• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Penn State football pedophilia thread (UPDATE: NCAA sanctions handed down)

Status
Not open for further replies.
D

Dan

No longer boycotting the Wolfenstein franchise
To be clear with that poll, a majority of people in every state now has at least some negative view of Paterno. It's not nearly as crazy as the graphical depiction demonstrates.
 
T

truly101

I got grudge sucked!
A lot of Paterno supporters from former players, to Dick Vitale to Coach K look pretty foolish right now. I know its human nature to assume someone you consider a friend could not be complicit in such a long string of horrible crimes, but you should really consider the facts before speaking. I don't know how much blowback these people will suffer, but if asked, they just need to say they were flat out wrong.
 
B

Big-E

Member
If the NCAA does nothing it will just be more evidence that they are fucking scum too and are just in the business to exploit amateur athletes.
 
jchap

jchap

Member
I bet the NCAA response is something like... For every 3 children raped, 1 scholarship will be taken away for one year.
 
D

Dan

No longer boycotting the Wolfenstein franchise
Sally Jenkins runs down the ways Paterno lied all the way to his grave. She had the last interview with him.

oe Paterno was a liar, there’s no doubt about that now. He was also a cover-up artist. If the Freeh Report is correct in its summary of the Penn State child molestation scandal, the public Paterno of the last few years was a work of fiction. In his place is a hubristic, indictable hypocrite.

In the last interview before his death, Paterno insisted as strenuously as a dying man could that he had absolutely no knowledge of a 1998 police inquiry into child molestation accusations against his assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. This has always been the critical point in assessing whether Paterno and other Penn State leaders enabled Sandusky’s crimes.

If Paterno knew about ’98, then he wasn’t some aging granddad who was deceived, but a canny and unfeeling power broker who put protecting his reputation ahead of protecting children.

If he knew about ’98, then he understood the import of graduate assistant Mike McQueary’s distraught account in 2001 that he witnessed Sandusky assaulting a boy in the Penn State showers.

If he knew about ’98, then he also perjured himself before a grand jury.

Guilty.

Paterno didn’t always give lucid answers in his final interview conducted with The Washington Post three days before his death, but on this point he was categorical and clear as a bell. He pled total, lying ignorance of the ’98 investigation into a local mother’s claim Sandusky had groped her son in the shower at the football building. How could Paterno have no knowledge of this, I asked him?

“Nobody knew,” he said.

Everybody knew.

Never heard a rumor?

“I never heard a thing,” he said.

He heard everything.

Not a whisper? How is that possible?

“If Jerry’s guilty, nobody found out til after several incidents.”

Paterno’s account of himself is flatly contradicted in damning detail by ex FBI-director Louis Freeh’s report. In a news conference Thursday Freeh charged that Paterno, along with athletic director Tim Curley, university president Graham Spanier and vice president Gary Schultz, engaged in a cover-up, “an active agreement of concealment.”

Paterno was not only aware of the ’98 investigation but followed it “closely” according to Freeh. As did the entire leadership of Penn State. E-mails and confidential notes by Schultz about the progress of the inquiry prove it. “Behavior – at best inappropriate @ worst sexual improprieties,” Schultz wrote. “At min – Poor Judgment.” Schultz also wrote, “Is this opening of pandora’s box?” and “Other children?”

A May 5, 1998 e-mail from Curley to Schultz and Spanier was titled “Joe Paterno” and it says, “I have touched base with the coach. Keep us posted. Thanks.”

A second e-mail dated May 13 1998 from Curley to Schultz is titled “Jerry” and it says, “Anything new is this department? Coach is anxious to know where it stands.”

There is only one aspect in which the Freeh report does not totally destroy Paterno’s pretension of honesty. It finds no connection between the ’98 investigation and Sandusky’s resignation from Paterno’s staff in ’99. The report also suggests that Paterno genuinely believed the police had found no evidence of a crime.

Paterno can be forgiven for his initial denial, for refusing to believe his colleague was a child molester in ’98. What’s not forgivable is his sustained determination to lie from 2001 onward.

...
Click to expand...

Go read it all.

I also missed this gem from his last interview:
He reiterated that McQueary was unclear with him about the nature of what he saw—and added that even if McQueary had been more graphic, he's not sure he would have comprehended it.

"You know, he didn't want to get specific," Paterno said. "And to be frank with you I don't know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man."
Click to expand...
 
K

Kusagari

Member
Joe Paterno is a piece of shit.

How anyone can defend this man and go "he did so much good" after this blows my mind. If the man had any kind of conscience, he would have admitted he knew after the shit blew up and he could no longer hide it. But in interview after interview he continued to lie his ass off and protect himself.

I wish he was still alive to see him squirm now.
 
T

truly101

I got grudge sucked!
I'm guessing the NCAA will have to do something because the public will become quite jaded that the NCAA can't stand a poor black kid getting money for clothes and food, but can only give a shoulder shrug to kids raped under the watch of one of CFB's most well known programs.

Keep in mind that if they do some severe sanctions on Penn St that they are establishing precedent here. I'm not saying its right or wrong, but it could have big implications in the future.
 
P

piratepwnsninja

Member
My former boss had a pretty good post of questions for the cover-up apologists.

http://sportsthodoxy.blogspot.com/2012/07/jerry-sandusky-questions.html

Jerry Sandusky coached at Penn State for 29 years before his earliest confirmed sexual assault of a minor. He ran The Second Mile for 21 years before his earliest confirmed assault.

Does anyone think that, in his 50s, Jerry Sandusky spontaneously began molesting little boys for the first time? That this was some kind of mid-life crisis?
Sandusky retired from coaching in 1999, after the Nittany Lions trounced Texas A&M in the Alamo Bowl. This was a decorated assistant coach in his mid-fifties. No other college approached him to recruit him? Even a little one elsewhere in football-crazy, Penn-State-football-crazy Pennsylvania? Pitt or Temple didn't want to have their football program run by this guy? California University of Pennsylvania didn't even ask? Really?
Boy, that's weird.

I mean, either they approached him, and he turned them down (which would be kind of strange), or they knew not to ask. Or approached PSU and asked permission to talk to him, and were discouraged from doing so.

You know, now that I think about it... this guy won two national championships as a defensive coordinator, in '82 and '86. How come he never got poached? I know he was then seen as Paterno's heir apparent, but it's not like heirs apparent are never poached or supplanted (see Dana Holgorson).

It's weird. I feel like there's more to this story.
Click to expand...
 
K

Kusagari

Member
Other articles are bringing up how it makes you wonder how much Paterno used his seemingly infinite power at Penn State to make sure the football team kept its squeaky clean image.

Would anyone be surprised if he covered up for players in trouble?
 
T

timetokill

Banned
Kusagari said:
Would anyone be surprised if he covered up for players in trouble?
Click to expand...

It's almost certain that he did. He explicitly told the university to stop trying to punish football players for legal transgressions, that "he would handle it," etc.

He wanted 100% complete control.

The fact that he used a "I'm just a naive, innocent old man who was just coachin' football, never did nothing about no politics with the administration, no sirree" is just fucking laughable.
 
B

BertramCooper

Banned
truly101 said:
I'm guessing the NCAA will have to do something because the public will become quite jaded that the NCAA can't stand a poor black kid getting money for clothes and food, but can only give a shoulder shrug to kids raped under the watch of one of CFB's most well known programs.

Keep in mind that if they do some severe sanctions on Penn St that they are establishing precedent here. I'm not saying its right or wrong, but it could have big implications in the future.
Click to expand...

It would set a precedent, but one I can't see ever being revisited again.

There has been some seriously seedy shit in the world of collegiate athletics, but I can't imagine we'll ever see something as heinous as this ever again. This is a truly unique set of circumstances that could only happen at a place as thoroughly fucked up and geographically isolated as Penn State.
 
T

truly101

I got grudge sucked!
BertramCooper said:
It would set a precedent, but once I can't see ever being revisited again.

There has been some seriously seedy shit in the world of collegiate athletics, but I can't imagine we'll ever see something as heinous as this ever again. This is a truly unique set of circumstances that could only happen at a place as thoroughly fucked up and geographically isolateed as Penn State.
Click to expand...

You're probably right. I can't imagine right now any coach of any sport who would consider this in the future. I don't think that would stop any current cover ups but then again, I can't imagine anything else like this or this magnitude somewhere else. I could see something along the lines of a Petrino type sex scandal.
 
B

Bolshevik

Banned
To be fair I doubt the most of the people who still view Joe P positively are informed and understand that he allowed child molestation to occur.
 
K

Knux-Future

Banned
If they bomb PSU football the entire College is probably dead too.


I mean what else was PSU known for? (Outside of this..now).

Oh well.. tough titty.

Glad I went elsewhere
 
B

BertramCooper

Banned
I think we need to remember that Paterno, a Catholic, couldn't even fathom the idea of a grown man raping a little boy.

I mean, where could Paterno have possibly heard of such of a thing? It was beyond his realm of understanding.
 
Q

quaere

Member
Knux-Future said:
If they bomb PSU football the entire College is probably dead too.


I mean what else was PSU known for? (Outside of this..now).

Oh well.. tough titty.

Glad I went elsewhere
Click to expand...
Other than being the 13th best public university in the US and in the top 100 universities in the world in all three commonly used rankings?

Yeah, not known for much.
 
M

mambadragon

Banned
I'm an alum and posted in this thread a lot. It's great to see the truth come out.

Sandusky is in prison for life. Curley and Shultz will go to jail, and Spanier should be charged soon. Paterno would be jailed for perjury too if he was still alive. Sadly this is the best that can be done right now, and other than paying the settlements there's not much else that can be done for the victims.

If football receives the death penalty for a few years it won't be that big in the long run (but I hope they do). Penn State and other schools need to review what football and other sports mean to the university. All of these programs should treat their sports programs like the Ivy Leagues and small schools do - identify the school with the academics and not the sports. The only way this will ever happen is to decrease the importance of sports on the local economies and then all the TV networks, but that will never happen sadly.

Thank jeebus the predator and these leaders are getting jailed, but hopefully there'll some actual change at Penn State and other schools will learn from this. With all the money in sports though there's little reason to think change will actually happen though :/.
 
B

border

Member
How hard would it have been to tell Sandusky, "You're done. You're fired. You will not maintain an office on campus. You will not set foot on campus. You will cease all activity with Second Mile or you will shut the charity down completely. If you refuse to comply then this shitstorm WILL go public and you will be hung out to dry by the entire administration" ??

It seems like even if they had wanted to avoid bad publicity, they could have gone about it in a way that didn't continue to enable this twisted fucker.

mre said:
75% of America doesn't care that Paterno abetted in the molestation of god only knows how many kids. Niiiiice.
Click to expand...

Dude, it's a web poll from a site for sports fanatics. I think a fair and unbiased polling of the general public would result in a much more negative view of JoePa and Penn State. Most people probably don't even know who Paterno was.....so they just see this as a story of some power-mad asshole who covered up the wrongdoings of his sicko underling.
 
L

LyleLanley

Banned
Being drunk and watching ESPN just angers me so fucking much. I hope everyone involved with this burns in hell. I still can't believe it's possible that so many people knew about this but didn't do a single fucking thing.
 
C

CorvoSol

Member
border said:
How hard would it have been to tell Sandusky, "You're done. You're fired. You will not maintain an office on campus. You will not set foot on campus. You will cease all activity with Second Mile or you will shut the charity down completely. If you refuse to comply then this shitstorm WILL go public and you will be hung out to dry by the entire administration" ??

It seems like even if they had wanted to avoid bad publicity, they could have gone about it in a way that didn't continue to enable this twisted fucker.



Dude, it's a web poll from a site for sports fanatics. I think a fair and unbiased polling of the general public would result in a much more negative view of JoePa and Penn State. Most people probably don't even know who Paterno was.....so they just see this as a story of some power-mad asshole who covered up the wrongdoings of his sicko underling.
Click to expand...

That's really the weirdest part of it. All of them could have avoided it and actually been heroes and stood unscathed. But because they were all afraid of tarnishing their reputations, they wound up tarnishing their reputations. It's some kind of Grecian Tragedy.
 
L

LyleLanley

Banned
border said:
How hard would it have been to tell Sandusky, "You're done. You're fired. You will not maintain an office on campus. You will not set foot on campus. You will cease all activity with Second Mile or you will shut the charity down completely. If you refuse to comply then this shitstorm WILL go public and you will be hung out to dry by the entire administration" ??

It seems like even if they had wanted to avoid bad publicity, they could have gone about it in a way that didn't continue to enable this twisted fucker.
Click to expand...

That's one of the things that makes no sense to me, could they have not found a thousand coaches to take Sandusky's job? Joe Pa would've looked like even more of a god had he acted like a human being and turned Sandusky in.
 
J

jaxword

Member
BertramCooper said:
I think we need to remember that Paterno, a Catholic, couldn't even fathom the idea of a grown man raping a little boy.

I mean, where could Paterno have possibly heard of such of a thing? It was beyond his realm of understanding.
Click to expand...

Given how we treat sports stars, Sandusky was practically a pope and enjoyed the same infallibility.
 
B

border

Member
CorvoSol said:
That's really the weirdest part of it. All of them could have avoided it and actually been heroes and stood unscathed. But because they were all afraid of tarnishing their reputations, they wound up tarnishing their reputations. It's some kind of Grecian Tragedy.
Click to expand...

I think it begs a question that we will never know the answer to -- How many of the Big 4 conspirators actually believed Sandusky was guilty? I'm not saying it's okay if they didn't, or that it's okay if their judgment was clouded by friendship, pride or a sense of self-preservation. But if they honestly thought he'd done what he did, they could have kept everything quiet very easily. Did any of them consciously decide to protect someone they believed was a child molestor, or did they choose to believe in the guy's innocence lacking any definitive evidence?
 
C

CorvoSol

Member
border said:
I think it begs a question that we will never know the answer to -- How many of the Big 4 conspirators actually believed Sandusky was guilty? I'm not saying it's okay if they didn't, or that it's okay if their judgment was clouded by friendship, pride or a sense of self-preservation. But if they honestly thought he'd done what he did, they could have kept everything quiet very easily. Did any of them consciously decide to protect someone they believed was a child molestor, or did they choose to believe in the guy's innocence lacking any definitive evidence?
Click to expand...

I think it's pretty clear they thought he was guilty. There's no reason they'd consider a coverup "humane" if not for the fact that they were assured that he was guilty as sin. If a close friend of mine was accused of these charges and I were convinced he were innocent, I'd be fighting tooth and nail. Every one of these men has been most concerned with proving his own innocence, though, and along the way it just kinda makes their guilt seem more obvious.
 
J

JABEE

Member
LyleLanley said:
That's one of the things that makes no sense to me, could they have not found a thousand coaches to take Sandusky's job? Joe Pa would've looked like even more of a god had he acted like a human being and turned Sandusky in.
Click to expand...

Do we even know if Sandusky was the only one participating in these pedophilic acts? Has there been any investigation into the Second Mile program?
 
B

border

Member
CorvoSol said:
I think it's pretty clear they thought he was guilty.
Click to expand...

If they thought he was guilty though, then why not make the guy leave outright? Why come up with some half-assed coverup that allows him to continue molesting kids?

If I thought your best friend was guilty of such a thing, you might give him the choice of either undergoing a police investigation or simply cutting all ties to his source of victims, leaving town, and starting a new life. It wouldn't be right, but that's the kind of mercy someone might show a close friend. Nobody with a conscience would simply brush everything under the rug like Paterno & Company did.

To suggest that they believed outright he was guilty and allowed him to continued unrestricted and unabated would mean that they are monsters only marginally less despicable than Sandusky himself. That's certainly possible, but I think it's more plausible to believe they were looking the other way, hoping for the best, and thinking it would all blow over. Not that such behavior is even remotely acceptable, but I can believe the story of 1 PSU monster more than I can 5 PSU monsters.
 
S

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
videotape said:
I'm an alum and posted in this thread a lot. It's great to see the truth come out.

Sandusky is in prison for life. Curley and Shultz will go to jail, and Spanier should be charged soon. Paterno would be jailed for perjury too if he was still alive. Sadly this is the best that can be done right now, and other than paying the settlements there's not much else that can be done for the victims.

If football receives the death penalty for a few years it won't be that big in the long run (but I hope they do). Penn State and other schools need to review what football and other sports mean to the university. All of these programs should treat their sports programs like the Ivy Leagues and small schools do - identify the school with the academics and not the sports. The only way this will ever happen is to decrease the importance of sports on the local economies and then all the TV networks, but that will never happen sadly.

Thank jeebus the predator and these leaders are getting jailed, but hopefully there'll some actual change at Penn State and other schools will learn from this. With all the money in sports though there's little reason to think change will actually happen though :/.
Click to expand...

Thank you, based alum. Seriously I needed this sanity and I know you're not alone.
 
S

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
quaere said:
Other than being the 13th best public university in the US and in the top 100 universities in the world in all three commonly used rankings?

Yeah, not known for much.
Click to expand...
it was not "known" for this. It may be true, but its fame was derived from its wildly successful child rape enablement sports camp.
 
R

Roland Garros

Banned
george_us said:
To send a message that, if you take chance on covering up something as heinous and disgusting as this, you risk your entire program if you're caught.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but my point is that the people who took that risk/chance/participated in the cover up, are now gone. So you're basically punishing new/innocent people for a crime they had nothing to do with.

Now, if the course of action led to a reduction in power for the football department, as Cyan was speaking about, I could go for that.
 
J

jaxword

Member
border said:
I think it begs a question that we will never know the answer to -- How many of the Big 4 conspirators actually believed Sandusky was guilty? I'm not saying it's okay if they didn't, or that it's okay if their judgment was clouded by friendship, pride or a sense of self-preservation. But if they honestly thought he'd done what he did, they could have kept everything quiet very easily. Did any of them consciously decide to protect someone they believed was a child molestor, or did they choose to believe in the guy's innocence lacking any definitive evidence?
Click to expand...

You could apply this question to EVERY SINGLE THREAD about the latest child molester in the Catholic church/youth program/boy scout type group/etc.

There's always some people who conveniently were so close to the criminal but had NO idea they were child rapists. Perfectly plausible deniability.
 
B

border

Member
Roland Garros said:
Yeah, but my point is that the people who took that risk/chance/participated in the cover up, are now gone. So you're basically punishing new/innocent people for a crime they had nothing to do with.
Click to expand...

I think the idea is that while the specific guilty parties have been removed, the "Football over EVERYTHING" culture still remains. If PSU receives a slap on the wrist, then coaches and administrators will still assume they can do whatever the fuck they want. I don't think anyone will ever again try to protect a child molestor, but their mentality will be that if the NCAA didn't take action against child molestation, then what's the harm in bribing players or having them use steroids or letting the alumni buy them cars?
 
R

Roland Garros

Banned
border said:
I think the idea is that while the specific guilty parties have been removed, the "Football over EVERYTHING" culture still remains. If PSU receives a slap on the wrist, then coaches and administrators will still assume they can do whatever the fuck the want. I don't think anyone will ever again try to protect a child molestor, but their mentality will be that if the NCAA didn't take action against child molestation, then what's the harm in bribing players or having them use steroids or letting the alumni buy them cars?
Click to expand...

Yeah I see your point. Stripping down and removing the power of the footballl department is something I can agree with. I still believe totally destroying the department and impacting the wider school is going too far, but I can definitely see why some would believe it is not.
 
D

devilhawk

Member
Roland Garros said:
Yeah, but my point is that the people who took that risk/chance/participated in the cover up, are now gone. So you're basically punishing new/innocent people for a crime they had nothing to do with.

Now, if the course of action led to a reduction in power for the football department, as Cyan was speaking about, I could go for that.
Click to expand...

There are dozens of instances where the NCAA has punished the school despite the players/coaches/boosters being gone or dealt with. Sometimes years later, in fact.
 
B

border

Member
Roland Garros said:
Yeah I see your point. Stripping down and removing the power of the footballl department is something I can agree with. I still believe totally destroying the department and impacting the wider school is going too far, but I can definitely see why some would believe it is not.
Click to expand...

You cannot really have it both ways though. You cannot shoot the football department in the kneecaps and expect it to not take a toll on other sports and the academic departments. You cannot ignore PSU's flagrant behavior and expect that your leniency won't encourage future indiscretions.

For the NCAA, it's question of whether or not it's worth it to cut off current revenues to ensure that future indiscretions will not happen, or whether they want to ignore the issue, keep rolling in money, and gamble on the integrity of the entire institution. Ironically, it's exactly the same moral conundrum that Paterno and his conspirators faced. I hope they will act differently, but I worry that they won't.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Former Bills punter Matt Araiza who was accused of gang rape cleared after evidence shows he wasn't present during incident: prosecutors
2
86
7K
Nobody_Important replied
Remember the CEO who paid all employees $70,000 or more?
23
4K
Konnor replied
Andrew Callaghan, Popular Host of ‘All Gas No Brakes’ and ‘Channel 5,’ Accused of Sexual Misconduct [Rolling Stone]
News Drama
29
3K
Lasha replied
The man who owes Nintendo $14m: Gary Bowser and gaming’s most infamous piracy case
2
85
6K
SHA replied
[SF Chronicle] San Francisco declares state of emergency over monkeypox
News Event
22
2K
Drew1440 replied
Top Bottom