No thread on this yet.
Disgusting what happened there and terrible that the people who knew tried to cover it up. Joe Paterno, at 84 will be step down and retire.
Discuss and express feelings on the scandal, Paterno.
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Until this week, the final home game of the Joe Paterno Era at Penn State would have been one of the biggest celebrations college football had ever seen.
Old players would have returned by the hundreds. Tributes would have poured forth from across the spectrum of sports, as well as bon mots from political and entertainment figures. (A statement from President Barack Obama would have been unsurprising.) The school would have elaborately planned as nice a ceremony as Paterno would have tolerated.
It would have been a nationwide salute to a man leaving the game as few coaches do anymore – without significant demerit of any kind in a 46-year body of work. He would have gone into the history books as arguably the greatest of them all: a huge winner and a man of unassailable character.
Hounded by the media on Tuesday, Joe Paterno released a statement on Wednesday indicating that he will retire at the end of the football season.
Instead, the Paterno Era will end in haste and amid heartache. His Wednesday retirement announcement comes just three days before the Nittany Lions’ last home game of 2011 and just five wrenching days after former longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky was arrested on child-molestation charges that have stained the once-unblemished Paterno legacy.
It will end after a surreal week in which the media camped on the coach’s lawn, and then students rallied on that lawn. It will end with what had been an adoring nation now strongly conflicted about how to regard this 84-year-old coaching giant.
The retirement announcement was not greeted with a unanimous cascade of applause. It was greeted with outrage from those who believe the winningest coach in the history of the game should not coach another minute, not after his failure to report a 2002 alleged child rape by Sandusky in the Penn State football building to law enforcement.
And, truth be told, it was greeted with some uncertainty as well. The fact that Paterno issued the statement himself, not the university, leaves you to wonder whether the school might have other ideas. A Wednesday night meeting of the Penn State Board of Trustees could conceivably spawn a movement to oust Paterno immediately.
So a career unlike any other in college football history does not end well. Certainly not as well as it could have.
Disgusting what happened there and terrible that the people who knew tried to cover it up. Joe Paterno, at 84 will be step down and retire.
Discuss and express feelings on the scandal, Paterno.
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Until this week, the final home game of the Joe Paterno Era at Penn State would have been one of the biggest celebrations college football had ever seen.
Old players would have returned by the hundreds. Tributes would have poured forth from across the spectrum of sports, as well as bon mots from political and entertainment figures. (A statement from President Barack Obama would have been unsurprising.) The school would have elaborately planned as nice a ceremony as Paterno would have tolerated.
It would have been a nationwide salute to a man leaving the game as few coaches do anymore – without significant demerit of any kind in a 46-year body of work. He would have gone into the history books as arguably the greatest of them all: a huge winner and a man of unassailable character.
Hounded by the media on Tuesday, Joe Paterno released a statement on Wednesday indicating that he will retire at the end of the football season.
Instead, the Paterno Era will end in haste and amid heartache. His Wednesday retirement announcement comes just three days before the Nittany Lions’ last home game of 2011 and just five wrenching days after former longtime assistant Jerry Sandusky was arrested on child-molestation charges that have stained the once-unblemished Paterno legacy.
It will end after a surreal week in which the media camped on the coach’s lawn, and then students rallied on that lawn. It will end with what had been an adoring nation now strongly conflicted about how to regard this 84-year-old coaching giant.
The retirement announcement was not greeted with a unanimous cascade of applause. It was greeted with outrage from those who believe the winningest coach in the history of the game should not coach another minute, not after his failure to report a 2002 alleged child rape by Sandusky in the Penn State football building to law enforcement.
And, truth be told, it was greeted with some uncertainty as well. The fact that Paterno issued the statement himself, not the university, leaves you to wonder whether the school might have other ideas. A Wednesday night meeting of the Penn State Board of Trustees could conceivably spawn a movement to oust Paterno immediately.
So a career unlike any other in college football history does not end well. Certainly not as well as it could have.
