You may recall back in November a story broke about a coach molesting boys in the shower at Penn State University many years ago. Since that time, this thing has snowballed into insane proportions.
Everytime you turn on the television, and it doesn’t have to necessarily be ESPN or something sports related, you hear about this. For those that live up in that part of the country, I can only imagine that it is 100x worse, especially if you’re around Happy Valley.
This thing has cost many people their jobs and, in my opinion, the life of one legendary coach, Joe Paterno. I say that because, at nearly 90 yrs old, he was still as spry and wiry as ever, not to mention the fact that the man can coach. To my knowledge, the only health problems he had were when he broke his hip. The guy is an octogenarian, what do you expect?
Upon his abrupt departure from the school and football amidst this scandal, he was the winningest coach in college football.
Penn St. decided to fund their own private investigation into the matter of this child sex scandal, and what they found out was even more hard-hitting than what we knew already.
That thing is 700 pages, so obviously I won’t go into it, but the main thing that was discovered is that Coach Paterno covered up the fact that he knew about what going on. Somehow, this has people all up in arms.
The guy lied. It is as simple as that, yet people are making it out to be as if what he did was rape those boys. That was not Joe; it was that douche bag, Jerry Sandusky.
I’m not going to sit here and say that lying and covering this up was right, because it wasn’t, but I will say that it isn’t half as bad as what actually happened to those boys.
Moving on…outside of Beaver Stadium, there was a statue of Joe Paterno leading the team out of the tunnel. As soon as this information was made public, though, people started calling for it to be torn down. On top of that, anything that has Paterno’s name on it, such as the school library and a street, is being renamed.
Making matters worse, the NCAA handed down punishment for this crime to the school. The most notable is that the winningest coach in all of college football has to expunge all wins from 1997-2011!
Let’s talk about that statue first, shall we. I don’t understand why people are so hell bent on having it removed. Like I said, it isn’t like Joe did the raping. On top of that, whatever they may think about him, Penn St. football would not and will not be the same without him. So, for them to remove the statue because of what he didn’t do seems a bit much to me.
I don’t know. I guess I’m just on the other side of the fence with this one, but I really see no reason to have such outrage against a statue.
Now, onto the wins. If you’re a fan of college football, then you are we aware that whenever the powers that be feel the desire to punish a school, usually for something like a player taking benefits from an agent, illegal practices, etc. When wins are taken away, it is because there was something or someone on the field who basically shouldn’t have been, causing those games to be forfeit.
So, with that in mind, how does a coach (and his teams) lose all of their wins for the past 14 seasons because of one little cover-up? I mean, those wins are linked to more than just the coach. There are all the players who actually went out there and beat themselves (and the other teams) up, the assistant coaches, and the school (whose legacy is mostly football, whether they want to admit it or not).
Again, I may be alone on this, but I just don’t think these wins should be taken away from him. There is no reason to so do. No matter what we may think of him now, Coach Paterno was a really good coach. You don’t win that many games (and at the same school for some 60 or so years) by accident
If you want to punish the school for this, then do it, but do it so that the whole school isn’t made to suffer for one man’s crime.
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6 years ago