We shouldn't leave college football to the Joe Paternos of the world

If Joe really thought simply reporting this was enough, it makes you wonder what his relationship(s) with authority were like growing up. Maybe something similar happened to him to make him think that such behavior is 'just the way it goes'.

In any event, it is clear that PSU needs to clean house. At bare minimum the entire football coaching staff needs to be gone as well as anyone in the chain of command who had even the most remote connection to the information.

 

I was surprised that there was even a presser scheduled. Telling people that you're primarily going to answer questions about the upcoming football game?! Yeah, right! Silly old man.

 

If someone was an eyewitness, wouldn't you run up and stop it right then? I'd run over and punch and kick the adult perpetrating the act in the teeth. And then I'd tell the authorities who came to haul him to the hospital what happened. Period.

 

I can honestly say that I would be in too much shock to do anything except maybe scream. If it was a person in power who was committing this atrocious act, I would probably be afraid for myself if I said or did anything in his/her presence.

 

It's going to get uglier as the details come out. Many people covered for this perv.

 

Penn State Said to Be Planning Paterno’s Exit Amid Scandal

By MARK VIERA and PETE THAMEL

Published: November 8, 2011


STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Joe Paterno’s tenure as coach of the Penn State football team will soon be over, perhaps within days or weeks, in the wake of a sex-abuse scandal that has implicated university officials, according to two people briefed on conversations among the university’s top officials.
The board of trustees has yet to determine the precise timing of Paterno’s exit, but it is clear that the man who has more victories than any other coach at college football’s top level and who made Penn State a prestigious national brand will not survive to coach another season. Discussions about how to manage his departure have begun, according to the two people.

Paterno was to have held a news conference Tuesday but the university canceled it less than an hour before it was scheduled to start.

At age 84 and with 46 seasons as the Penn State head coach behind him, Paterno’s extraordinary run of success — one that produced tens of millions of dollars for the school and two national championships, and that established him as one of the nation’s most revered leaders, will end with a stunning and humiliating final chapter.

Jerry Sandusky, a former defensive coordinator under Paterno, has been charged with sexually abusing eight boys across a 15-year period, and Paterno has been widely criticized for failing to involve the police when he learned of an allegation of one assault of a young boy in 2002.

Additionally, two top university officials — Gary Schultz, the senior vice president for finance and business, and Tim Curley, the athletic director — were charged with perjury and failure to report to authorities what they knew of the allegations, as required by state law.

Since Sandusky’s arrest Saturday, Penn State — notably its president, Graham Spanier, and Paterno — have come under withering criticism for a failure to act adequately after learning, at different points over the years, that Sandusky might have been abusing children. Newspapers have called for their resignations; prosecutors have suggested their inaction led to more children being harmed by Sandusky; and students and faculty at the university have expressed a mix of disgust and confusion, and a hope that much of what prosecutors have charged is not true.

On Monday law enforcement officials said that Paterno had met his legal obligation in alerting his superiors at the university when he learned of the 2002 allegation against Sandusky. But they suggested he might well have failed a moral test for what to do when confronted with such a disturbing allegation involving a child not even in his teens. No one at the university alerted the police or pursued the matter to determine the well-being of the child involved. The identity of that child remains unknown, according to the Attorney General.

Paterno has not been charged in the matter, but his failure to report to authorities what he knew about the 2002 incident, in which Sandusky allegedly sexually assaulted a young boy at Penn State’s football complex, has become a flashpoint, stirring anger among the board members and an outpouring of public criticism about his handling of the matter.

In recent days Paterno has lost the support of many board members, and their conversations illustrate a decisive shift in the power structure at the university. In 2004, for instance, Paterno brushed off a request by the university president that he step down.

Paterno came to Penn State in 1950 as a 23-year-old assistant coach making $3,600 a year. He planned to stay for two seasons, to pay off his student loans from Brown University, where he earned a degree in English literature.

He became the head coach in 1966, and he has been widely credited with helping spearhead the Penn State football program and the rest of the university from a local enterprise into a national brand. Along the way, Beaver Stadium grew to 108,000 seats from 29,000 and Penn State’s endowment grew from virtually nothing to more than $1 billion.

What separated Paterno from many of his coaching peers until this week was that he did this with few questions about how he grew the program. Penn State’s lofty graduation rates and education-first ideals, known as Paterno’s Grand Experiment, became as synonymous with the program as its plain uniforms and dominating defenses.

Paterno led Penn State to national titles in the 1982 and 1986 seasons, and he complemented the on-field success with the reputation of a throwback sideline professor, whose tie, thick glasses and black Nike coaching shoes became as predictable in Northeast autumns as the changing foliage.

Paterno’s reach on campus extended well beyond the football program. He and his wife, Sue, have donated more than $4 million to the university. On campus, everything from an ice cream flavor at the Creamery to a library now bears his name.

“There’s no individual in the entire 120- or 130-year history of the university that has had a greater impact on the institution than Joe Paterno,” Larry Foster, a former trustee and a president of the alumni association, told The New York Times in 2004. “He’s just reached into so many areas.”

 

It just makes you wonder how many of these pedophiles are out there. And in positions similar to Sandusky. There are thousands of youth camp programs in United States. From sports to religion to politics. It's really a sad world we live in with stories like this.

[youtube]fzsWsSChYJE[/youtube]

 

So basically, Penn State has wanted to get rid of him for awhile but needed to do it in a way that would make Penn State not look bad or tick off hardcore alumni and boosters that loved him dearly.

Penn State thanks their lucky stars that they won't have to wait for Joe Paterno to either retire on his own (if it didn't happen by now it wasn't going to) or be forced out via death, as morbid as that sounds.

The 80s championships are getting older every season and Penn State thinks its better than an occasional Big Ten title or Rose Bowl berth.

Million-salary coaches of college football be warned: If Jim Tressel's and Joe Paterno's jobs are not safe, neither is yours. Don't just win, don't just worry about your legacy. Do the right thing!

 

Phil great read. I would rather have Switzer than a man who covers up for a child molester. Switzer by no means was a saint, however, I truly believe Switzer had all of his players best interest at heart. Look what Stoops does for the terminally Ill children and by no means would Stoops or Switzer cover up a travisty like this. I believe Joe Pa needs to step down and the people who were in the know need to go to prison for a very long time. Pray for the children who were abused and for their parents. This is a very ugly situation.

 

Switzer never claimed to be a saint never claimed to be holier than thou but Switzer would have killed that pedo on the spot. It's sad that the biggest punishment JoePa will receive is to be fired from his job at the age of 80. That's doesn't seem like a bad deal at all.

 

^^^^This

I think that Switzer and/or Stoops would have been very bad people to be doing the discovering.
That said, Barry would have taken a bit more relish and spent more quality time in beating the SOB to death. Bob would have simply gotten the job done and gone to wash his hands and face.

 

More damning info against Penn State & Paterno:

http://espn.go.com/college-football...ittany-lions-call-joe-paterno-news-conference

 

why would a 10 year old boy be around a college locker room? was this one of his adopted kids or what?

 

As distasteful as this entire criminal matter is, your analysis is spot-on and I agree 100%. I simply don't understand how a person who witnesses or is made aware of such a thing doesn't go straight to the police - the vast majority of us put in Paterno's position, I'd wager, would've dialed 911 on the spot and added at the end of the call "and please hurry, before I go find this monster myself and start stomping him into the ground." Which goes to your point: Paterno lacked the character to do the right thing when it could've counted the most.

 

From Penn State to State Pen.

 

Sue Paterno runs that situation thru her husband. They'll have to bring in a SWAT team to get rid of her.

 

Yeah, exactly, and not all of them are/were connected with the Penn State program according to the indictment against the main person.

 

Mind boggling, disgusting, far reaching, long lasting. Scarred beyond imagination. Litigations galore. Media circus eventually. No way to estimate direct and indirect $$ cost to PSU.

 

I don't get where people are trying to deflect culpability because the matter was reported up the food chain in the athletic department and the university administration. This is a criminal issue first and foremost, not a university issue or an athletic department issue. Sarbanes-Oxley does not apply to the sexual assault of children.