Since I've been present on this Earth, there's only been one Coach at Penn State. Granted, they only joined the Big 10 when I was 10 in 1993, but my young mind didn't really pick up on that fact. All I knew back then was that Iowa didn't beat them all that much. There was that that one, glorious win at Happy Valley in my youth- in 1996, as it turns out, which was Iowa's first win against Penn State since 1983, 13 years before.
That (if memory serves me) was a huge win. In overtime. I remember someone (I want to say it was Sedrick Shaw) during that game smacking into The Coach and bowling him right over. He was a younger man then, so he picked himself up, brushed off his pants, fixed the player in question with a steely gaze from behind his now iconic, darkened glasses and continued coaching.
There have been other moments of course: the 'kick' in 2008, that blocked punt in 2009... but for some reason, of all the moments I remember, it was that win in 1996 that seems to stick out the most.
I'm not a Penn State fan. I grew up in Iowa City. I bleed, poop, pee black and gold- and ironically, it took working a third shift job and picking up a ton of hours of overtime to really do it, but I would probably consider myself a hardcore fan of Hawkeye Sports now for the first time in my life. But while I know who to cheer for whenever we play the Nittany Lions (and in recent years, beat the Nittany Lions) I can't say that I really hold any hardcore grudge against them. (Ohio State and Northwestern are victims of my ire currently. Give Michigan a couple of years and they'll probably be back on my shitlist too- yet, curiously, I've had little to no problem with Wisconsin, even when we play them. Probably because I love a good rivalry as much as the next person and it's all knotted up at 42 a piece between the Badgers and Hawkeyes, I'd say that qualifies- statisically at least.)
Penn State has always just kind of been there, guarding the Eastern most approaches to the Big 10 and I've never really thought of them as anything but a member of the Big 10. They seemed to fit right in, which is probably what made them such an attractive candidate to the Big 10 to begin with. There was something comforting almost about the sight of the wrinkled face and the raspy voice flashing across your television screen and growling, 'Come to Penn Staaaaate....' Coaches came, Coaches went, but there was always Paterno. He outlasted Schembechler and Hayes, Carr and Fry, Alvarez, Bryant and Bowden... meeting him, I've often thought, would be a lot like meeting Moses.
While I'll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude at Ohio State's scandal, this isn't something you can gloat over. This is just sad, tragic and shocking all wrapped up into one awful bundle- and I'm nowhere near State College, PA right now. I can't imagine what loyal Penn State fans must be thinking right now- ESPN dug up a sportswriter who posted a nice column on Grantland today and interviewed him (plugging, of course, Grantland as they did so) and the poor guy looked to be absolutely shell-shocked. Scandals, it seems were something that happened at other schools. Penn State was built on Paterno's motto of 'success with honor' and it must be ringing very hollow for a lot of people today.
Multiple heads have got to roll but I don't know if Paterno's would be first on my list. The President of Penn State, Graham Spanier apparently gave his unqualified support to the two assbags that have been indicted for covering this up. He should resign. Today. Instead, it would not surprise me one little bit if he still has a job at the end of all of this while Coach Paterno takes the fall. That's not to say that I think Paterno isn't without some culpability in this- I just have to wonder if something got lost in translation at some point. If a graduate assistant came to you and said, 'hey, I saw a ten year old boy getting raped in our showers' I think I'd be calling the police first AND then my supervisors. I'd hope that the message got muddled or confused somehow- because if it was that direct, then while Coach Paterno may have fulfilled his legal responsibilities, he fumbled the ball on the moral ones.
So I hope the Penn State Board of Trustees does the right thing: let Coach Paterno finish out the season and retire with some semblance of dignity at least. (He's on the last year of his contract- it'd be easy just not to renew it, which is what I'm betting will happen.) The University owes him that. And I hope that the house cleaning is extensive and the Board takes as many heads as they need to in order to send the crystal clear message that they have absolutely zero tolerance for this kind of thing. Zero tolerance for covering it up and that they're going to do their utmost to make sure this never, ever happens again.
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