Joe Paterno needs to resign

It's hard to envision someone at Penn State forcing Joe Paterno into retirement.

One, it hasn't happened yet and the man is 84 (But hey, his team is 5-0 in the Big Ten). Two, it doesn't seem like anyone is really in charge at the university.

But Paterno has to step down. Because the furor over this Jerry Sandusky business won't die down for a long time, and it's only going to get hotter. One can only wonder how many protesters and picketers will show up in State College. And how terribly unfair is it to his current team to force it to live as part of this awful spectacle?

I'm not stating anything that hasn't been said by so many others in the last two days. Paterno didn't do remotely enough when he heard his former defensive coordinator, Sandusky, had molested a boy in the school's Lasch Football Building in 2002. Paterno told athletic director Tim Curley about it, and that was that.

I'd call Curley a (formerly) higher-ranking athletic official than Paterno, but everyone knows that's just a technicality.

Joe: Penn State is going to clean house, so don't put off your exit. Make an immediate handoff to one of your current coordinators. Don't string this along one more minute. The storyline involving your team from now until the season ends will be you, not your players, not their performances. Let the program you turned into an icon keep a little dignity and begin the arduous job of moving into the future. The longer this goes on, the more Penn State football and Penn State University get torn apart. The rebuilding process will be rough enough without making it even harder.

There is nothing to be gained by Paterno staying on the job, and Penn State needs to show the rest of the world it is a place that hasn't totally dismissed the concept of personal responsibility.

Paterno has done so much in his life for others to remember with appreciation. But the longer he coaches this team and drags it (and the rest of the Big Ten and college athletics) through this mess, the more his body of work diminishes.

Fine people sometimes make occasional bad decisions, whether out of loyalty, fear, an inability to grasp the seriousness of a situation, you name it. We're all human beings. None of us press the right button at every key moment in life. But this bad decision by Paterno has lasting consequences, and those who were victimized the most suffered far more than just a fall from grace.