Penn State Story's Not About Joe Paterno (or Jerry Sandusky), It's About Victims

"I was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won't get it from you. I wish I were dead."

That is a quote that former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky said to the mother of "Victim 6" during a telephone conversation, according to a 23-page Grand Jury presentation released this week.

"I wish I were dead."

You're not the only one.

After reading through the Grand Jury document, that's the only thought that goes through my head. The world would be a better place if people like that did not exist.

That quote, by the way, was from 1998, three years before a Penn State graduate assistant saw Sandusky reportedly having sex in the Penn State locker-room shower with a 10-year old boy. 

That incident reportedly occurred in 2002. The graduate assistant reportedly told Joe Paterno, who reportedly told athletic director Tim Curley. Nearly 10 years later, this is finally being reported.

The quote that has everyone talking is from Paterno's official statement on the matter:

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"If this is true we were all fooled, along with scores of professionals trained in such things, and we grieve for the victims and their families."

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Look, nobody who is covering this news story or giving an opinion on the situation actually wants to be doing this. Most sportswriters are focusing on the Paterno angle because it's the most tangentially related to sports. Debating whether or not a coach should be fired is something we do all the time, even if the circumstances are different in this case.

Even those of us writing that angle know that this is not actually a story about whether or not Paterno should be fired. Paterno had to know what was going on with Sandusky. It's his job, as the CEO of Penn State football, to know what was going on in the lives of everyone on his staff and, especially, to know what was going on inside his football complex.

If Paterno knew what was going on and helped cover it up, he should go to jail. If he, as the statement indicates, was "fooled, along with scores of professionals trained in such things," he should still be held accountable in some way.

Plausible deniability is no defense in a situation like this, especially when it happens in your building.

The story has obviously sent shockwaves through State College this weekend, with University senior VP Gary Schultz stepping down among allegations that he helped cover up the situation for Sandusky, perjuring himself in the process. Curley has taken an administrative leave amid the same allegations. He has not been fired, yet, and did not resign. People clamoring for Curley's job today will not have to wait long. The "administrative leave," while completely cowardly on the part of both Curley and Penn State, is certainly just a way to buy time while a settlement is reached on his contract. It's over for him.

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We often hear that the cover-up is worse than the crime. This is not one of those cases. There are few things the brain can even fathom that are worse than what Sandusky has been accused of doing to boys as young as eight years old. 

Let's remember that when we make the story about Joe Paterno.

Paterno's team is 8-1 on the season, 5-0 in the Leaders Division of the Big Ten. Penn State could go to a BCS game this season and Joe Paterno could retire after that game, and people will look at him as the winningest coach of all time and one of the greats of the game. That will be Paterno's legacy, no matter what comes of this Sandusky situation.

The fact is, Paterno washed his hands with the situation nearly 10 years ago by reporting what he heard from a shaken graduate assistant to the University and doing no follow-up on his own because Sandusky wasn't a coach anymore. How that impacts his job status now will be up to a board of trustees and university staff that have a gigantic public relations nightmare on their hands.

While they need to figure out how to handle Paterno's inevitable retirement in the right way—announcing it now is not the right way, but I can't see them going past this year with Paterno at the helm. Having said that, no amount of public pressure is going to decide that for them right away. 

So as much as this has understandably become about Joe Paterno in sports media, we need to remember that the story isn't really about him. This story should not be about Penn State Football or Tim Curley, either.

This story should be about Victim 1 and Victim 2 and Victim 3 and Victim 4 and Victim 5 and Victim 6 and Victim 7 and Victim 8 and the other victims that Sandusky allegedly sexually assaulted and abused during his life. There could be dozens of victims. This story is about them.

This is all still new to us. We just found that a man who had dedicated his career to molding young lives, many of them foster children with little family support, has been accused of doing the most disgusting things imaginable.

But those boys, now young men, have known about him for years. They've had to live with this for years. There's no way to undo what has been done to them.

The public has just learned who (allegedly) Jerry Sandusky really is. This is not a story about a football coach. This is a story about a monster living among us. Let's not forget that, because his victims never will.

You can listen to my podcast with Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports where we discuss the recent Penn State sex scandal revelations: