Joe Paterno Fired: Dismissing Coach One Small Step Toward Healing

The deed is done.

Mere days after a child sex abuse scandal took over the Penn State football program, word has come out from Happy Valley that longtime head coach Joe Paterno has coached his last game. For all intents and purposes, he has been fired.

The news was first reported by 6ABC News in Philadelphia, specifically by anchor Jim Gardner. His Twitter feed told the tale as simply as it could have been told:

There you have it, folks. One of the most legendary careers in the history of American sports has come to an end. 

This should not come as a shock. As storied as Paterno's career may be, it had to end. Jerry Sandusky, JoePa's former defensive coordinator, has been accused of sexually abusing young boys for over a decade, and Paterno is alleged to have known about it for years. Specifically, JoePa did not go to the police when he learned of a 2002 incident in which Sandusky allegedly sodomized a young boy in the Penn State football locker room showers.

If true, Paterno lived with knowledge of Sandusky's misdeeds for at least nine years. 

Needless to say, this is not how Paterno wanted to go out. It's been apparent for years now that he was going to stay at Penn State as long as he wanted to, but he finally relented and announced that he was going to retire at the end of the season.

That wasn't good enough for the Penn State brass, and rightfully so. The university needed to be purged of all the big names involved in the Sandusky case, and Paterno is one of them. Penn State needed to move along immediately, and it would not have been able to do that had Paterno been allowed to stay.

But Penn State isn't out of the woods yet. This is the kind of scandal that is not going to disappear overnight. It will hang over the university and the football program like a dark cloud for years, and it could very well take decades for Penn State to reclaim its dignity.

Rest assured, Penn State will get to that point. And because it didn't wait to rid itself of Paterno, the university can only get there sooner.