A Sad and Shocking End

This cannot be how it ends. And yet it is.

One sick, depraved human being has taken down an icon, bringing a proud university to its knees in the process.

Not alone of course; he had several unwilling accomplices. Whatever you may feel about the Penn State administration right now I can guarantee this; none of them wanted to be in this position. If they covered for Jerry Sandusky for whatever reason; to save the school or to save him, I assure you it was not by choice. It was because right or wrong, and it’s most likely wrong, they felt they had to.

To what extent Joseph Vincent Paterno was involved in that collaboration remains a mystery. It may never be fully understood. And it’s now irrelevant. The die has been cast and barring a dramatic change in facts or circumstances, he will be deemed fully complicit in these horrific events.

A significant majority believe that Paterno, either through negligent inaction or a conspiracy to defraud enabled a horrific scandal with devastating consequences. A small minority believe he is a high powered scapegoat, served up to satisfy public bloodlust. I honestly don’t know what to believe.

I cannot recall an event that has shaken my core convictions to this degree.

I do not expect those who are not part of the Penn State family to understand our grief. How can I expect others to understand it when I can't explain it myself? All I know is what I felt when the announcement was made official, profound sadness.

This is a DEVASTATING time for all of us in the Penn State community.

It’s not the act of JoePa's firing in and of itself that saddens me. It’s what it represents. This surreal nightmare is now undeniable on every level. Until this week any notion of Penn State football without Paterno was inconceivable, let along Paterno being fired. That it happened and happened so suddenly crystalizes on every level the monumental nature of this scandal.

Many have called JoePa's dismissal the end of an era.  You cannot fathom how inadequate that description is to the events at hand.

You must understand Penn State is a massive extended family. Our family has hundreds of thousands of members. It stretches across years and decades and thousands of miles. We are incredibly broad and diverse, different in so many ways. The one thing that binds us is an undying love of The Pennsylvania State University. And yes part of that is represented in our love and respect for Penn State football.

Understand this, whatever you may think of him right now, Joe Paterno was the patriarch of our family. He was quite literally the physical embodiment of this place we hold so sacred. His termination represents a spiritual death to our family, to our school, and to our beliefs. For that we mourn.

We mourn for the man we knew, and we mourn in fear of the man we may not have known.

We mourn for the destruction of a great man and that man’s reputation. We mourn the systematic annihilation of six decades of our history.

And we mourn our fear that perhaps the great man was not so great after all. At least not when it mattered the most.

Do not interpret our grief as an endorsement of his action or lack thereof. We all understand that gravity of this situation. I have opinions on Paterno’s culpability but I’m unwilling to share them. For one thing I don’t trust my feelings and convictions. I’m not sure I can see clearly through my emotions or bias. For another, I quite literally dread the next development that might make things worse.

Part of me cannot fathom that 60 plus years of dedicated service to one university is being wiped away. That’s 60 plus years, a lifetime of coaching, teaching, and mentoring young men. Some coaches are associated with a school or program. Joe Paterno literally is Penn State football. He is the universal constant for every Penn Stater past and present.

The other part of me cannot fathom that he may have played some role, however peripheral in these horrific crimes. He neither perpetrated nor witnesses these acts. And to whatever extent he enabled them he was not alone. It does not matter. Anyone involved in this appalling tragedy must be held accountable.

In my perfect world a man with a six decade track record of excellence would have been given the benefit of the doubt. We would have allowed for due process, for ALL of the facts to be known before such drastic action was taken.

Alas that was not realistic. I knew by Tuesday that JoePa would never coach another game. This scandal became too big, too fast. His position became untenable as did so many others. I knew this with absolute certainty.

And still I cried when the announcement was made. The raw emotion of the moment was more powerful than I ever expected.  Even now I can’t grasp the non-stop “Paterno fired” headline that’s living in perpetuity on cable TV.

Jerry Sandusky is the ultimate bad guy here. Everyone who suffers for this does so ultimately because of him. Others made bad decisions, horrible perhaps but he and only he committed these heinous crimes. I will never back off of that belief.

That does not absolve the actions of our leaders. We entrusted them with something we hold sacred and they betrayed that trust. Their actions and decisions have brought shame to the entire Penn State community. Any and all who were involved must pay with nothing less than their jobs. If that includes Joe Paterno then so be it.

It’s just so hard to believe. 

Let me be clear on this point, we are NOT the victims here. The kids that Sandusky abused AND ONLY those kids deserve your thoughts, sympathy and prayers. The entire Penn State community however is collateral damage.

The damage to the university is incalculable; as is the pain and sadness felt by its students and alumni. We’ve been stripped of our dignity, turned in to a nationwide object of scorn and ridicule. Hundreds of thousands are suffering because of the heinous actions of one man, and the subsequent action or inaction of several others.

We suffer twice, once for the kids and once for our school. And we suffer in silence. Nobody wants to hear our pain. Our betrayal pales in comparison to the betrayal of those kids, and we all know it. If we suffer out loud we are called apologists, enablers, or worse. We are not any of those things; just hurt, confused, and profoundly sad.

We cannot defend the indefensible; nor have we tried.  It is stunning how many lives have been negatively affected by the actions of one deeply disturbed human being.

I don’t know that we will ever fully come to grips with that.  And frankly we're not ready to do so.  Right now we are dealing with profound changes to our reality; a reality we've taken as a given our entire lives.

It’s ironic that so many of us were calling for Paterno’s retirement before this happened. There was endless debate as to whether he stayed too long. Many felt, in spite of all he had done, that it was time for the Paterno era to end.

None of us wanted it to end like this.