[apillar]

Football was Paterno’s life, nothing else mattered or at least nothing mattered near as much, that was most likely the reason he was such a successful coach and ironically what ended up taking him down. His greatest strength also proved to be his greatest weakness and he ended up paying the price for it. I guess if there is a moral to the story it's not to get focused so much on something you love that you lose site of the “big picture” and what's really important in life.

[Charles H. (The_r0nin)]

Football was Paterno’s life, nothing else mattered or at least nothing mattered near as much, that was most likely the reason he was such a successful coach and ironically what ended up taking him down. His greatest strength also proved to be his greatest weakness and he ended up paying the price for it. I guess if there is a moral to the story it's not to get focused so much on something you love that you lose site of the “big picture” and what's really important in life.

It's called a "fatal flaw" and has been a part of drama and literature since the ancient Greeks. Elizabethan drama (including Shakespeare) was especially fond it it as a dramatic device. Macbeth's ambition propels him to glory and then drags him to destruction.

This is the problem with modern society's ignorance of the classics (in part because the liberal mind declares that the past doesn't matter... "they aren't me; I'm different"... the cry of a perpetual adolescent). This feature of humanity has been warned against for millennia... yet we treat it like it is a new discovery...

[dfwgator]

One thing Paterno and Bear Bryant had in common, both were dead within months of the end of their coaching careers.