It's time to officially Pit Joe Paterno and the Penn State football program.

The BBQ Pit
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What’s wrong with me from your point of view is that I’m keeping a level head. Joe Paterno, a man of longstanding reputation for honesty and integrity, testified to the grand jury (quote posted uptread) that McQueary told him that he had seen Sandusky engaging in “fondling or doing something sexually” with what appeared to be a young child.

Why are so so willing to assume that a vague statement (“told him what happened”) made by a guy who’s made egregious missteps all the way through this and may well be trying to deflect some of the blame away from himself should trump the word of a man who has a decades-long reputation for behaving admirably?

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Sorry SA, but you are the one trying to find a way to get Paterno off the hook here. I will agree that to my mind McQueary should have notified the police. But if he didn’t, then Paterno should have and so on up to the University President and the Board of Regents. Anyone at Penn State who was aware of any allegations of this nature against Sandusky and didn’t report it to law enforcement failed to perform their duty from a moral standpoint and from a legal one as well. This was not the only incident of this type brought to Paterno and administrators about Sandusky. I suspect there will be more incidents coming to light before this is over.

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Jesus Christ. “…fondling or doing something sexually with what appeared to be a young child” is all it takes. The next step is a phone call to law enforcement officials. And how the hell do you know how honest Joe Paterno has been over his lifetime? Been reading some Sports Illustrated articles?

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Empty, but level.

Oh. Hadn’t realized that’s all it was. Fondling or doing something sexually with what appeared to be a young child. That’s no big deal then. For all we know, Paterno just thought he was playfully rubbing against a midget. Or one of Santas elves. Or a young…I mean totally of age beardless dwarf. Or a tall albino smurf.

Behaving admirably? Fucker did his job as a college football coach. Just because a lot of other coaches are shitheads doesn’t make Paterno a saint. And why are you so willing to believe that everyone else made “egregious missteps” along the way but not Paterno?

Because you can’t believe he would do something like that (cause he’s the coach teehee!) and your experience trumps all. And also too the great Nancy Grace.
I can’t be the only one getting nervous about her name being repeated. I’ve heard if you mention her too many times (five times in mirror in the dark. Not sure the limit on the internet), you’re automatically found guilty and sent to the chair to fry.

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I haven’t heard about this. Can you tell me where you found out about it?

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I’m sure lots of folks thought Sandusky was a hellava guy too.

It seems like people are conflating “popular and wins a lot of football teams” with “morally righteous”. It’s crazy and disgusting, and I’m glad that most people, even people that don’t normally agree on stuff, are able to distinguish the two.

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The thing is that JoePA [del]does[/del] did have a “longstanding reputation for honesty and integrity”. He enforced academic requirements for his players and provided them with support including getting extended library hours and providing academic tutors.* He donated a big chunk of money to the aforementioned library and pushed not just for football but for success in most things relating to Penn State. It’s part of the reason he’s achieved the “god” status - not just the football wins but being involved in promoting the university as a whole.

Which is why this particular scandal hits so hard - he had a helluva reputation even amongst the non-sports types. I can’t see him getting out of this untarnished - either he knew and didn’t act, in which case he’s morally reprehensible, or he didn’t know which, given his tenure and involvement in the university, suggests either carefully-cultivated plausible deniability or the onset of senility and incompetence.

My guess is that he’ll finish the season and retire during the spring, giving PSU a buffer to hype up the new guy enough to minimize the damage to next season’s team.

  • The usual implications of football players having academic tutors to “help” them with their schoolwork continue to apply, however.
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But this is where my thinking is, and I will readily admit that I am biased and probably looking at this in every way possible favorable to Joe Pa. My thinking is that a grad assistant came to Paterno’s house that Saturday and said that he saw Sandusky doing “something strange” to the boy.

I don’t believe for a minute that he said anal sex. If he saw that, what person in this world would have ran out of the locker room instead of immediately beating the living shit out of Sandusky?

I think the GA felt sufficiently guilty or unsure enough that he hemmed and hawed around describing the incident to Paterno. Then Paterno, not believing it himself, thought “There’s no way that Jerry would do something like this. This must be a misunderstanding. Nonetheless, I will let the AD investigate.”

Then after hearing nothing from the AD, he assumed (as he originally thought) that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, that the GA didn’t see what he thought he saw, and that there was an innocent explanation for it.

I know that if someone said that one of my associates had done that to a kid, I wouldn’t believe it. Who wants to believe that a monster is among you? In hindsight, that was the incorrect thing to do.

Like I said, I’m sitting here with my fingers in my ears screaming loud enough so that I CAN’T HEAR YOU. :wink: It just boggles my mind that ANY human, let alone Joe Pa, would hear of anal sex with a 10 year old and shrug it off.

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Local news on KDKA AM radio this morning is reporting that Gov. Corbett was involved in the investigation as PA Attorney General. Gov. Corbett heads the Board of Trustees and has asked former Gov. Tom Ridge to take over for Spanier who is apparently on his way out.

Most reports are saying Paterno could be gone before Saturday’s game and definitely won’t be back next year. A decision may be announced by the Board of Trustees after their next meeting.

Bri2k

330

Here’s the deal with responsibility and blame: it doesn’t always divide up like a pie.

If Person A trusses up a guy and ties cinderblocks to him, and Person B pushes the trussed-up guy off the boat and into the water, they don’t each bear 50% of the responsibility for his death: they each bear 100%, and will both get convicted of first degree murder if the facts become known.

Same thing here: McQueary’s responsibility for making sure the police were informed was 100%. So was Paterno’s. So was anyone else at Penn State who was informed by either of them about Sandusky’s actions.

McQueary bears the additional responsibility for having failed to break up Sandusky’s rape of the 10 year old when he witnessed it. But that doesn’t lessen Paterno’s responsibility for reporting what McQueary told him, either.

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That doesn’t exactly reflect well on Corbett. Investigation or no, the first responsibility with a serial child rapist is to keep him from raping again. I sure don’t see where Corbett did any of that, considering that Sandusky had access to PSU facilities until last week, and was working with Second Mile until very recently as well.

One certainly would hope!

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Actually, Second Mile severed their relationship with Sandusky in 2008, when allegations about a boy in Clinton County came out. Recent, I guess, but not really very recent.

I’ve heard that the number of victims coming forward is now up into the 20s.

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Thanks, I stand corrected.

I believe it - given his decades at Second Mile, he’s had plenty of time to rape and molest dozens of kids.

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I disagree. It’s not as simple as that.

When I was in my early teens there was a guy involved in my school in some sort of teaching/tutoring capacity - probably around age 20 or so - who liked to rub our legs under the table and the like. We were creeped out, and made the expected jokes and snide remarks about the guy behind his back, and to the extent possible we avoided sitting in a position that would allow for this, but that was about it. I don’t bear the guy any ill will today (he was a nice guy apart from that issue) and while I wouldn’t be absolutely shocked to find that he later became a hard core molester, I think the overwhelming likelihood is that he grew out of it (he was not in a relationship at the time).

And I remember seeing a middle-aged guy who used to tutor a kid in a public place (a library of some sort) and he used to put his arm around the kid in a way that made me uneasy. I wondered at the time if I should track down the kid’s parents and report it to them, but I had nothing really to put my finger on, and in the end I didn’t.

And so on, for any number of situations.

The point here is that there’s not a hard and fast line between “evil molester who should be tortured to death” and “fine and upstanding man” - there’s a lot of gray area in between, and a lot of room for different corrective measures.

And to the extent that - to JP’s knowledge - there was ambiguity in this particular case, then the question is whose job it was to sort it out. I would say it was not JP’s job. He was the coach of the football team, and his job was to coach football - apparently a pretty time consuming job, from what I hear. And Sandusky was out of his employ for three years by this time. By passing it along to people whose job it was to manage this type of situation, he did the right thing, both legally and morally. And if he didn’t see Sandusky being led away in handcuffs the next day? Well, maybe it turned out that this was not warranted based on the evidence in this situation. Happens sometimes.

But again, this depends on what he knew. If he knew enough to know that his superiors had obviously been derelict in their duties, then he should have followed up. But if his knowledge was such that he could reasonably believe that proper procedures had been followed, then he did the right thing.

So far, there is no evidence at all that he knew the extent of what had happened. The grand jury report does not claim that he knew this, and he himself has denied it. The only evidence that he knew what had happened is the speculation of frenzied witch-hunters. I say let’s wait for actual evidence instead.

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If you look at who Sandusky was victimizing, they were poor kids from disfunctional homes. I’m sure in the minds of many of Joe’s supporters, they were just white trash and not more important that the schools extra-curricular athletic program. After all, who were these kids compared to those millions of dollars?

Ultimately, kids like that spend their lives either getting literally fucked in the ass by people like Sandusky, or figuratively fucked in the ass by people like JoePa.

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According to this the state Attorney General investigation that brought Sandusky to justice was initiated by Corbett.

Now, I certainly wish Sandusky could have been apprehended earlier, but this would have been difficult with a lack of evidence. Had certain individuals in State College made known what they saw, this might have been wrapped up faster.

That seems rather obvious.

I expressed earlier in the thread the contention that reporting procedures ought to be followed strictly. This goes for investigative procedure and due process as well.

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What I’d like to see come out of this is that every college coach of every sport develops a plan to prevent anything like this happening at their school. With all the sports camps offered by so many schools in so many sports, there are a lot of opportunities for other sick people to take advantage of their access to young people. Every coach, every AD needs to look at the PSU situation and ask himself “Could this happen at my school? How can we prevent it? And if, heaven forbid, ANYTHING improper happens, how do we make sure that it will get reported and not covered up?”

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There’s a story out on the AP that Joe Paterno’s son has confirmed he’ll retire as head coach at the end of the season. I wonder if this will preclude the Board of Trustees from making him leave sooner.

According to this story in the Post-Gazette, Gov. Corbett will be attending Friday’s Board of Trustees meeting and plans to speak about the scandal and investigation. His press secretary says he withheld commenting on this because he directed the investigation as Attorney General prior to becoming governor.

Bri2k

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Um…I agree, but I hardly think this should be limited to coaches. When I was a teenager I attended what was basically a summer camp held at a university in northern Pennsylvania. This camp used university facilities not limited to the athletic fields, and university faculty and other employees were involved in running the thing.

Not to mention the fact that a certain number of incoming freshmen every year are still minors.

Universities should have a program about child sexual abuse for all of their employees, this program must not be insulated from law enforcement and child welfare operations in the greater community, and this must involve all employees including, clearly, janitors. I think we all can agree on this.

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There already IS a plan. Even more, there is a LAW. They don’t need another plan, or another law, if people are going to ignore it.

Maybe what the law needs is more teeth. I asked upthread what the possible punishment is for failing to report according to the laws requirements, and I haven’t seen an answer. But maybe the penalties need to be ramped up, substantially.