Penn State fans/alumni are happy and want to bring back his statute on campus. I do not believe the NCAA sanctions were perfect and in fact were far from it. Requiring the State of Pennsylvania to send their tax dollars to other states was ridiculous. Joe Pa also did win those games so I understand giving the wins back. I've never really been a fan of vacating wins. If the team won the game that was played, they won the game that was played. My problem is he still was not a good guy. He did next to nothing about the child molestation and he valued his football program over anything else. He was also a liar. I guess my position is the record books can reflect the wins, but the man deserves no recognition at all for his football accomplishments. He should not be celebrated. OJ Simpson was a fantastic football player. His records and and accomplishments stand in the record books as they should. That said, his football accomplishments are rarely discussed or acknowledged anymore. They are certainly not celebrated. When we think of OJ we think of a murderer. The same should happen with Paterno. When we think of Paterno, we should think of someone that, i would go as far as to say, condoned child molestation.
Should have waited til National Cupcake Day to announce it. Htown, Give credit where credit is due, no other coach in NCAA history turned down the chance to play for the National Championship. Neither has any other coach played so many teams with losing records. Paterno's win total is laden with teams softer than a Hershey bar left on an Odessa sidewalk all day in July.
In reply: "This is true. He then went on to lie about it years later and kept claiming "we never had an opportunity to play Texas." Man was always a liar and of low character." Following the 1969 season JP and psu dodged UT in the NC game at the 1970 CB. Put a spin on it at the time and later flat out lied about it. Sorry Joe, but I have a long and clear memory about this one. Also, I will NEVER forgive you for turning your head and letting that monster asst. coach go on sexually abusing those boys when you got wind of it. You had dirt on your hands
Paterno had a choice: 1) Protect the children; 2) Protect his program. He made the wrong choice and paid for it...not enough as it turns out.
One created a created a Cult like, Jamestown atmosphere and the other was found Not-guilty by a jury of his peers, no comparison......
Joe, your going to get me all pissed off again at Paterno for turning a blind eye to what Sandusky was doing, for years! Paterno protected the brand at the expense of innocent kids - I cannot forgive that.
Joe - please, don't take that post personal in any way... I don't care if PSU got its wins back or not. Accountability for Joe Pa unfortunately will never happen.
if you are going to pretend something never happened, i'd focus on the one that didn't ruin the lives/youth of kids. if you want a JoePa statue, how about this one...
Let the Paterno lovers bow to the statue and have their "wins", because over 80% of those wins were over teams that amounted to little more than a piss-poor Texas 5A high school team. No coach or school has ever or will ever put together a weaker grouping of opponents than Paterno did. That would even be an embarrassment to Baylor or Frank Beamer. Did he know what was going on? YES! Did he cover it up? YES! Did he ruin young boys' lives? Absoultely! Wanna challenge it - start with the San Antonio Police Department or the Pennsylvania high school coaches who warned other schools not to hire Sandusky.
If they care at all about JoePa's legacy, they will shut up about it. Having his name back in the news is not good for him because it's already pretty well understood what he did.
It never ceases to amaze me how the experts -- the pundants -- often create a false perception of someone and it just builds and builds for years. Paterno struck me as a whiney, self-absorbed phony way back in 69. It became apparent later that as he hung on way past his prime to pile up the wins, he was all about himself, his ego and his legacy. The terrible revelation about Sandusky was, of course, a surprise. In hindsight though, it should not have been a shocker. Given the apparent nature of Paterno and his flawed character, it is tragic but not difficult to understand why he turned a blind eye. I'd like to see ESPN, the primary power broker in sports today, do a better job of watching and if necessary vetting sports figures. They're very good at chronicling what happened...after the fact. If they are not a watchdog, who will be? Obviously institutions like Baylor and Penn State (and many others) cannot be relied upon to self police. And of course, the NCAA is a toothless, misguided and likely priorities challenged organization.
ESPN is a major part of the problem - The Kings of the Whitewash! Look at the garbage they parade as "investigative journalism" and call it 30 on 30. The whitewash jobs they did on SMU & Marcus Dupree are bigger travesties than the events themselves. Of course if they present the truth, the public outcry would have enormous. Then again any validity they would have established would have been destroyed by actions like constantly focusing on Craig James & Eric Dickerson on the sidelines for SMU's first bowl game after coming off the penalty. Too many analogies to present for that one that are more than distasteful considering what's happened this morning and the last two weeks. ESPN is better at broadcasting football than FOX, but to suggest they could "police" anything and present it accurately isn't remotely close to ever happening. The only "investigating" the whores at ESPN are likely to be doing is the investigating for "johns" to buy their "whores".
SabreHorn, there's nothing you wrote with which I would disagree. I was being measured... ESPN is indeed the primary power broker in sports these days. With that power "should come responsibility." It does not because ESPN is scared s***less to offend their meal tickets, whether it be the NFL, the NCAA and so on. The same goes for the major news networks but I'd better not go there in this forum.
