"It's easy to vilify or blame someone who's not alive to defend himself," said Tim Sweeney, president of Penn State's official Football Letterman's Club.
They believe Paterno is being made a scapegoat, with no way to refute the accusations. Joe knew pretty much everything going on there."įor those closest to Penn State and Paterno, though, their faith in the coach remains unshakeable. To what extent, that was the only question," said Brad Benson, a former Penn State offensive lineman who won a Super Bowl with the New York Giants. Paterno died of lung cancer in January, two months after school trustees fired him for what they called a failure of leadership. Sandusky is awaiting sentencing after being convicted last month on 45 criminal counts of abusing 10 boys. At a news conference, Freeh called the officials' disregard for child victims "callous and shocking." But the stark horror of Freeh's report was impossible to ignore.įreeh's firm, hired by university trustees to investigate how the scandal happened, found that Paterno, and three other administrators at the time - president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz - "repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky's child abuse." Handwritten notes and emails portray Paterno as being involved in a decision by the officials not to tell child welfare authorities about a 2001 encounter, while other emails show Paterno closely followed allegations made against Sandusky in 1998. Paterno said before his January death that he should have done more after a then-graduate assistant told the Hall of Fame coach he'd seen Sandusky assaulting a child in the Penn State showers in 2001, but said he had no knowledge of any accusations prior to that. Penn State's graduation rates were impeccable, his players were as good off the field as they were on, and his financial support of the university often had nothing to do with the football program. His teams won, but he didn't sacrifice his standards to do it. Until last fall, Paterno symbolized all that was right about college sports. I don't have the answer for that one, I really don't." So how do you separate the two? I don't know. "On the other hand, if you're looking at everything Joe has done and all the lives he's impacted and all the things he's done. Joe was a person, and he messed up," Arrington said. "A name on a building should be the least of someone's worries. "A statue should be least of someone's worries at this point," Penn State's former star linebacker LaVar Arrington said on his radio show in Washington, D.C. There was renewed clamor online to remove Paterno's statue outside Beaver Stadium, and USA Today columnist Christine Brennan called on Penn State to drop football for at least a year until the university has addressed the failings that led to the scandal. Nike announced it was stripping Paterno's name from the child care center at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. I can't imagine anything more shocking than that." "The contrast between the ethical standards we always associated with Joe and the complete lack of them in how this was handled - if what the Freeh Report says is true, and I have no reason to doubt it is, to sacrifice kids for the reputation of a football program, that's pretty despicable. Joe to something approaching the devil," said Frank Fitzpatrick, a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist and author of two books on Paterno and Penn State, including a biography last year, "Pride of the Lions." "I doubt anybody could have imagined this. After an eight-month inquiry, Former FBI director Louis Freeh's firm produced a 267-page report that concluded that Paterno and other top Penn State officials hushed up child sex abuse allegation against Jerry Sandusky more than a decade ago for fear of bad publicity, allowing Sandusky to prey on other youngsters.
(AP Photo/Pat Little) PAT LITTLE Show More Show Less 5 of8 Items left by visitors surround the gravestone of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno at the Spring Creek Presbyterian Cemetery in State College, Pa., Thursday, July 12, 2012. Paterno and other top Penn State officials hushed up child sex abuse allegation against Jerry Sandusky more than a decade ago for fear of bad publicity, allowing Sandusky to prey on other youngsters, according to a scathing internal report issued Thursday, Jon the scandal. 30, 2008 file photo, Penn State football coach Joe Paterno listens to a question during his weekly news conference in State College, Pa.
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