Jerry Sandusky Sex Scandal: Why Nittany Lions Will Protect Joe Paterno

Are you buckled in and ready for the P.R. spin cycle?

The Penn State sex scandal has already cost two men their jobs, and more are to come.

Media outlets around the country are calling for football coach Joe Paterno to be the next one to go in the worst college football scandal of the past decade.

Paterno released a statement, which essentially told everyone that he was told of the incident in the PSU showers in 2002, and went straight to the athletic director.

But people want more. They want more accountability for the most prominent state employee of Pennsylvania.

Yet Penn State is going to protect the coach with the most wins in the history of college football until the end.

They have defended him for years against critics that say the 84-year-old is too old to handle the rigors of a high-profile college football program.

The athletic department will continue to remind you that their 409-136-3 coach is a man of the utmost integrity. They will remind you of all of the outstanding success stories, all of his former players who have his back.

This is a good guy, no question about it. Deadspin scribe Drew Magary talks about how difficult of a decision Paterno was faced with on that faithful day in 2002:

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Sandusky was Paterno's colleague (and one would assume friend) for over three decades. So imagine someone coming up to you and telling you that your friend of 30 years was raping a kid in the shower. Would you believe it? Would you want to believe it? Probably not the first time you hear it. Would you go to the police? What if the grad assistant was wrong and your friend's life is ruined because of a misunderstanding? You might not even want to explore the matter further because you can't tolerate the idea of someone you trusted doing such monstrous things.

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It’s such a hard topic to debate because of the gray area involved. Legally, Paterno was right in informing his A.D. right away. He did his job…technically.

When you don’t ensure that the local police know about this, and just merely go about your day, you have to seriously question his ethical standards—something he has been preaching for half of a century to college kids.

One lapse of judgment shouldn’t make you completely change the way you think about Paterno. He wasn’t the guy committing these heinous acts.

Yet don’t buy the spin-machine that the athletic department is going to place on this. Paterno committed a fireable offense by letting crimes that impacted dozens of lives get swept under the rug.

This scandal is too big, too gruesome and too corrupt to let Paterno escape, but Penn State is going to do everything in its power to try.