It’s a very confusing and stunning episode - that we’ll now think of Paterno totally differently than we have all assumed we would think of him for the past several decades.
On one extreme are those who think he’s just as guilty as Sandusky - and on the other are those who want to saint him.
I have no doubt that he really could not process what McQueary was telling him. I am sure that whole scene was totally foreign to him. And yet, rumors are that Sandusky’s proclivities were an open secret in State College. (I cannot deny or verify this).
So -The truth is probably something along the lines of the fact that he held onto a job longer than he should have for a number of reasons - and that part of this motivation for keeping quiet was to protect Penn State football - which is a very poor reason.
I feel for the victims of Sandusky, and for the family of Paterno.
Definitely verified by a friend who has many friends in and around the program (or at least he did during the era in question). Which begets another question...why didn't anyone act on it even before the McQueary incident?
Paterno was surely not so virgin-eyed or -eared that he hadn’t heard stories of the buggery of the navies of old, or read it in the bible, or heard it warned about from a pulpit?
Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.