>Not sure I agree with that. How many more children were molested because of what Joe and the rest of them could have done but did not do. There’s plenty of blame for a lot of people including Joe.
I would say he did exactly the bare minimum he could get away with doing without putting himself in legal jeopardy. Paterno was one step below Christ at Penn State, if he had wanted Sandusky gone, he would have been gone. One call to the local authorities or the college president saying, "I have a pervert on my staff molesting children in the shower room and I want him locked up now!" and the authorities would have falling all over themselves to help "Joepa".
I suppose we will never know how much blame he really deserves, my general impression is that he was treated something like the President, where his staff kept many of the controversial issues away from him for "plausible deniability". But it was clear he at least knew something about what was going on and choose to treat it like an annoying distraction that could hurt his precious legacy if it went public. The ironic thing is, if he would have went public and done every thing in his power to get rid of Sandusky the day the first allegation surfaced. Not only would we be celebrating him as a great football coach, but as a great person who wasn't afraid to risk his own reputation to take out a child molester. Instead his attempts to protect his legacy ended up destroying it.
Exactly. He had two options: 1) Use every bit of moral and legal authority to fire Sandusky and ensure that university goes full-bore public on the matter, replete with a promise to fully cooperate with ALL investigations on the matter; or 2) Cover it up and roll the dice in the hopes the code of locker-room secrecy holds.
Well, it's quite clear which path he took. Shame on him, and everyone around him who knew.