Penn State could have been anywhere else

Maybe, maybe, all the national attention on the Jerry Sandusky child sex charges and how Penn State officials failed to blow the whistle on him will help someone else down the road.

Maybe it will help survivors of sexual abuse know they aren't alone. Maybe people will be a little quicker to be suspicious and concerned, a little more willing to go to authorities when they know or suspect an adult is molesting a child.

That's not much to cling to when you hear about something so vile, but the torrent of media attention about this story could work for the greater good. Which, by the way, is the primary purpose of journalism.

It's beyond trivial to focus on the athletics part of this story. But this is a sports column and two of the principals in this story are Penn State's former defensive coordinator, and Joe Paterno, its head coach as of the moment this was written.

It puts a searing spotlight on a place called Happy Valley. It's one of the favorite road trips of many college sports media members like myself. It defines picturesque. I was there a month ago. The tailgate scene before the Iowa-Penn State game was like a county fair. Good bands played good music at various locations. There were food vendors. Good times.

The people are nice, the campus is eye-pleasing, the atmosphere is enjoyable. You walk around Penn State, and it just feels like a place that would fill you with pride if you were a student or alum.

But yet ... you drive the couple of miles from the quaint State College commercial airport into the city, and you get overwhelmed by the monolith that is Beaver Stadium. In a town of 42,000 residents and a Penn State student body of about the same size is an erector set on steroids that seats over 107,000 people.

If you were from a foreign country and your first stop in the U.S. was State College (or Ann Arbor, or Tuscaloosa, or Iowa City), you'd ask yourself what a university could possibly need with a stadium of that size. The concept of university sports is different everywhere else in the world than it is in this country.

The more time you spend in State College, the more you realize what a king Paterno is and has been. Someone who commented on another post on this blog stated it better than I ever could when he posted this:

I would describe the people of central Pennsylvania's relationship with Joe Paterno as one that is complicated and eternal. They realized ... that he needs to go and the program needs a new leader, and certainly this only amplifies things. But realize, Joe Paterno put central Pennsylvania on the map, gave this school that is literally in the middle of nowhere almost all of its current identity. ... He is the moral, ethical, cultural and spiritual soul of the place.

Paterno became a genuine national icon, and made Penn State football iconic. Nowhere else, perhaps, could an 84-year-old continue to head a program as vitally important to a state university and an entire region. Now, in the eyes of many, he has failed his school and his legacy by not being more of a whistle-blower on Sandusky. That's a lot for people to digest.

It also goes to show what happens when you make anyone a king, when you put anyone on a pedestal. It brings a lot of pain when you discover they're mortals as capable as anyone of making wrong, even terrible decisions at crucial times.

One more note: Anyone who says such a thing that can't happen here is delusional, no matter where “here” happens to be. Damaged people are capable of heinous acts, and everyone is capable of inaction when the opposite is dearly needed.