Penn State doesn't get to choose Paterno's Legacy: Excellent article

The fact that Penn State continually buries their head in the sand and demonstrates how out of touch they are is completely mind-boggling. For all the bad that was done, there was a chance to do some good - use their platform as an athletic blue-blood in America's oldest conference and their status as a respected academic institution to educate, raise awareness, and raise funds to combat this horrible issue. As a community, there could have been healing, for the institution and most importantly for the victims.

Instead, we get this. Which is almost the opposite. We could hang 200 on them Saturday and it wouldn't be enough. Absolutely no respect for their football program or any fan that cheered when they announced that guy's name on Saturday.

Harbaugh should name Wise and/or someone from malesurvivor.org to be honorary captains this week.

Hope JH responds to the Joe PA day with an appropriate score run up

Joe Pa knew.

And now they're calling out people who make jokes directed towards their ignorance

Something from the Undefeated that isn't flamebait. It only took them a year.

God, Penn State is revolting. I seriously despise them more than anyone else in the country. They should have been completely shut down for several years instead of having their penalties reduced. 

Me to participate in a weekend celebrating the enabler....I dunno man.

This article gets it right, it's not PSU's decision to make and by participating in the elongment if this JoPA glory train is further acquiescence to the original crime. Sickening. As much as I love Harbaugh, he goes directly under the bus if he ever does this.

something like that without anger or bitterness toward his family or Penn State. Can you imagine how that guy must feel about a university celebrating a man who enabled the same thing that nearly ruined his life? ESPN/theundefeated are awful, but incredible article.

Since the disgusting news first broke, I have wanted them thrown out of the Big 10. I will never change that stance. They do not deserve to continue to reap the financial rewards of this conference. They should be blacklisted from all profit sharing. I want their football program to become a bankrupt, desolate wasteland that no one cares about. 

Football games can never change the atrocities of what went on, but I hope we run the score up on them. I would love to see us win 70-0 and show them absolutely no respect. They don't deserve an ounce of it. Fuck them forever. 

I encourage everyone to turn around when the PedState football team enters and get everyone around you to do the same. I think it could work and be a powerful statement.

Very engaging article, well written and emotionally devastating and to a certain extent, explanatory of a great deal.

Penn St. fans, much like the author's family, have a great deal of cognitive dissonance to deal with.  We shouldn't be shocked it's being dealt with in a variety of ways and I can only hope they finally process this and come to grips with the realization that this is an evil stain on JoePa's legacy.  

Reading through that article, I just cannot understand how someone can deliberately cause that much pain in a person's life, I can't understand crushing that innonence and trust, and, finally, I can't understand covering it up an d enabling it.  I can't understand the authors family letting a known molester sleep in the same room as the author and I can't understand Sandusky's continued presence in that program since at least 1998.

 

... they only get to choose their own. And the legacy they are choosing is heartbreaking. 

will never work. Sue Paterno will go to the grave a loser in this quest.

Joe Paterno WAS Penn State football for 46 years.

I read this other article too (see link), where you have former PSU players like Lance Hamilton who simply cannot acknowledge nor accept the fallibility of his head coach:

http://www.centredaily.com/sports/college/penn-state-university/psu-football/article102407092.html

“It’s been very hard on me, because I see a man in Joe Paterno, whose reputation was stellar, be sullied and dragged through the proverbial mud,” he said. “In the sense that he was never given his opportunity to speak before he passed ... It seems there has been a large segment of society, of the media who has rushed to judgment where Coach Paterno was concerned.”

This is a former player who will not accept the facts of the case, and somehow must rationalize 36 consecutive years of Paterno's silence and inaction as acceptable.

So that answer is "No".  A significant number of Penn State fans, alumni and former players WILL NEVER fully accept or acknowledge the truth of what happened over a period 40+ seasons at Penn State. Especially not the former players. They cannot come to grips with the fact that Paterno harbored and protected a known child rapist FOR DECADES.

Add to that new student athletes, coaches and alumni of Penn State who will always operate from the function of "having nothing to do with any of that".Yet, PSU officials want such anniversary events to focus on the such new players, their achievements and scholarship.

Nobody is going to forgive this.

Speaking of forgiveness, it remains very difficult to reconcile the preposterous double-standards of the NCAA. The very notion that SMU football would receive the "death penalty" in 1986 over the payments to players, the flicking of $100 bills by boosters, restaurant checks paid, free leased camaros and Dillard's shopping sprees, while Penn State got pretty much NOTHING (everything reinstated) for institutional harboring and protection of a serial child rapist is a disgrace on such an order that cannot be quantitied and should never expunged.

In my opinion, Penn State should not even be playing college football, let alone be a member of the Big Ten conference anymore. 

That Ohio State would employ, and keep employed, a coach like Greg Schiano, who also knew of the sexual abuse at Penn State, and also did nothing to stop it or report it, FOR DECADES and to this day, only adds to scandal.

Joe Paterno was a successful football coach AND obstructed justice for dozens of helpless victim of rape.

All Michigan fans can do is protest Paterno public veneration by the religious zealots in Happy Valley, and say "No" to Penn State's solipsism.

After that all the UM community can do is hope to hell nothing even remotely like this ever happens in Ann Arbor, but that if it did, the university would handle it differently and decisively

 

 

 

 

 

All I really want from Penn State is to convince me that you've learned from this and would never do it again.

I'm honestly not convinced.

That's scary.

 

players. Saturday that admiration came to an end when the delusional basted said Ped State owes Paterno an apology. Fuck Joe Paterno. Fuck Ped State and fuck Franco Harris. I only wish Sandusky had done it to you.

The Paterno family is really the mess at the epicenter of all this. I think they themselves had such a hero worship of Joe and such pride in the Paterno name that they're struggling with that 'cognitive dissonance' the author alluded to so much so that they're unwilling to even entertain the fact that Joe was sadly indifferent.

Screw them. They insult the survivor's of Sandusky's abuses with every stupid little stunt they pull trying to protect Joe's name

As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and one who has found healing and forgiveness while still not hiding from the truth, this is the best article on this entire topic that I have ever read. Extremely well written. Courageous vulnerability from the author. No one knows shame like an abused child. To overcome that and then write about it publicly is nothing short of amazing. Very powerful stuff.

is anyone doing the 'quiet statement'?

is anyone doing anything more overt?

I will be there with a friend and have talked about doing some sort of protest of penn state.

Spot on article. There's no doubt Paterno did a lot of good things in his life,  but he also failed miserably at the most important thing.  And for that reason he doesn't deserve a statue, he deserves to be forgotten.

I'm in the minority on this but I feel Paterno took way more of the blame than is warranted. He never molested anybody (Jerry Sandusky did that, remember?). Yet you hear Paterno's name mentioned in this 20x as much as Sandusky's. Paterno just wanted to coach football and would have been perfectly happy if his assistant coach hadn't turned out to be a pedo. It also made no sense for the NCAA to punish the current players, students and fans over something they had no hand in.