Sandusky case, PSU's response a sad story
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There's a question college football coaches are asked every autumn, even though the answer is never terribly revealing or important: Is this a good time for an off week?
Yesterday, Nov. 5, 2011, was a very good time for the open date at Penn State.
It was so much better than having the 84-year-old living-legend of a head coach marched into a postgame media room for some kind of question that, right here, I can only try to approximate.
"Joe, in light of the lurid details in the grand jury report on Jerry Sandusky, do you expect that you or any allegedly involved chain-of-command university officials up to and including president Graham Spanier can keep your jobs?"
That's the kind of question that can make a coach long for a good ol' quarterback controversy right there.
For most of the 21st century, you pretty much knew that the Joe Paterno Era would end badly. He had taken the football program and with it the entire university to the very apex of decorous national prominence, but long since led both on a stubborn chase to perfect his legacy, a legacy he was absolutely petrified to unleash.
There was no good way out, but there were one million better ways than this, the charging of former defensive coordinator and longtime top Paterno lieutenant Sandusky with child sex abuse, the related perjury charges and looming surrender to authorities of Penn State athletic director Tim Curley and Penn State vice president for finance and business Gary Schultz, and the apparent head-in-the-sand reaction of university president Spanier to more than a decade of unspeakable allegations involving one of the football program's greatest retired generals.
What Paterno knew about the crimes alleged in 23 sickening pages of a grand jury report on Sandusky, covering eight victims as young as 10 and stretching over 13 years, during most of which Sandusky enjoyed full, unfettered access to Penn State's facilities, might be nothing more than the contents of one conversation.
First Published November 5, 2011 9:43 pm
