Tag Archives: Joe Paterno

BuzzFeed: Some People Still Don’t Understand What Joe Paterno Did Wrong

What do you get when you combine the Tweet of anfy Penn State fans following the NCAA’s announcement of sanctions against the university with sections from the Freeh Report on what actually happened? A great article by our friends at BuzzFeed.com that shows just how out-of-touch the Paterno apologists are.

WARNING: Some of the Tweets contain Not Safe For Work language and stupidity.  Here’s one of my favorite Tweets:

“Seriously f*ck whoever punished penn state. #joepa”

Whoever punished Penn State? You’re following this story so closely you don’t know who the NCAA is or their role in this?

Here’s a taste of this piece:

Twitter, meet the Freeh report. Freeh report, meet Twitter. The next time you hear someone defend Joe Paterno, you might want to send them this.  The Freeh Report was the end result of an investigation of the Penn State sex abuse scandal led by former Director of the FBI and District Court Judge, Louis Freeh. The investigation was commissioned by the University.

 

May 3, 1998

Penn State Pounding

For Penn State students, alum, and fans who were holding their breaths this weekend awaiting word on what the NCAA will do to the football program there is good news: the Nittany Lions will not face the death penalty. The bad news? They may wish they had.

According to sources, the NCAA will likely announce today some blistering punishments including the loss of scholarships, bowl appearances, and a hefty fine.  So, likely it will cripple the once proud program for years to come and fans will have to sit and watch in disgust as every game, every down will be a reminder of the flawed oversight of the program for the past dozen years or so. The Death Penalty would have been bad, no doubt, but at least it would have been done, over. Not staring you in the face every fall Saturday afternoon for years to come. Better to have no season or an 0-10 season?

And if that weren’t enough, the University itself decided early Sunday morning to remove the statue of Joe Paterno that sat outside Beaver Stadium.  Roads to the stadium were blocked, a blue-covered barricade put up around it and then workman started the removal process.  We can certainly understand not wanting to wait until thousands had lined up to protest to the removal or block workers, but to some fans it will certainly seem like PSU pulled another fast one in the middle of the night, like firing JoePa last November.

We’re not closer to what’s going on in Happy Valley than the rest of you, but from where we sit, it certainly looks like the relationship between administration and well, everyone else there, is broken and will remain so for quite some time.

More Trouble for Penn State: The Woman Who Stood Up to Joe Paterno

I remember reading about Vicky Triponey a few years back when she was a vice president at PSU who oversaw student discipline. Or at least the discipline of some of the students. When it came to Paterno’s football players, he reportedly thought only he knew best how to punish his boys and wanted Triponey to stay out of it.  She was told it was just the “the Penn State Way” and she should just go with it.

She didn’t.

In the end, guess what happened? She tried to use the authority granted to her by the university as part of her job and when Paterno objected, she was gone. Does that mean the Penn State football program was more corrupt than other big time athletic programs? No, but it does show that the culture in Happy Valley was so skewed toward what was best for the football program (and Paterno) that no one stood a chance against it.

Read the full article here at CNN.com.