But Joe Paterno did not stop it and he enabled it, and that’s just tragic.” What happened to these children because of Joe Paterno - it’s because of Jerry Sandusky first and foremost. The games he won, the number of players he graduated, that’s a tremendous record. “I absolutely understand and respect the past. “We should look at as a willing enabler of a convicted child molester,” Brennan said. Paterno acknowledged 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 insisted he had no knowledge of any accusations prior to that.īut Freeh’s bluntly disputed Paterno’s stance.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 e-mails portray Paterno as being involved in a decision by the officials not to tell child welfare authorities about a 2001 encounter, while other e-mails show Paterno closely followed allegations made against Sandusky in 1998.Īt a news conference, Freeh called the officials’ disregard for child victims “callous and shocking.” 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.Įven after the November arrest of Sandusky, the architect of Penn State’s ferocious defenses and Paterno’s one-time heir apparent, many were hesitant to put too much blame on Paterno or let his one failing outweigh all his good deeds. 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 could still be more fallout from court cases - criminal charges against two administrators, civil suits from victims of Jerry Sandusky - and the NCAA has yet to decide whether it will weigh in on the scandal or not. 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., not even six months after founder Phil Knight drew a thunderous ovation for an impassioned defense of the major college football’s winningest coach at his memorial service. 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. Paterno, former FBI Director Louis Freeh said, was “an integral part of this active decision to conceal.” Now, to many people outside Penn State and even some insiders, that’s been exposed as an illusion.Ī report released Thursday found Paterno helped hush up allegations of child sex abuse against a former assistant that went back more than a decade, sacrificing the ideals he preached to protect his football program. LITTLE ROCK - For decades Penn State was considered special, immune from the corruption of college athletics by virtue of Joe Paterno’s high ideals, long list of victories and even longer list of graduates.
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