Penn State

Sadly, there is a horrible situation unfolding involving a Penn State coach and the sexual molestation of a number of young men on the campus at State College, Pennsylvania. This is the worst and most unimaginable occurrence at an education institution like Penn Sate, which has always, seemingly, been able to rise above scandal and cheating and NCAA infractions and investigations.

Now, something worse than any penalty ever handed out to SMU or USC, is occurring. And the most disastrous thing of all is not that a great coaching career has come to a grinding halt and may not even last the rest of this 2011 college football season, but that the praised and oft-imitated warm family environment at Penn State is now nothing but an illusion. Men who were looking to cover their own butts and, perhaps, the proverbial of their university are paying a deservedly high price now.

Given the horrible stories coming out of Penn State, football should take a back seat. You look at the situation and you imagine yourself as a parent and you think, 'Wow, Paterno is the most honorable guy in football and he has a good staff of people just like him, so I'll send my kid there to play football in Happy Valley because it's the best place for a young man to grow up and learn about life' and this happens. 

The victims...I don't even know how you deal with something like this, and to have had this situation occur where one or more people at Penn State have only just barely discharged their legal responsibility, without doing more to help the kids and to make sure that there were support avenues is sickening, and anyone with even a shred of humanity inside themselves should be as angry as heck about this. We're talking about the total collapse of a safe environment for young and impressionable kids.

How is it even fathomable that Sandusky had an office at Penn State available to him until last week? Especially when you consider that there's evidence doing the rounds now that people at the university have known about this shocking set of circumstances since 1998. Yet still Paterno, the PSU coaches and the people who run the school and the Athletic Department have let Sandusky come on campus and potentially, knowing the allegations that have come before, putting more young men in harm's way because they are in a position where they may be alone with a man who is clearly capable of something like this. It turns the stomach.

It's a sad end for Paterno's legacy, certainly, but we should not let what has gone before cloud our judgement and condemnation of what is happening now, what he has allowed to happen. The fact of the matter is that Joe Paterno, as head coach of a football team - of a program whose coda is 'Success with Honour' - has made some big mistakes in the way he handled, or did not properly handle a situation that has likely damaged, perhaps irrevocably, the lives of however many young men - too many young men - end up coming forward to say they have been molested by Sandusky. 

Alliances and allegiance aside, Paterno should have done more than he did. I daresay even Paterno knows and realises this now. It seems fashionable at times to beat up on a person undeserving. But, in this circumstance, Paterno deserves all the criticism that he is receiving. It's a shame, but it's also the truth. The legacy he had built up over so many years will be tainted. It seems unfair, but what was also unfair, what is dreadfully unfair in all of this, is that there are a group of young men out there who went to Penn State University to play football, and to grow up under the tutelage of a man revered as one of the greats in all of sports. They left, instead, with memories that will likely scar them for life.

Sure, it's sad that Paterno's blemish will be remembered for all time, that his career accomplishments will always come with an asterisk because of what has come out over the last five or six days. But it's a whole lot sadder that the lives of some young men have been torn apart and will probably never be the same again.