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UNIVERSITY PARK — Penn State’s 2013 recruiting class lost one of its commitments on Saturday. New Jersey defensive lineman Greg Webb withdrew his oral pledge to attend Penn State in favor of North Carolina. UNC recruiting sites reported Friday that Webb had reopened his recruiting and planned to visit the Tar Heels’ Chapel Hill campus on Saturday. Webb — a 6-foot-1, 295-pound defensive tackle at Timber Creek High School in Sicklerville, N.J. — indeed visited UNC and committed when his high school teammate Dajuan Drennon also committed to the Tar Heels. A four-star recruit by Rivals.com standards, Webb was one...

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — The famed statue of Joe Paterno was taken down from outside the Penn State football stadium Sunday as the NCAA announced it would be issuing sanctions against the university whose top officials were accused in a scathing report of burying child sex abuse allegations against a now-convicted retired assistant. Workers lifted the 7-foot-tall statue off its base and used a forklift to move it into Beaver Stadium as the 100 to 150 students watched, some chanting, "We are Penn State."

The Joe Paterno statue was removed Sunday morning from its pedestal outside Beaver Stadium, and it will be stored in an unnamed "secure location," Penn State president Rodney Erickson announced. Erickson also said the Paterno name will remain on the university's library. Shortly before dawn in State College, Pa., a work crew installed chain-link fences to barricade access to Porter Road outside Beaver Stadium and covered the fence with a blue tarp. The work crew then removed the 7-foot, 900-pound bronze statue by forklift and placed it into the lower level of the stadium. Erickson released his highly sensitive decision...

(CBS News) CBS News has learned that the NCAA will announce what a high-ranking association source called "unprecedented" penalties against both the Penn State University football team and the school. "I've never seen anything like it," the source told correspondent Armen Keteyian. NCAA President Mark Emmert will make the announcement Monday morning at 9 a.m. at the organization's headquarters in Indianapolis. The penalties come in the wake of the independent report by former FBI Director Louis Freeh that chronicled repeated efforts by four top Penn State officials, including former football coach Joe Paterno, to conceal allegations of serial child sex...

<p>STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Penn State University will remove the famed statue of Joe Paterno outside its football stadium, eliminating a key piece of the iconography surrounding the once-sainted football coach accused of burying child sex abuse allegations against a retired assistant.</p>

It's hard to believe that in all the months since the Sandusky scandal broke, and amid all the calls for accountability among Penn State's leadership, that not one member of the university's Board of Trustees had resigned. Now, there comes word from Happy Valley that Steve Garban, who was board president in 2010 and 2011, when everything surrounding this scandal finally came to light, has stepped down after 14 years as a university trustee. In a letter sent today to chairman Karen Peetz, Garban laid out his reasons for stepping down at this time: These past months have been some...

(CNN) -- In a year marred with controversy and national notoriety, Penn State University alumni and boosters finally have something to smile about. In fiscal year 2011-2012, the school earned $208.7 million in donations -- the second-highest annual amount in school history -- according to a release from the Development and Alumni Relations division. Penn State spokesman David LeTorre said the donations "send a loud and distinct message," in what has been a particularly challenging time for the school. "Despite the things that have happened with Jerry Sandusky, Penn State never really lost the support of its alumni," La Torre...

Penn St. leaders passed on reformBy Don Van Natta Jr. | ESPN.com Updated: July 18, 2012, 12:45 PM ET In November 2004, four of Penn State's leaders, including then-president Graham Spanier, sat down at Joe Paterno's kitchen table on a Sunday morning. The men asked the iconic coach to retire. Paterno said no, and that was that. That same month, seven members of Penn State's board of trustees proposed sweeping reforms that would have strengthened the board's oversight power of Spanier and other campus leaders, including Paterno, according to documents obtained this week by "Outside the Lines." The group told...

In a PBS interview broadcast Monday night, NCAA president Mark Emmert refused to take “anything off the table” regarding its possible punishment of Penn State University in the wake of the damning Freeh Report. The results of former FBI director Louis Freeh’s investigation, released last week, concluded that top Penn State officials — including former President Graham Spanier and former head coach Joe Paterno — “repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities” in order to “avoid the consequences of bad publicity.” So the so-called “death penalty” for Penn State football is possible. And though that...

<p>No more sports *PERIOD* for the entire university for 50 years!</p> <p>Seriously. Shut it all down. I'm sick of this BS. I don't even care who is to blame anymore. Paterno, Sandusky, Larry, curley, or moe...I really don't give a sh*t. Fire all current staff and shut it down...from the very tipity top all the way down to the towel boy and the cheerleading squad. I don't give a damn if the problem is only in the football program either. Shut down every goddam sport at Penn state. Bulldoze the sporting complex and plow up the fields. All of it.</p>

Sources close to the Jerry Sandusky case say that three men have come forward and told police that they were abused in the 1970s or 1980s by the convicted pedophile. They are the first men to allege abuse before the 1990s, and if found to be credible, would directly attack the 68-year-old's defense argument that a person doesn't become pedophile in his or her 50s. In the early 1970s, when one of the men says he was abused, Jerry Sandusky would have been in his late 20s. Sandusky was convicted in June of 45 counts of child sex abuse against...

(CNN) -- Vicky Triponey knows all too well the power Penn State's late football coach, Joe Paterno, held for more than half a century over the insular slice of central Pennsylvania that calls itself Happy Valley. She experienced firsthand the clubby, jock-snapping culture, the sense of entitlement, the cloistered existence. It's what drove her five years ago from her job as the vice president who oversaw student discipline. She was told she was too aggressive, too confrontational, that she wasn't fitting in with "the Penn State way." She clashed often with Paterno over who should discipline football players when they...

You're sorry. That's all I want to hear from Penn State today. It's all I want to hear from Joe Paterno's family. It's all I want to hear from Graham Spanier, Tim Curley, Gary Schultz. From the Board of Trustees. From Penn State fans. You're sorry. Why can't you say that? Why haven't any of you said that? The Freeh Report was released Thursday morning, released to much fanfare, though I haven't the foggiest idea why. There was nothing special in the Freeh Report. Nothing we didn't already know. Jerry Sandusky raped kids for years? We knew that -- he...

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — An artist has removed a halo from a mural of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno amid the school's child sex-abuse scandal. Michael Pilato had put a halo over Paterno's image after the beloved coach's death in January, but said he felt he had to remove it Saturday after a report that Paterno, former university president Graham Spanier and others buried allegations of child sex-abuse against ex-assistant Jerry Sandusky. Paterno's family denies the claim.

In N.C.A.A. parlance, “lack of institutional control” is a hazy, almost undefinable term. It is also the organization’s ultimate admonishment, the phrase it utters before handing down its most severe penalties. Now, in light of the child sexual abuse scandal at Penn State, there is some question about whether those nebulous words will be used by the N.C.A.A. to impose serious sanctions on the Nittany Lions football program, perhaps even forcing the team to shut down for a time, the so-called death penalty.

The embattled members of Penn State's Board of Trustees quietly have decided to leave Joe Paterno's statue standing -- at least for now and, some hope, forever, according to sources with firsthand knowledge of the trustees' private discussions this week. The trustees' reluctance to remove the statue is motivated, in part, by a desire not to offend alumni and students who adore the late coach despite the damning findings of his role in the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse cover-up detailed in the Freeh report, the sources said. Some trustees also said in interviews they want to resist being pressured...

I have to say, I’m disappointed and a little concerned by the reaction of some of my freeper friends to the Sandusky / Penn State scandal. Full disclosure: I graduated from PSU in 1970. Am not a member of the Alumni Association, have been back for, maybe, 5 games since 1970. Very much on the periphery of all things Penn State. For the class of ‘70, the JoPa phenomenon (“JoPa” hadn’t even been coined, yet.) hadn’t materialized. Nevertheless, living in Pennsylvania, one could hardly be oblivious to the success of the football team or Paterno’s philosophy. We were happy to...

In January 2011, Joe Paterno learned prosecutors were investigating his longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky for sexually assaulting young boys. Soon, Mr. Paterno had testified before a grand jury, and the rough outlines of what would become a giant scandal had been published in a local newspaper. That same month, Mr. Paterno, the football coach at Penn State, began negotiating with his superiors to amend his contract, with the timing something of a surprise because the contract was not set to expire until the end of 2012, according to university documents and people with knowledge of the discussions. By August,...

They want us to believe Joe Paterno and his title-heavy minions — university president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley and senior vice president Gary Schultz — didn’t fully grasp the depravity of Jerry Sandusky’s perversion. They, Paterno’s remaining apologists, want us to believe JoePa’s and Penn State’s sin had more to do with naivete than vanity. They’re delusional and think we’re stupid.

Penn State plans to renovate the building where Jerry Sandusky sexually molested boys.University spokesman David La Torre said today that Penn State plans to remodel the football shower and locker room area as a direct result of Sandusky’s crimes. The former defensive coordinator was convicted of assaulting some of his victims in the team shower.La Torre said renovation plans to the Lasch Football Building were drawn up shortly after Sandusky’s arrest in November. ------BREAK------ Reminders of the Sandusky child sex abuse scandal — and the senior school officials accused of covering it up — are all over Penn State’s campus...