And before the Usual Legal Eagles jump in to say “well, he’s right, that’s all the law required!,” I’d like to repeat my statement earlier than a simple sense of humanity, of moral decency, required much, much more from Paterno than it seems he was willing to give.
Hiding behind “I did what the law required” cheapens him, especially given that reputation he worked all those years to build.
Former Penn Stater here and oh, I am sick.
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
You realize you’re talking about maybe six months, tops, after he steps down as coach. The guy is 85.
If ever there is a time to do more than the bare minimum that the law requires, it is to protect children. He knew that a 10 year old boy was raped in his locker room. How could he look himself in the mirror all of these years knowing that he didn’t do all that he could to stop other children from being abused?
Color me another bummed-out Penn State ex-fan. Forget an 8-1 season and 409 wins, I’ll never be able to watch another game without wondering what Joe knew and if he couldn’t have done more. I don’t see any way he can come out of this with his reputation intact and if he could have done more but didn’t he doesn’t deserve to.
There’s a really great player on my alma mater’s football team who was headed for PSU and I was stoked to think a kid from my high school was going to be playing for the Lions. Now I wonder if he’ll even go and I wouldn’t blame him.
One thing I haven’t seen is how this whole mess got exposed. Did one of the victims come forward?
Again, to stave off the Usual Legal Eagles, he didn’t “know” a 10-year-old boy had been raped. He’d been TOLD that a 10-year-old boy had been raped. By someone that he found credible enough to give an assistant coaching position to for the past nine years, so it’s not like McQueary said “I saw this” and Joe said “I don’t believe you, but I’ll pass it up the line.” Joe basically said “I’ll pass it up the line, and oh by the way, want a job?”
After being told by someone that you find otherwise credible that a rape had been witnessed, you’re morally obligated to ensure that the proper authorities (the non-campus police) conduct a proper investigation.
Nobody at Penn State looks good in this. Not McQueary, who worked for nine years with the guy who was supposed to make sure the report got investigated. Not Curley and Schultz. Not Spanier. Nobody.
As a nerd, I’ve never understood why football, an extra-curricular activity at an academic institution, is such a big deal. You can bet that if the administrators knew about an English prof raping kids, they would have found it in their hearts to call 911.
English professors don’t bring in multi-million dollar contracts, TV coverage, and elite athletes.
We can argue about the meaning of college sports and the negative or positive effects of the existence of the college sports machine elsewhere, but there is a financial reason why those two scenarios would receive differential treatment.
I know there is a financial incentive, it just bugs the living shit out of me that somehow college football makes people suddenly find the “grey area” in reporting child rapists.
Well, that just means everybody involved in this fiasco was a moral whore with a price, which just makes it that much worse.
If Graham Spanier (the president of Penn State University) had a clue, both Paterno and McQueary would already be on administrative leave.
Speaking of Spanier, he has a webcast about college athletics:
The most recent episode was titled, “Impact of TV on College Sports.” Maybe the next one can be titled, “Impact of Child Rape on the Penn State Football Program.”
Well, he certainly is being inconsistent with his own past statement. Obviously, the explanation for the lack of outcry is that the boy’s parents, being proper folk who always wore suits and ties when riding airplanes and what not, taught him manners such as the use of an indoor voice at all times while indoors. :rolleyes:
I am in 100% agreement with both of you. The machine of college football required, in this case, at least four high-level administrators to turn a blind eye to reports of child rape.
Frankly, universities don’t handle run of the mill sexual assault accusations very well. So I won’t take your bet.
Or that he (correctly) believed that the people in a position to do something about his behavior were too chickenshit to do so.
Tell his superiors, “You call the police, or I will”, and then do the latter when the former failed to occur. Duh.
Even more reason to report it, really. If an English professor gets convicted of child molestation, that’s pretty much the end of the story. He’s a pariah to everyone he knows, and the department moves on. When a nationally-known defensive coordinator gets busted for having sex with a prepubescent boy in the locker room, that could be the end of the program. Who the hell is ever going to send their kid to Penn State to play football after this? If they’d called the cops immediately and shipped this guy off to hell, people would have been inclined to say “bad deal, but at least they took care of it.” Now, Penn State may be looking at going the SMU route in the foreseeable future. This is orders of magnitude worse than Ohio State or Miami football or UNLV basketball. There may be no NCAA sanctions, but they’re going to get killed in the court of public opinion.
Being a lifelong Nebraska boy, I never thought I’d say that I felt honestly sorry for Penn State fans. I’m saying that now. Sorry, Jacknifed Juggernaut. This cannot be easy.
This whole thing may be the one point we actually agree on. Universities (including Penn State) don’t handle sexual assault/rape accusations (especially on-campus incidents) well at all. This kind of thing is why I tend to call Campus Security the place where crimes embarrassing to the admin go to die.
I’ve been pissing off several of my Facebook friends (people who I would NEVER expect to excuse this kind of thing) because I’m not “waiting for all the facts to come in”. All the facts ARE in, as far as Paterno’s knowledge goes…the indictment has McQueary’s testimony. The eyewitness contradicts what the secondhand reporters (Paterno, Curley, etc) have testified to. But any acknowledgement of that, to certain Penn State fans, is just hearsay and couldn’t possibly have happened in any way that JoePa has any culpability. I’m fairly certain that I’m likely to get unfriended by several people over it.
As a lifelong Big Ten fan, I remember being pleased when PSU joined the conference. Now, it might be time to show PSU the door.