An open letter to the powers that be at Penn State

Dear mindless idiots in charge of Penn State,

Joe Paterno is quite possibly the most straight up, by the book coach in college football today. Over the years he repeatedly demonstrated this fact on an off the field. No one, until now, has ever had the slightest reason to question Paterno's integrity or character.

When it came to the allegations of Jerry Sandusky's pedophilia, Paterno did exactly what Penn State's rules and state law required him to do. He reported it. Everyone agrees the coach did what he was supposed to do.

Paterno isn't legally implicated in the Sandusky case; a grand jury report detailed how he followed protocol in going to Curley with a graduate assistant's account of an instance of abuse in a shower at Penn State's Lasch Football Building in March 2002. But there was never a report to law or child protection authorities — the basis for charges against Curley and Schultz — and Paterno has been condemned for not following up on such a serious issue.
- USA Today

The people doing the condemning have never been in a situation where there is a clear chain of command. Nor have they been in an environment as political as a major college sports program. Imagine going over the heads of your bosses under circumstances like that and finding out you were wrong.

Paterno played by all the rules, both written and unwritten. Now, because people at the university failed to adequately follow up on those allegations one of the most decent human beings on the planet is being put up as a sacrificial goat.

Oh one more thing. Those annual checks the college gets from grateful alumni supporting your fund raisers? You can forget about most of those. Those checks came from people who remember a more honorable time at your university.

-30-

Unintelligent people always look for a scapegoat.
- Ernest Bevin