a price worth paying to preserve the program, or to make that program a winner? Payola? Recruiting violations? Injury pools to take out another team's best players? And at what point do you just have to say "no, this is nuts, its still just football, just a game, doing this is wrong." And if there's a long history of not being able to make the right decisions on that, at what point do you just have to say the whole thing needs to be scrapped, to start over or just to go away forver, because the price is too high? That is basically one of the objectives of the NCAA death penalty, after all: you force the whole thing to reset by denying any football for a period of time.
Anyway, that's where I am with this now.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/12/us/pennsylvania-penn-state-paterno/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
http://www.wingheads.com/index.php?showtopic=68529&st=30&gopid=234978&#entry234978
As an alumni who never knew anything but Paterno as PSU's head coach, and by the time I was there (early '90s) the mythology of JoePa was already well entrenched, I'm still processing exactly what this means retrospectively. I suspect it's going to be one of those things that looks contradictory at first - JoePa the forger of young men's character, demanding class and education as well as football, vs. JoePa who participated in covering up ongoing child abuse - but actually makes a kind of sense:
I can believe that Paterno, half not wanting to believe what he was being told by multiple sources, sensed a threat in Sandusky's activities to the thing he loved most - the football program - and to all the good he thought he was doing with it, and so wanted that threat to go away as quickly and quietly as possible so that the program wasn't tarnished. That was the priority, as near as I can tell: preserve the program at all costs, justified in the name of everything Paterno believed he was accomplishing. And it became something straight out of a Greek tragedy - by totally losing perspective on what was more important, by choosing to cover up rather than confronting a terrible thing, everything Paterno did and worked for is now tarnished with a black brush of evil.
Perspective. If permanently dissolving the PSU football program, or even all college football, or even all football, could prevent even one more boy from having to go through the torture that Sandusky's victims went through, would that be worth it? How about if doing that prevented what happened to *all* the victims since '98? Isn't there a point where you have to say, no, football just isn't that important. And I think that point is way, way short of the line where someone, anyone, ends up scarred for life.
For Paterno, the program was his life, his legacy. I suspect a lot of coaches have this problem - Lombardi, George Allen, Vermeil before his burnout. This skewed his sense of right and wrong, and those kids paid the price. For myself, I did buy into the JoePa persona, even when I was probably old enough to know better, to know that everybody is a mix of good and bad, and of contradictions. Its something I think all PSU fans will have to confront eventually about this: did we help build up JoePa and the program to the point that it became this larger-than-life thing that a lot of people at Penn State, including Paterno, thought was more important to keep safe, at any price, than some nameless (to them), faceless (to them), kids' lives?
This is hardly something limited to Penn State - if you've been in a major college football stadium filled to capacity on a Saturday, you know that its a huge deal to a huge number of people. The question becomes, at what price? If not a child's innocence, is there still a price worth paying to preserve the program, or to make that program a winner? Payola? Recruiting violations? Injury pools to take out another team's best players? And at what point do you just have to say "no, this is nuts, its still just football, just a game, doing this is wrong." And if there's a long history of not being able to make the right decisions on that, at what point do you just have to say the whole thing needs to be scrapped, to start over or just to go away forver, because the price is too high? That is basically one of the objectives of the NCAA death penalty, after all: you force the whole thing to reset by denying any football for a period of time.
Anyway, that's where I am with this now.
