Penn State trustees gave legendary football coach Joe Paterno the boot last night for his role in covering up an ugly child-sex scandal involving an assistant coach. What took so long?
Paterno had offered to quit — but only after his team had wrapped up its season. He wanted to leave the field with “dignity.”
Alas, JoePa lost all claims to a dignified departure back in 2002, when he allowed a horrific case of pedophilia in the Penn State locker room to be swept under the rug.
Paterno didn’t deserve to be anywhere near the sideline for even one game longer.
Who could have imagined that the two words that best inform the end of Paterno’s storied career would be “sordid” and “disgusting”?
As Penn State’s head coach for nearly a half-century, the man won more games (409, to be exact) than any other major-college football coach. And he was revered not only for his record, but for his upstanding character — having long insisted that players excel both on and off the field, in schoolwork and as human beings.
But he himself fell short of that standard.
Start with the beyond-nauseating criminal charges against his ex-defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky — including 40
counts tied to sexual abuse of eight boys from 1994 to 2009.
Paterno himself faces no criminal action. But his relative silence after being told of a 2002 incident allegedly involving Sandusky and a 10-year-old boy in the locker-room showers is indictment enough.
Protecting the school’s image — and Sandusky (a key part of the team’s victories until 1999) — was apparently more important to Paterno & Co. than getting him off the streets. And never mind that the alleged serial abuser also ran a charity that dealt with troubled boys.
How many more kids might have been harmed by Sandusky after that incident?
Yes, the coach did report the case to Penn State’s athletic director, Tim Curley, and it eventually went up the chain of command — all the way to school President Graham Spanier. But no one called the cops.
Curley and Vice President Gary Schultz, charged with perjury and not reporting the matter, stepped down. But last night, the trustees, facing pressure to contain the damage, fired Paterno — and Spanier, too — effective immediately.
Paterno himself yesterday admitted he should have “done more.”
No kidding. It was time for him to go.