Penn State Football: Joe Paterno Firing Details Released

It's been about six months since the Jerry Sandusky scandal first broke at Penn State, and while that legal process is ongoing, the scars are starting to heal at Penn State. Bill O'Brien is the new head coach, Sandusky's legal situation doesn't directly involve the university very often and generally the wars of last November and December aren't being fought again.

All of that thawing may quickly return to a deep freeze, however, as ESPN's Outside The Lines program has presented new materials regarding the Penn State scandal and Joe Paterno's unceremonious dismissal. PSU fans who still resent Paterno's firing won't find much reason to be sympathetic toward the Board of Trustees, who made the final decision on sacking JoePa, and overall there aren't many revelations that would otherwise sway a person's opinion one way or the other if it was already made up in November.

Chief among OTL's materials is a copy of the statement Paterno intended to make at a press conference once his role in the Sandusky investigation of 2002 became scrutinized. The press conference wasn't set up through Penn State (a fact that doubtlessly concerned the trustees), and it was summarily canceled, but reading the speech itself, there's hardly anything that the school needed to worry about Paterno saying out loud. The key excerpt:

As the Grand Jury report notes, I was subpoenaed last January to testify regarding an incident in 2002. As my very brief testimony established, my role was limited to a single report made to me by an assistant coach in 2002.  The coach in question came to my house on a Saturday morning and informed me that he witnessed former coach Jerry Sandusky in a shower with a young boy.  The coach made it clear that he felt strongly that there was something inappropriate going on and that he was very upset by what he saw.  The coach made no specific allegations of any identified sexual act, nor did he use any graphic terms – just the idea that what he saw was wrong and that he did not know what to do next.

All in all, it reads an awful lot like a lawyer had written it—and that is a very good thing—and it doesn't deviate from Paterno's other statements throughout the whole process.

As for the actual firing of Paterno, one of the most striking things about it was the inherent futility in trying to apply PSU's normal, modern dismissal policies to someone like Paterno, who was an employee of the school for literally over 60 years. To wit:

Those arrangements involved the university's collecting property from the coach, an apparent pro forma list that included a cellphone (Paterno didn't own one), a university ID card (Paterno never used one), a parking permit, office keys and a security badge.

There was something else. "It is also our understanding that you have conducted university business out of a home office. Someone from University Office of Human Resources will contact you within a week of your receipt of the inventory to arrange for the retrieval of university property."

A few weeks later, a university employee arrived at Paterno's home and carted away a 25-year-old beige telephone and a dilapidated fax machine.

This was the Joe Paterno conundrum: he did not want to be treated as special, nor did the Penn State trustees want to bend their rules and processes for him. But everyone knew he was special, and pretending he wasn't just leaves you with nothing to accomplish but walking out of an 84-year-old man's house with an old, crappy fax machine.

Read the whole thing. It's well worth your time.