Maureen Dowd has finally written a column I can wholeheartedly endorse. She writes about how Joe Paterno and Penn State let down her ten-year old nephew who “is the proud owner of Penn State shorts, underwear, socks, jerseys, sweatshirts and plastic football players.” I’m not ten years old anymore, but I was once. And I was a big Penn State fan who idolized Joe Paterno. Fortunately, I am old enough now not to be emotionally scarred by the revelations at Penn State, but it’s still painful to process. People around here have taken pride in Penn State’s football program for a half century. Even their refusal to put anything on their helmets indicated a certain purity. Of Joe Paterno’s five undefeated teams, only one received a national championship, which only added to the fan base’s desire to see the program get the respect they thought it deserved. Defending Penn State’s honor and virtues is a habit deeply embedded in Pennsylvania culture. Yet, the way they handled the allegations against their legendary defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is so much worse than the booster scandals at Notre Dame or the notoriously bad behavior of the student-athletes at the University of Miami.
Unlike Oklahoma State, Penn State would never hand a degree to a man who admitted to being functionally illiterate. Of teams that participated in Division I bowl games last year, only Notre Dame and Northwestern had higher graduation rates (pdf) for the football players. Nationally, the graduation success rate of college football players increased last year to 67%, but Penn State could brag a 90% success rate. Coach Paterno proved, year in and year out, that you can be successful on the highest level without treating academics as a joke and without breaking NCAA rules. That meant something to people. And that’s what makes it all that much harder to deal with the fact they didn’t protect innocent children and didn’t follow the law in reporting incidents of child rape and, in some cases, perjured themselves in a failed effort to cover their tracks. Ultimately, the fact that they avoided many of the lesser sins of college sports is overwhelmed by the one of the biggest sins imaginable.
I hope the program can find someone who will continue to do all the little things right and slowly rebuild the reputation for excellence that Penn State earned. And I hope they don’t have any huge moral blind spots that ruin their efforts. There will be a lot of ten-year olds counting on them.
