As the stains of the most grotesque scandal to hit college football wash away and an entire country scrambles to make sense of all that is distant, one truth shines through in light of the dark times at Penn State: Americans need to ease up on their love of football.
This is an ideology I never imagined arguing in a column dedicated to grading the gridiron game, but the surprise comes at the end of a week’s line of startling disappointments. Never did I envision being so disappointed in a collective group of Americans that decided the game of football was the primary angle by which to discern a subject of life, ethics and human suffering.
Joe Paterno is not the story. He should not be the story.
But Joe Paterno is the story.
Right after breaking the scandal, The Harrisburg Patriot-News printed a front-page editorial detailing why Paterno needed to be fired. The same day, The Philadelphia Daily News printed a cover of Paterno with the headline, “SHAME.”
Public reaction stood by that plot, plastering it over message boards and print columns in every nook and cranny of American hubbub. What unfolded was a motion-picture scenario of an underground child molestation scheme where Joe Paterno is the antagonist and defendant Jerry Sandusky, PSU President Graham Spanier, athletics director Tim Curley and senior vice president Gary Shultz are his cast-away partners in crime.
In America’s film, the man actually responsible for committing the crimes (Sandusky) and the university officials who perjured to cover it all up play allies to the football coach whose fault was failing to do more than his job requested. The reason for it is that America prefers the story it can relate to rather than the real issue that doesn’t flash as much pop culture appeal.
Human perception is a dangerous tool. It translates what we think or feel into accepted fact, absent of crucial details we need to know but refuse to wait for.
That’s because perception is so often reactionary. It relates what we see and hear to what we can offer through experience. If that experience is common, the perception becomes widely accepted, even by a less vocal minority that understands common thought as truth when enough people voice it as such.
Despite football’s minute role in this broad subject of institution, ethics and life, the man who did some but not all becomes the story because his role as a legendary football coach is the angle by which the perceptive majority can project a semi-informed voice.
That “semi-informed voice” has limitations that perception can cover up the louder it speaks. People know Joe Paterno and they know football. They don’t know what a graduate assistant told him regarding a Sandusky crime or what Paterno correspondingly told Currey. They couldn’t wait to find out, and neither could the Penn State Board of Trustees.
The board instead decided that a phone call firing was all the decency it could afford a coach of 61 years, 409 wins and countless individual stories of building people up, and the reason was that the public relations benefits of pleasing an angry public outweighed any obligation to due process.
Despite the last aside, this column is not a cry for Joe Paterno. There are too many other victims in this case than to get so caught up on what the football coach did or didn’t do.
They are victims who deserved ample coverage for their candle-lit ceremony held by the same Penn State students publicly blasted for rallying for their former coach. They are victims who deserved for America to move beyond the sport it can relate to and look at the life questions that deserve honest answers.
Some might claim that Joe Paterno was Penn State, with his 61 years spent as the most popular individual on campus. But as iconic of a coaching legend as he was, to suggest that a football coach holds more power than the university president — to the degree that neglect carries heavier scorn than perjury and immoral organization — is to make the game of football a power it isn’t and was never intended to be.
Even in the peak years in Happy Valley, football was a representation of all that is great about a prestigious institution, and never the other way around.
Football is a beautiful game played by skilled athletes, organized by sharp minds and enjoyed by incredible people. It should be understood as such — even when gut reaction begs for a more popular headline.