They’ve kissed and made up at Penn State.
Penn State and the Paterno family have buried the hatchet, according to a pair of statements released jointly Friday.
Sue Paterno, widow of longtime former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, said the eight years since the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal came to light “have been difficult.”
I’m glad her heart goes out to the kids who were abused by a man who was enabled by her late husband.
“The last eight years have been difficult, made more so by the opinions in the Freeh Report, which my family and I believe was deeply flawed, reached unsupported conclusions about Joe and unjustly criticized the culture of Penn State,” she said. “The university has made clear that Mr. Freeh’s opinions about Joe were never endorsed by Penn State. By confirming this position and reaching this understanding, the leadership of Penn State has acted in the best interests of the university, and for this I am grateful.”
Oh. I guess it’s easy to forget who the real victims were here.
Get The Picture 
Had to play golf in a tournament, in the late ’80’s, with an obnoxious Penn State fan, who wouldn’t shut up the whole day about Jan Kemp.
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That HBO movie had a powerful ending. Not a good look for Paterno.
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“The report was deeply flawed”? That’s the takeaway after eight years of reflection?
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You have to wait eight years to make a comment like that because fewer people will remember what was actually in the report.
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Paterno was young enough to know better but too damn old to care. He couldn’t have been that stupid, but now all is forgiven? Ha!
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I would have thought Penn State would have had the good sense to let that dog lie and not feel the need to comment in any way, hoping that time’s passage would allow everyone to, if not forget, at least not have the sordid episode anywhere near the front of their mind. I would have been wrong.
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Financial sellout by State Penn, there are still many big donors who have not come back to the fold because they didn’t like Joe’s statue going down. Guess they suppose Sue making nice with the school makes everything all good. Disgusting behavior but somehow the school and NCAA are trying to make it all go away. I thought their actions were weak when it was “breaking news”, now we are looking for a complete whitewash. Integrity, where have you gone?
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I still don’t fully understand why the NCAA got involved in the matter. It seemed to be a matter for law enforcement and the university to deal with. None of what happened involved college athletes or any Penn State teams.
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It didn’t involve Penn State teams? Did the child rapist coach for some other team? Was he raping kids at some other team’s facilities? Was the head coach that was aware of it the head coach of some other team?
If that program wasn’t the textbook example of “lack of institutional control”, I don’t know what is. The highest levels of leadership at the university and university system (i.e. the Board of Trustees) allowed the football coach to not only have unilateral control of his program but allowed him to control and dictate the university and the university system’s entire approach to overseeing his program.
Now, could you argue that this it isn’t drastically different from the way a lot of big state universities operate? Maybe. I’m certainly not going to argue about that. College sports are a dirty, nasty business and I’m under no illusion that this couldn’t happen elsewhere. But to say that this didn’t deserve or require involvement or punishment from the NCAA is completely ridiculous. Their football program should have been shut down for a minimum of 2 years. The fact that it wasn’t shut down at all is a total joke.
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What NCAA rules did they violate? The whole thing was horrible but none of it involved cheating or violation of NCAA rules. Paterno and Sandusky should have both been prosecuted as should anyone else who knew about it and didn’t say anything. I don’t think any of the football team knew anything about what was going on and the football team didn’t gain any advantage from what was going on. Why should the NCAA shut down the football program?
The head coach having control over the football program is pretty standard at colleges with football teams. Coaches put on camps and clinics at almost all colleges with football programs without the university president or board of trustees giving much, if any, oversight to those camps and clinics. I am confident Jere Morehead and Greg McGarity know Kirby and Richt before him put on camps and clinics kids attend but they are not on site overseeing what is going on there.
If a biology professor was caught molesting children at some university summer science camp and the dean of the biology department was aware of it, should the biology department be shut down completely for two years? Should the biology department lose its accreditation? I think not. I think the professor and the dean who knew about it should both be prosecuted and sent to prison but I see no reason to punish the biology majors at the university who had nothing to do with the molestation nor had any knowledge of it.
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What part of “institutional control” don’t you understand? This was a program totally out of control, one that needed to be reigned in. For what other purpose do you think State Penn allowed this except to protect their football program? What wouldn’t they tolerate/allow/hide? If protecting the safety of athletes doesn’t fall within the domain of the NCAA, what is their role? They took a stand and have now backed off, disappointing.
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Which NCAA athletes did Penn State not protect? Again, what NCAA rule was violated? I think you may not fully understand the term “institutional control”. It does not mean the school or AD constantly has a hand in every event going on at every moment. It means the university and AD have an expectation and requirement that the particular athletic program follow the NCAA rules and act when they become aware of violations.
Failure to report criminal activity is a CRIMINAL violation, not an NCAA violation. The guilty parties should have been arrested, tried and imprisoned. Paterno resigned, under force, Sandusky was charged and tried. There was no NCAA rule violated that benefited the Penn State football program in any way. The whole affair was a criminal affair. The Penn State football program had nothing to do with the criminal behavior of Sandusky and Paterno’s failure to do anything when he learned about the behavior did not involve any of the football program’s activities.
If Joe Paterno and Sandusky had gotten together and kidnapped a female student and raped her in Joe’s office, should the NCAA punish the football program? I don’t think so and this is pretty much the same thing.
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“Mr. Freeh’s opinions about Joe were never endorsed by Penn State.” Really? Paterno was removed as head coach and the university president was forced to resign. Sounds like a ringing endorsement to me.
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She just needs to STFU already. She can shove Joe Pa’s legacy up her ass.
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The unpopular opinion that a person in charge has some responsibility for the actions he allows to occur on his watch is not endorsed by the leadership at Penn State. I’m shocked.
This is gross. It will always be gross. Time will not and should not heal this wound. Regardless of whatever “good” Joe Paterno may have accomplished on behalf of Penn State, his ultimate legacy will be that he enabled a friend to molest boys on his campus over decades, and despite accusations made to him personally, he did nothing to stop what was happening. It wasn’t that he did 40 years of good and one bad thing in the heat of the moment (like punching a player). He was doing this bad thing continually for decades that left dozens of victims in his wake. He should not be honored. They deserve no recompense. Sue doesn’t deserve peace. She should sulk away and live out the rest of her life on the millions her husband earned while being a heartless, enabling, failure of a human being.
Always remember this about JoePa: What did he do after Mike McQueary alerted him to Sandusky “fondling or doing something of a sexual nature” to a boy in the shower of the football building on Penn State campus? Did he immediately call the police? Did he immediately call his athletic director? No. He went to an awards ceremony. He didn’t bother alerting anyone to what he was told until he got back.
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Penn State will never lose enough and will never be humiliated or humbled enough to end my hatred for the place. The fact that eight years hence, the school would capitulate to the Paterno people is reprehensible. From the evidence, it is irrefutable that Joe Paterno was aware of a credible allegation of sexual abuse by Jerry Sandusky, did what I’d think to be the bare minimum in terms of reporting it, and then didn’t bat an eyelash at the fact he was still around the program for years more. Leaving aside all of the other allegations I’ve read about his complicity, this alone is enough to stain his legacy and make laughable the protests of the people who still think he’s infallible. For so many of their fans to still protest his complete innocence in this saga just so they can put back up a statue and believe that they had some great man at the helm of their program makes them the fan base I loathe most in sports, more than even Florida or Tech or any other rival. Until those people die off or disassociate from the program, may nothing good ever happen to Penn State athletics.
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Sounds to me like there was an “under-the-table” payment to Paterno’s widow. Money heals all wounds.
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Jo Pa: “Son, you played piss poor! Report to Coach Sandusky at 6 AM for extra work.”
I wonder how many times this happened?????
We are…
PENN STATE!!
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