To borrow from John Calipari, there's nothing good that can happen at a nightclub at 1AM and a college board press conference at 10PM. JoePa got the ax last night; defensive coordinator Tom Bradley will take over for the rest of the year, including a key game against Nebraska Saturday. Instead of celebrating the matchup between the two newest members of the Big 10, we get the fallout of the worst scandal to hit a college football program in recent memory.
That being said, I'm not sure if firing Paterno for an error of omission nine years ago is the right path, especially when he announced he was stepping aside at the end of the year. If we rewind the tape to the summer of 2002, we knew a lot less about child sexual abuse than we do now.
We were just starting the big coverage of the Catholic priest sex abuse stories; that was one of the big stories that got a lot of Catholic writers to start blogs back in 2002 as the Blogosphere was in its infancy. In the near-decade that has followed we've learned that even decent-looking people can have an inner pervert and to err on the side of reporting stuff to authorities. That's 20/20 hindsight that Paterno didn't have at the time.
Paterno did report stuff, but not quite to the right authorities. The folks in the athletic department sat on the information and some of them are being charged for those misdeeds. When you couple that with the seemingly glowing reputation of Jerry Sandusky (from a distance, I knew him as the headmaster of Linebacker U, but his charitable work with kids made it seem even less likely to have him as a sex abuse suspect at the time), it's easy to see where Paterno might not have been bugging his bosses for feedback on the incident or sicking a county DA on the case.
One upside of firing him ASAP is that he won't have to deal with question for the last 4-5 games of the season; PSU has three regular seasons games left, plus a bowl game and probably a slot in the first Big Ten title game. Given l'affair Sandusky, we wouldn't get to see the Goodbye JoePa tour that would have normally have accompanied the announcement of his retirement; too many folks would be saying Goodbye and Good Riddance instead.
Good Riddance to one of the straightest shooters in the history of college football? It might be needed in a fire-the-whole-chain-of-command response to such scandals that is common these days, but Paterno deserved a better exit. A year or two from now, if he's still with us, Paterno should get the kind of elder statesman of the game spot that John Wooden held for a good quarter-century after stepping aside at UCLA.
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