“You mean Paterno himself. It didn’t give his school’s team a competitive advantage. (In fact, from what you’ve said it appears the team would have been better off without him.)”
The scandal would have put the team at a disadvantage when it was time for them to recruit. They would have moved from being a first choice to a second choice at best and possibly even an “anywhere but” choice. Paterno may or may not have had saving his job as his first priority but the others clearly acted to protect their cash cow.
Nothing any other team did to help their program is 1/1,000th as contemptable as what Penn State did. The comments by Penn State supporters and officals show clearly that they still don’t understand just how vile the actions of Paterno and the other pedo protectors are. Perhaps if it is quiet in Happy Valley for a decade or so, they will have some time to reflect on why there is so much outrage. And they will stop trying to defend the indefensible. When that day comes, and they rip down the Paterno statues and rip his name off all the buildings. When Penn State students spit on the ground when they here his name, then and only then should they be allowed to field a team.
One thing that puzzles me is why, after the 1998 accusation to the campus police that led to Sandusky’s apparently forced retirement, Paterno and others at the university allowed him to have access to the campus and have an office there. I can understand why self-interest — avoiding a scandal — might influence them to let him retire and fade away quietly. If they really believed he was sodomizing children, though, rather than just involved in inappropriate horseplay, why didn’t they separate themselves more completely from him — if only to protect themselves and the university?
If they had, his later arrest and conviction over a decade later would have been an embarrassment to his former university, but people wouldn’t be talking about tearing down Paterno’s statue and giving the university a death penalty. I haven’t bothered to follow the details of this story, but that sounds to me as if Paterno and the other Penn State authorities thought Sandusky had shown poor judgment, but didn’t really believe he was molesting children.