Joe Paterno’s Legacy, is a confused mess of
triumph, greatness, and disgust. Paterno was one of the best college football
coaches, if not the best football coach, period, of nearly all time. How do you
judge Paterno’s legacy? Should his statue be removed? Finally, does the
football program of Penn State deserve to be dismantled?
Joe Paterno was a great coach, and is an
intriguing story of a life. Joe Paterno, the leader of men, who apparently was
able to build fine football players, excelling students, and complete men. But,
when push came to shove, and the results of the so-called Freeh Report,
reported what to me seemed obvious, Joe Paterno, and other administrators,
covered up Jerry Sandusky’s heinous sins. The fact is, Paterno, broke a law. If
you know of Child Abuse you are legally obliged to report it to authorities, or
you can be charged and tried in the criminal court of law. So, did he (Paterno)
did all he possibly could to stop the malicious abuse of children? No. Plain
and Simple. It was Paterno and other administrators who thought they could deal
with the problem themselves and ultimately prevent a colleague from being
arrested. In the end, Paterno might have done a lot of good things for Penn
State and college football, but after what he has done, I find it morally hard
to accept him as a great man, but I can buy him as a legendary football coach.
The status of the statue is a very
sensitive subject. I honestly do not believe that Paterno deserves to have such
a grand and embellishing statue outside of the stadium. At the same time, I do
not think that he deserves no credit to how much he has contributed to the on
the field success of the football program. Instead of a statue, I can see and
approve of a mural of Paterno, maybe of him being carried off the field by a
championship team, and a plaque on the mural reading “JOE PATERNO 1926-2012”. I
think that wouldn’t be so heroizing (New word!) but would still recognize him
for coaching such a good team.
The biggest issue of this everlasting
scandal, which seems to add a new chapter to the saga every month, is what will
happen to the football program itself. I have heard different reports about
different opinions and demands. I have heard/read about people calling for the
football program itself, to be eternally terminated. I am not sure about that,
but that is why you pay the people in the position to lead, the big bucks. You,
as a work place superior to someone like Joe Paterno or the head of the Penn
State Athletics Department, would hope that the people in charge would do the
right thing. Thus, when you are a leader, and you screw up, you make your
organization suffer as well. An argument countering argument to the permanent
death penalty of Penn State football is, “What about the players?”. The thing
is, if a football player is good enough to go to play, as a non-walk-on, for
somewhere with as much reputation as Penn State, he could probably play
anywhere else. But, as a program itself, I do not believe that the football
program being taken away, is the right choice. I think that Penn State should
ban themselves from playing in bowl
games.
There are also a lot of other interesting
opinions across the web. The most intriguing one is a Fox Sports rticle about
how things would have turned out differently if there was a female in charge of
some part of the athletics department.
Anyways, those are my opinions, and it was
announced yesterday that the statue would come down, and it has, and NCAA fined the football program $60 Million, and all their wins since 1998, and suspended the program from any bowl games for the next four years.
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