Penn State Scandal

[soccerman]

Don't know how many of you are following this but the Penn State controversy is a hot topic right now. People even calling for legendary coach Joe Paterno to step down since he was aware of the allegations and did not report it to the police eventhough he told the Athletic Director. Do you think he did enough by notifying his superiors? Or was he morally obligated to file a police report?

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/college/joe-paterno-penn-state-football-coach-center-unholy-mess-article-1.974071

[theworm2345]

Paterno is a football coach though not basketball

[soccerman]

My bad worm, I thought I placed it in the other sports section

Mods can you help me out and transfer it there

[Bakes]

Paterno need to go.

[soccerman]

So you find him at fault Bakes?

[Bitter]

Paterno and anyone connected with this should already be gone.

Difference Makers
November 8, 2011 | Paul Campos
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/11/the-mystery-of-cowardice

On a Friday night in March of 2002, Mike McQueary, a 28-year-old former starting quarterback for the Penn State University football team, entered the locker room at the PSU football complex. At the time, McQueary was a “graduate assistant” – that is, someone at the bottom of the football coaching hierarchy, who was in effect auditioning to get a job as a full-fledged assistant on the PSU football staff. According to a grand jury report, this is what he saw:

As the graduate assistant entered the locker room doors, he was surprised to find the lights and the showers on. He then heard rhythmic, slapping sounds. He believed the sounds to be those of sexual activity. As the graduate assistant put his sneakers in his locker, he looked in the shower. He saw a naked boy … whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky. The graduate assistant was shocked but noticed that both [the victim] and Sandusky saw him. The graduate assistant left immediately, distraught.

“Sandusky” is Jerry Sandusky, who in 2002 was a 58-year-old icon of PSU football, second only to legendary coach Joe Paterno in prestige among former PSU players like McQueary. As PSU’s defensive coordinator, Sandusky had been Paterno’s right hand man and heir apparent, until his sudden and unexpected resignation in 1999, two years after McQueary had been the team’s starting quarterback and co-captain.

McQueary called his father, who told him he needed to tell Paterno about what he had seen. McQueary telephoned Paterno the next morning (Saturday) and visited him at his home. Paterno testified that McQueary seemed “very upset,” and that the next day (Sunday), Paterno called PSU athletic director Tim Curley to his home, and, according to Paterno’s grand jury testimony, told Curley that McQueary reported seeing Sandusky “fondling or doing something of a sexual nature to a young boy” in the football locker room showers.

Ten days later McQueary was called to a meeting with PSU Athletic Director Tim Curley and Senior Vice President for Finance Gary Schultz. McQueary testified that at this meeting he told these men that he had witnessed what he believed was Jerry Sandusky having anal sex with a young boy in the football locker room showers. Curley and Schultz told him they would look into it. Two weeks later, Curley told McQueary that Sandusky’s keys to the locker room had been taken away, and that the incident had been reported to The Second Mile, Sandusky’s charitable foundation for troubled young boys.

And that, apparently, is the last that Mike McQueary ever heard about the matter. (As a commenter points out, it seems no one at PSU, either at the time or in the years since, ever bothered to try to find out who the boy Sandusky was raping was, or what happened to him).

Now here is the detail that, among all the details in the Grand Jury’s extensive depiction of the morally depraved behavior of Sandusky, Curley, Schultz, Paterno, PSU president Graham Spanier, and McQueary, is perhaps the most shocking: Five years after this, in the spring of 2007, Sandusky was attending PSU football practices with his latest rape victim: a 12-year-old boy who he had met through a Second Mile camp conducted at PSU, and who he was in the process of, among other things, orally sodomizing.

At this point, McQueary was no longer a graduate assistant, as he had been promoted to an administrative assistant position on the football staff a few months after his meetings with Paterno, Curley and Schultz, and was made a full-fledged assistant coach the following year. So Mike McQueary and Joe Paterno were at the PSU football practices to which Jerry Sandusky was showing up with his latest child rape victim in tow. They saw him, there, with his latest victim. They could not have had any doubt, at that point, about what they were seeing.

Certain (pitifully inadequate) excuses can be are being proffered for Paterno’s behavior, then and now: he’s an old confused man, coming from a generation of men who were so intensely repressed about these sorts of matters that he didn’t really understand the gravity of what McQueary had told him, and after all he hadn’t actually seen Sandusky raping a ten-year-old boy. Etc.

As miserable as these attempts to minimize Paterno’s disgraceful conduct are, what can one say about McQueary’s? In 2002, McQueary was a powerful young athlete, just a couple of years removed from NFL training camps. It’s possible, I suppose, to make some sort of excuse, based on the effects of shock and disgust, for his behavior in that locker room, where instead of coming to the aid of a ten-year-old boy being raped by a 58-year-old man, he fled and called his father. A blog commenter:

I’m a five foot nothing middle aged woman and there’s no way I would have walked past that shower without dragging that child to safety. [Another commenter] compared it to the shock and fear that one feels when a gunman opens up on a crowd and argued that “none of us would be heroes” if we, too, caught sight of an old man buggering a ten year old boy.

My jaw just hit the floor . . .apparently he doesn’t know any normal people and normal parents. We are confronted every day by dangerous incidents involving children—when a kid gets hit on a soccer field or is injured while playing there are really zero adults who run away from the scene of the action or stand bewildered wondering who to notify.

A 28 year old graduate assistant former football player ought to have had the natural human kindness and good sense, the basic human decency, to have grabbed the rapist and secured the child and called an ambulance.

One would think. Football is a hyper-masculine world, within which it’s a common insult to use women’s genitalia as a synecdoche for insufficient toughness and bravery, but I’m quite confident the women I know best would have displayed far more sheer physical courage in a comparable situation than McQueary did – and that most certainly includes my 4’10” 100-pound Aragonese grandmother.

Leaving that aside, consider McQueary’s subsequent behavior. It appears that he in effect decided his nascent coaching career was more important than stopping Jerry Sandusky from not merely raping little boys, but from using the Penn State campus to gather his prey, and using Penn State football games and practices to “reward” his little victims. In other words, this is a case in which McQueary, in the years after he actually saw Sandusky raping a little boy, came face to face with Sandusky in the company of the little boys Sandusky was raping at the time – and he continued to nothing further about it. And not because his life or freedom or those of anyone close to him might be in danger, but because he knew that the coaching fraternity does not look well on taking things “outside the family.” (If this seems implausible, consider that Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski implicitly criticized a Baylor assistant basketball coach for taping conversations with head coach Dave Bliss, after Bliss ordered the coach to participate in a scheme to falsely attribute a Baylor player’s murder to the player’s imaginary drug dealing, in order to conceal Bliss’s illicit payments to the player. The coach has since been blackballed from his former profession. Coach K, as he is worshipfully known in the sports media, recently hosted an ESPN special entitled Difference Makers: Life Lessons with Paterno and Krzyzewski).

The point of lingering over McQueary’s decision to value his potential for career advancement over stopping a serial child rapist from continuing to find and parade his victims in front of McQueary’s face isn’t that McQueary (along with the rest of the actors in this saga) is some sort of inexplicable moral monster. It would be nice to think so, but consider that his despicable behavior merely mirrors that of his head coach, his athletic director, and his university’s president, who all made, and continued for years to make, essentially the same decision to value their careers over stopping little boys from being raped by a man they had worked with for years, and who they allowed to continue to walk among them every day. The point of calling out McQueary’s physical and especially moral cowardice is to remind us how we are all capable of sinking so low, if we do not remind ourselves constantly, in whatever way is most useful for each of us, of the truth of Samuel Johnson’s remark that, “courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.”

[soccerman]

Just sad all around. By that grad assistant (even Paterno) not reporting that incident to law enforcement, opened the gateway for Sandusky to molest like 9 more boys.
If it's one thing about the US, people hold you accountable for actions you do and for things you failed to do or lapsed on. You always have to cover your rare and never let things slip, even the simplest things.

[MEP]

Paterno need to go.

Gone
Sad way to end 46 years but I don't feel sorry for him.

[asylumseeker]

I imagine if Joe Pa walked into say ... a KFC restroom ... and witnessed said f**kery occurring, he would report it without pause. Here, however, it is understandable that his course of action was to inform the AD. Once that occurred he became captive to institutional dynamics.

[Deeks]

He and Penn president have been terminated according to NPR. He had to go. He knew this had been going on. I quoting from the Washington Post Express. "Was he(Paterno) the gentle once-in-a-life time leader with a knack for molding champions? Or simply another gridiron pragmatists, his sense of right and wrong diluted by decades of coddling from "yes" men paid to make his problem disappear?"
This can apply to any 'great" coach. Alex Fergusson, Bear Bryant, Eddie Robinson and Red Auerbach comes to mind. There have been many long tenured coaches who have been faced with similar and not so similar situation and they were given the benefit of doubt because they could "do no wrong". When Len Bias from Maryland died from the OD, lefty Driesell walked the plank.

[MEP]

The difference is that Len Bias was an adult..he was at a party and CHOSE to snort coke.
The 10 year old boy along with the other boys were innocent and unwilling participants.
JoePa should have taken the approach, what if it were his son or grandson, by choosing to only inform the AD he became an enabler. If he wanted to handle this in-house he he would have done everything within his power to make sure that Sandusky was never around little boys but he swept it under the carpet. It is rather ironic that his statue at happy valley reads educator, coach and humanitarian. Where was his humanity?

[daryn]

Once that occurred he became captive to institutional dynamics.

We talking about the rape of a 10 yr old here. There really is no way to dress that up.

It is unfathomable that someone on his staff made such an accusation about a close associate and he supposedly never followed up on how the process concluded.

Additionally, neither the AD nor the college president had more power than Joe Pa in any meaningful sense: they literally could not get rid of him. But that is really secondary.

[asylumseeker]

I eh trying to dress it up. The facts may be different but the dynamics are much the same as those that influence the capacity of some individuals to be whistleblowers and others not.

[soccerman]

I'm certain the coaches on staff knew about Sandusky's lifestyle and kept it hush hush. If as reported Sandusky was Paterno's right hand man for about 30 years, he must've had some inclination about the vice he had all along. Anyway from what I'm hearing, this is just the beginning with lots more to come on Sandusky including boosters being involved and special walk-on scholarships being awarded so we'll see if this really unfolds.
If you're in command of hiring coaches and recruiting student athletes, whatever they do good or bad ultimately reflects on you as the head coach since you have the sole responsibility for giving them the opportunity.

[giggsy11]

I say Sundusky will take his life rather than serve time or before it goes to trial.

[Deeks]

The difference is that Len Bias was an adult..he was at a party and CHOSE to snort coke.
The 10 year old boy along with the other boys were innocent and unwilling participants.
JoePa should have taken the approach, what if it were his son or grandson, by choosing to only inform the AD he became an enabler. If he wanted to handle this in-house he he would have done everything within his power to make sure that Sandusky was never around little boys but he swept it under the carpet. It is rather ironic that his statue at happy valley reads educator, coach and humanitarian. Where was his humanity?

MEP, you are right the situation is a bit different, But he was still  a college student at the state institution, The state still has some responsibility for his well being..

[Bitter]

Joe Paterno, former Penn State football coach, dies at 85

By Leonard Shapiro, Updated: Sunday, January 22, 11:23 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/joe-paterno-dies-at-85/2011/12/09/gIQAS9eXIQ_story.html?hpid=z1


Joe Paterno, the former Penn State football coach who was among the most admired figures in the annals of collegiate sports but whose reputation was shattered in the wake of a child abuse scandal involving one of his longtime assistants, died Sunday morning of complications from lung cancer. He was 85.

The death was announced by his family.

“It is with great sadness that we announce that Joe Paterno passed away earlier today,” the family said in a statement. “His loss leaves a void in our lives that will never be filled.

“He died as he lived. He fought hard until the end, stayed positive, thought only of others and constantly reminded everyone of how blessed his life had been. His ambitions were far reaching, but he never believed he had to leave this Happy Valley to achieve them. He was a man devoted to his family, his university, his players and his community.”

Mr. Paterno’s ascent, followed by his sudden firing at age 84, formed one of the most tragic narratives in modern athletic history.

Affectionately known as “JoePa,” Mr. Paterno began his 46-season tenure as Penn State’s head coach in 1966 after having served as assistant coach for 16 years. His teams won a record 409 games over that span with five undefeated and untied seasons and two national championships. He was the all-time winningest coach in major college football history. Moreover, his players and his team had one of the highest graduation rates in the country among athletes.

Mr. Paterno was shaken to the core this past fall when a grand jury report alleged that his former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, had sexually assaulted underage boys.

Sandusky, Mr. Paterno’s longtime defensive coordinator and trusted lieutenant until he retired in 1999, was charged with assaulting eight boys over the course of 15 years, some of them while he was an assistant coach. Following the release of that report, other alleged victims also began to come forward. Sandusky had made contact with the boys through the Second Mile, a charity he founded to help troubled youngsters.

The Sandusky case was not the first off-the-field issue Mr. Paterno’s program had faced in recent years. According to an ESPN report in 2008, between 2002 and 2008, 46 Penn State players had been charged with a total of 163 crimes that ranged from public urination to murder. In March 2011, Sports Illustrated published arrest numbers for all the schools it listed in its preseason Top 25 teams in the country. Penn State tied for fourth, with 16 players on the 2010 roster who had been charged with a crime.

During the Sandusky investigation, Mr. Paterno testified to the grand jury that Mike McQueary, a graduate assistant coach, said he had witnessed an assault by Sandusky on a youngster in the Penn State locker room.

Mr. Paterno said he passed the information on to his supervisors but did not notify law enforcement authorities about the incident. Mr. Paterno was never charged with a crime but was fired Nov. 9, 2011, by the school’s board of trustees, which included five former Penn State football players. Athletic Director Tim Curley and school President Graham Spanier were also dismissed.

Mr. Paterno, McQueary and other Penn State officials were all severely criticized for not reporting the incident to the police. “It is one of the great sorrows of my life,” Mr. Paterno said in a written statement at the time of his firing. “I wish I had done more.”

Still, the day his dismissal was announced, Penn State students marched in the streets in support of their beloved coach, and police were called in when the demonstration turned into what Sports Illustrated described as “a low-grade riot.” A week after the firing, Mr. Paterno’s family announced that he was being treated for lung cancer.

“I didn’t know exactly how to handle it, and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was,” Paterno told The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins this month when discussing the Sandusky scandal. “So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”

Until news of Sandusky’s transgressions rocked the university, Mr. Paterno had a virtually impeccable reputation. He was a sought-after speaker who also had been recruited, to no avail, to run for political office. President Gerald R. Ford made overtures to Mr. Paterno in the 1970s, trying to persuade him to run for Congress.

“He transcends football,” Ford, a onetime University of Michigan gridiron standout, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2004. “I tried very strongly to get him to run for Congress, but he was so dedicated to Penn State and young people, he turned me down. Joe could have done anything he wanted to do in life because he’s so dedicated. . . . He’s not only a great motivator of young people, but he always has the best interest of his community at heart.”

Mr. Paterno called Penn State football his “grand experiment,” an attempt to marry athletics and academics to achieve another of his mantras: “success with honor.” He was particularly proud that his players went to class and earned their diplomas and that the football program was never implicated in seamy recruiting or academic scandals that plagued so many of the nation’s major athletic powers.

He was an old-school coach who would not allow his players to have their names sewed on the backs of their uniform jerseys and enforced a strict coat-and-tie dress code when his teams went on the road. He roamed the sideline usually wearing rolled-up khaki pants, a white shirt and tie, white socks and athletic shoes.

His specialty was offense, and he believed in having a strong running game. Several running backs he coached earned all-American honors and moved on to successful careers in the National Football League.

He preached the basics on the field and was a stickler for the game’s fundamentals. His offensive schemes were nothing fancy. His defenses were characteristically uncomplicated. His strategy, although simple, was efficient. In his 46 years coaching, he had only five losing seasons.

Under Mr. Paterno, Penn State produced so many top-notch linebackers, including Hall of Famer Jack Ham and former Washington Redskins LaVar Arrington and Andre Collins, that the school became known as “Linebacker U.”

“If you’re not a man when you get there, you’ll be a man before you leave,” Arrington, the second pick in the 2000 NFL draft, was quoted as saying in the 2011 Penn State football media guide. “Joe has his system so that you’re prepared for life. Joe trains you more mentally than physically so that nothing will rattle you.”

In more than six decades at Penn State, Mr. Paterno had an enduring impact on the university. He lived in a modest home about a mile from his office and often walked to work, stopping to chat with students, faculty or anyone else he encountered along the way. He was a formidable fundraiser for the university and donated more than $4 million of his own money for a wide variety of projects, including the school library that bears his name.

He helped endow a student health center and was a principal reason the school’s endowment, virtually nonexistent when he arrived on campus, grew to an estimated $2 billion. An ice cream was named after him at the campus creamery — Peachy Paterno — and the school even had an occasional class called “Joe Paterno: Communications & the Media” listed in the course catalogue.

Mr. Paterno had other difficult times besides the Sandusky scandal. Following a 4-7 season in 2004, Curley, the athletic director, and Spanier, the school president, tried to persuade Mr. Paterno to consider retirement.

Mr. Paterno, then 77, scoffed at the suggestion and remained the head coach for an additional seven years, including an 11-1 season and No. 3 national ranking in 2005 and back-to-back 11-2 seasons in 2008 and 2009.

Joseph Vincent Paterno was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Dec. 21, 1926. His father was an appellate court clerk who graduated from law school in his 40s. Mr. Paterno always credited his father with instilling in him the importance of education.

Mr. Paterno graduated from prestigious Brooklyn Prep, a public high school with a strong academic and athletic tradition. He played baseball, basketball and football, graduated second in his class and was student council president.

After serving in the Army, he went to Brown University in Providence, R.I. Playing alongside his older brother George, Mr. Paterno started at quarterback for Brown and led the team to a 7-2 record in 1948 and 8-1 in 1949.

Mr. Paterno, an English major at Brown, was planning to attend Boston University’s law school after graduation. But in his senior year, he helped coach Brown’s quarterbacks, and the team’s head coach, Charles “Rip” Engle, persuaded Mr. Paterno to follow him to Penn State in 1950.

Mr. Paterno still had a notion to go to law school, but he decided to accompany Engle to State College and was named offensive backfield coach. He never left and coaching a number of outstanding players, including future NFL Hall of Fame running back Lenny Moore.

Engle stayed at Penn State for 16 years and never had a losing season. Mr. Paterno was aware that his mentor was planning to retire after the 1965 season and reportedly turned down six offers to coach at other schools. In his first season as head coach, the Nittany Lions finished 5-5, but in the second year they improved to 8-2 and earned a bid to the Gator Bowl, the first of his 37 bowl appearances, with 24 bowl victories.

In that game against Florida State, Mr. Paterno decided to gamble on a crucial fourth-and-one play at his own 15-yard line despite leading, 17-0. Florida State held, and then scored 17 unanswered points to salvage a 17-17 tie. Mr. Paterno was heavily criticized for his failed gamble.

“I had told the players time after time you have to take chances to win,” Mr. Paterno said after the game. In an article in Sports Illustrated the following year, he said: “We’re trying to win football games . . . but I don’t want it to ruin our lives if we lose. I tell the kids who come here to play, enjoy yourselves. There’s so much besides football. There’s art, history, literature, politics.”

Still, winning clearly meant something to Mr. Paterno. He was bitterly disappointed when his undefeated and untied teams in 1968, 1969 and 1973 were not ranked No. 1 in the final wire-service polls..

In 1969, he was particularly upset with President Richard M. Nixon, who walked into the University of Texas locker room after a Longhorn victory over Arkansas and told the players they deserved to be the national champions.

Mr. Paterno complained publicly at the time that Nixon “took something away from my kids.” In his 1973 commencement address at Penn State, Mr. Paterno asked, “How could President Nixon know so little about Watergate in 1973 and so much about football in 1969?”

In 1972, Mr. Paterno had been offered a $1.3 million contract over five years to become the head coach of the New England Patriots, but he turned it down to stay at Penn State. Three years earlier he was offered the top coaching job with the Pittsburgh Steelers and also decided to stay in State College. The Steelers instead hired Chuck Noll, who won four Super Bowls in six years.

“I can tell you that Penn State would have been the loser in that situation,” Steelers owner Dan Rooney told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2004. “I wrote him a letter once and told him he was ideal for college football. That was coming from a guy who tried to take him away from that. He is the perfect coach for college football.”

Why did he spurn the NFL?

“In the end,” Mr. Paterno told Newsday, “I didn’t feel like I should leave a job where I had been happy, where I had made so many friends.”

In 1962, he married Suzanne Pohland, a Penn State graduate. Besides his wife, survivors include five children, all of them graduates of Penn State.

“I knew what college football means to me and what pro football could never mean,” Mr. Paterno once told Readers Digest. “I love winning games as much as any coach does, but I know there’s something that counts more than victory or defeat. I get to watch my players grow — in their personal discipline, in their educational development, and as human beings. That is a deep, lasting reward that I could never get in pro ball.”

[soccerman]

Stress!!! I think was a huge factor in the man's death.

[Deeks]

Sad. To go that way. RIP.