PENN(ITENTIARY) STATE

Mark Emmert has a problem.  Actually that’s putting it mildly.  A problem is what is the answer to 2+2 or which tie do I wear to a press conference? 

Emmert is faced with a disaster of epic proportions as well as a PR nightmare regardless of what he chooses because the biggest scandal in college football history has just landed on his desk.  Actually it had been on his desk he had been busy trying as hard as he could to let another entity (local law enforcement) deal with it.  Regardless, try as he might to avoid it for this long but everyone knew eventually he was going to have to weigh in on the Penn State catastrophe orchestrated by sexual deviant Jerry Sandusky and cohorts at the university.

 See for those of you who don’t know, Mark Emmert is the president of the NCAA, one of the weakest, most dysfunctional, bi-polar outfits in the country.  He’s the leader of a consortium that rarely sees eye to eye with the fans and puts dollars first while claiming everything they do is for the good of the student athlete—from standing firm against a real playoff, to denying athletes the opportunity to increase their personal revenue by paying them higher stipends, to not allowing them to transfer when their coaches violates their universities’ trust.  So if we want to say the office of the NCAA president is in it for the greater good, I’m truly sorry to tell you this but that ship sailed long ago in the dead of night  and only daydreamers and fools occupied the decks as it headed for the iceberg.

But for all the failings the president has had, and all of the decisions he and others that came before have tried to avoid or showed absolute prejudice in favor of the “money-maker “ institutions, this whole fiasco with Penn State  can give him the opportunity to make people not look at the NCAA as the joke it has become.  But I have a feeling Emmert won’t make the obvious choice and will attempt to pass the buck as he has done in the past.

For nearly eight months former FBI Director Louis Freeh and his team pored over countless documents, interviewed hundreds of individuals and read numerous emails pertaining to the child molestation charges.  Freeh linked every person who claimed to not have known anything, from Joe Paterno to University President Graham Spanier and many individuals in between in some way to covering up various aspects of the sordid Sandusky affair.  Freeh’s report read like a graphic horror novella and for many of us, it was more than we wanted to believe.  Paterno, who once stated he could never retire leaving football to the likes of Barry Switzer and Jackie Sherrill ended up being worse than two of college football’s most notorious repeat offenders.  Actually, worse is an understatement.

And as Freeh read the report, word for word, line by line, the luster that once engulfed the legacy of Jo-Pa slowly faded until it was nothing more than a fuzzy haze barely visible to even the staunchest of defenders.  He explained how Paterno knew about the investigation into Sandusky’s disgusting behavior as early as 1998-99 just before Sandusky was allowed to retire and keep an office just feet away from Paterno.  We found out that Paterno had shared emails with higher ups regarding Sandusky and how they all decided to make sure he was treated humanely despite the fact the man was raping children on the campus of the school.  That statement alone should have Emmert not wondering if he should employ the Death Penalty, rather it should have him deciding how soon and how long it should be.  Some have chimed in regarding what punishments should be levied against the school, the most recent being Alabama’s Nick Saban.  Saban stated he thought that if the school were to maintain a program this season, they should levy a tax on top of the regular ticket price.  That tax, he suggested, would go to the victims to help them heal and help them financially, but it seems more like it is penalizing the ticketholders while the actual perpetrators are so far, getting off scot free.

If there was ever a reason to completely destroy a school program this is it.  There are no mitigating circumstances that can be produced and there is no reason to invoke the student athlete as an excuse to keep football alive this year. 

So here is my quick and unflinching solution to the imbroglio:

We all know the students had nothing to do with it but the people that were in charge did.  The students are smart enough to understand that they are not being punished and should be reassured of that by being allowed to transfer immediately and be able to play this year.

Scholarships should go next—all of them.  They could be reinstated by 25 percent every year so that by 2016 they should be back at 100 percent.  It may seem drastic but hell it’s nothing compared to being penetrated in a shower by someone you trust and being betrayed by people you would hope had your (the victim) best interest in mind.    They did not.  All they apparently cared about was the money coming into the program and the wins they would tally as the university looked to make Paterno the winningest coach in FBS History.

I would love to say that I think the school gets it by removing Paterno’s name off the child development center but it wasn’t their decision.  It was self proclaimed idolizer and CEO of Nike Phil Knight who made the painful but correct decision to change the name in order to begin the healing.  It’s too bad the university cannot do the same thing and remove the statue next to Beaver Stadium.

This would set a precedent like no other in the history of the NCAA.  I doubt there will ever be anything like this happening again but what this does is set a precedent for even the most mundane of cheaters.  It puts real power back into the hands of the president’s office and places real fear in the larger programs across the country that have basically been acting with impunity since the destruction of Southern Methodist University in the late ‘80s.   Their infractions pale in comparison to the scandal at Penn.

This is lack of intuitional control at the highest level and to the very definition.  There is no alternative other than to dissolve the program immediately in order to start healing.  The victims and their families deserve that much.

I hope Emmert has the stones to do what’s right, otherwise he’s putting these victims through the same hell all over again.       

It is so, Joe

 [Note: This blog was posted prior to the recent developments resulting in the firing of University President Graham Spanier and Coach Joe Paterno]

As a young man, I had always viewed sports as a release—an escape from the doldrums of life if only for a few hours. 

Earlier this year I had blogged about the impact sports has on healing through tragedy such as with the Gabby Giffords’ shooting in Arizona or the way the sports world came together after the devastating tornadoes that ravaged both Missouri and a year ago in Alabama.  It’s in moments like those when an athlete comes down off of his/her perch and remembers that they are people too and that single action causes children to begin their idolization and finally understand what their fathers saw in men they did not know personally in their youth, but felt a kinship with them because they became human. 

But what do you do when your escape from reality becomes a living nightmare?  Where do you run to and who do you look to after that?  Those are just a few of the questions facing one Joseph Vincent Paterno and the Penn State Nittany Lions.

Joe Paterno or “Joe Pa” has been in coaching at Penn State longer than I have been breathing.  In actuality, he’s been there longer than my mom, dad and 10 of their siblings as well.  The man is Penn State.  He has constructed a power base at that institution that would rival only Bear Bryant and Barry Switzer if they were still coaching Alabama and Oklahoma respectively.  He has built his and his program’s reputation through honesty, integrity and trust from the moment he became head coach.

Nearly every athlete that has come through his program loves the man.  I can’t recall an unkind word that has been uttered against him.  Conversely, the words and phrases that usually follow any mention of his name are “iconic,” “legendary,” “does it the right way” and “moral authority.”

Of course that was all before there were no more fingers to be shoved in the Penn State dyke and the water came running through the city before the villagers knew what hit them.  No one knew except the principals that had walked away from the dam to ensure they reached higher ground minutes before because they knew what was about to come.  Only the water reached their feet and it still hasn’t stopped.

School president Graham Spanier is expected to be fired soon; A.D. Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz have been charged with failing to notify authorities of child abuse in the confines of Happy Valley and receivers coach Mike McQueery is more than likely to have coached his last game ever within the coming days all because these people who have been around the man that defines Penn State; the man that is integrity, that is an icon and is worshipped like no other in the state of Pennsylvania decided to forgo some semblance of good judgment and report serial rapist, Jerry Sandusky, to someone outside of the university.

As they sat on their hands, this monster masquerading as a defensive coordinator and community outreach volunteer was able to assault victim after victim at will.  In my opinion they are all complicit as they allowed Sandusky to use the athletic facilities as a romper room for after hours activities with prepubescent teens even after they were informed of the initial incident in 1998.  Yes 1998, as in 13 years ago.  He retired the next year and was given emeritus status upon his departure where he would use his access to molest more boys.

And as if this couldn’t get any worse, Paterno and Curley knew.  Of course it’s all semantics about what questions they asked after they found out whatever minimal details they wished to hear; the bottom line is they knew and did nothing.  They didn’t contact the victims or their parents; they didn’t contact the attorney general or the state police either.  They didn’t run Sandusky’s ass out of town because they simply didn’t care.

They cared about Penn State, the public relations hit the school would take in the media and the legacy of Jo Pa.  That’s all they cared about.  And they kept passing the buck and what we got 13 years later is a room full of folks that at the least should be charged with obstruction of justice and one that needs to go to prison for the rest of his life.

Joe Pa could have settled this long ago and would have still came out on top had he lived up to the moral code we’ve come to expect from him and what he expects from his players.  Allegedly he and Sandusky were friends so I don’t see why he couldn’t have asked one simple question: Did you have an inappropriate sexual relationship with a minor in my athletic facility?  It didn’t matter the answer because the next step would have been to alert the proper authorities and when he got around to it, inform the A.D., campus police and the president of what was about to happen.  Whether Sandusky was innocent or guilty would have been left up to jurors and would have freed Joe and the university from wrongdoing immediately.

No one else would have been molested, Sandusky would have been stopped and the athletic program would have been spared the firestorm it is receiving now because at that point it would have been one man versus 9 victims.  Because of everyone’s incompetence it now has become the leadership structure versus 9 victims.

And now their willful ignorance will come at a price and it should.  I don’t think Joe should be allowed to finish the year.  McQueery should not be allowed to finish the year.  Any person who had any knowledge of any of these incidents should not be allowed on the Penn State campus and that included the venerable coach Joe Paterno.  You cannot sit idly by while a man preys on children and you are more concerned about the virtue of the institution than the virtue of a child.  The most precious thing in the world is a child’s innocence and Paterno, McQueery, Spanier, Schultz and others might as well have been sitting right in the room while Sandusky defiled these kids.  There is no way as a student athlete and possibly a student that I would want to be associated with a school that conducts its business much like the Catholic Church.

It’s time that everyone involved did the right thing and got out of the way in order to let the healing process begin.  And that includes Coach Joe Paterno.

If he is all the things we think and have said he is, then immediately stepping down should be his next step so he can at least regain some of his and Penn State’s dignity.