Update:
By the way, this has been somewhat in the public record since April. Where was the media? ESPN? Hello?
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12 comments
November 9, 2011 at 8:07 pm
ari
I honestly can’t believe he’s going to try to coach out the season. And I can’t believe that people are rallying on his behalf. What a disgrace this whole situation is. Worse still, that nothing more will come of it other than a few lost jobs and a prison sentence or two is a tragically wasted opportunity.
November 9, 2011 at 8:34 pm
JWL
“..I can’t believe that people are rallying on his behalf”.
One single action– one that could maybe, just maybe– begin to reestablish the shreds of its reputation, is if Penn State cancels its football program outright.
It could always reestablish the program a few years down the road.
If not?
It will then be fair to ask: What kind of people are they?
November 9, 2011 at 8:49 pm
ari
Well, at least they fired him. And now the people of State College should cross the street and bring their children a little closer whenever they see him coming.
November 9, 2011 at 9:31 pm
kathy a.
Well, at least they fired him. only after this whole mess was out for a while, and paterno announced he would stay the season, into post-season if that happened. maybe this is a rhetorical question, but wtf were they thinking?
November 9, 2011 at 9:48 pm
KC Costanzo (@KCinHD)
Drew Magary over at Deadspin has the right idea:
http://deadspin.com/5857014/jerry-sandusky-joe-paterno-and-the-failure-of-adult-institutions-everywhere
Paterno screwed up worse than most of us will ever get a chance to. But it doesn’t make him evil.
November 9, 2011 at 11:18 pm
ari
I don’t care a whit about Paterno’s goodness or badness. I care about his behavior. And he behaved very, very, very badly. Badly enough, in fact, that I believe he should be shunned by members of polite society. I feel the same way about Peter Orszag, for what it’s worth. That said, I do like Big Daddy Drew. A lot.
November 10, 2011 at 6:42 am
KC Costanzo (@KCinHD)
I was making an extremely broad and not particularly insightful point, but I do feel like he should get the chance to redeem himself after all this. If he spends the last few years of his life complaining about how he was fired, then we can go ahead and call him a child-molester sympathizer or whatever. Hopefully he donates a bunch of money to charities for victims and owns up to his mistakes.
Honestly, college football is terrible so even if this hadn’t happened, I’d advocate we completely forget about him anyway. Down with the BCS, long live March Madness. You know, the important things in life.
November 10, 2011 at 7:20 am
silbey
It makes it worse in a lot of ways that Penn State was seen as such a model program. It suggests to me college sports as a whole is irredeemably broken and should just be done away with.
November 10, 2011 at 7:41 am
politicalfootball
Paterno and Bernard Law (for example) are creatures of their respective systems. Contempt for people like that is natural and appropriate, but insufficient. John Yoo is an evil, frightening man, and it’s necessary to shun him, but you also have to recognize that people like him are more-or-less inevitable, given the way our political institutions are constructed.
OWS seems to recognize this, and that’s part of the genius of their failure to make specific demands. “Fire Joe Paterno” is all well and good as a demand, but it’s only a start.
November 10, 2011 at 8:55 am
WM Rine
The New York Times has a profile this morning of McQueary, the “graduate assistant” (read: slave coach) who witnessed the rape in the shower; the angle is that McQueary’s reputation will probably be tarnished by this mess and his quest for a head coaching job ruined in the process. It emphasizes that he was the one who went to Paterno and followed up with campus law enforcement, all the while skimming over the fact that he did nothing in the moment to stop the rape from continuing and had to think about it overnight (and talk to his parents) before he did anything at all.
The Grand Experiment was just an idea, but it was a better idea than is the norm in college athletics. It’s unfortunately that it will now have an asterisk on it, that people will use it as an excuse to never try to improve this system.
November 10, 2011 at 10:01 am
eric
Isn’t it well known how “to improve this system” – go back to college sports as college sports, without athletic scholarships and proto-NFL accoutrements.
November 10, 2011 at 11:03 am
silbey
Yep, that would be a really really good way to go.