Joe Paterno – the _

[2569] Historical revisionism and NCAA’s pretension

What Jerry Sandusky did was wrong. Although I am sympathetic of Joe Paterno, his failure to report Sandusky is a grave moral lapse. Sandusky deserves to be punished, and so too Paterno.

But I ultimately think the punishment meted against Paterno and Pennsylvania State University is just too much. I agree with an opinion at UMGoBlog.com that the NCAA has stepped out of their authority to punish Penn State.

But out of all things, what I find most distasteful now is the attempt at historical revisionism.

There are several cases of revisionism. One was the removal of halo from a painting depicting Paterno. Second was the removal of a statue of Paterno. This appears to have caused a lot of grief among the students there. Three, the worst of all lot, is the stripping of wins by Paterno from 1998 and 2011. All those 112 wins and two Big Ten championships. With the stripping, officially, Paterno is no longer the winningest college football coach in NCAA history.

So, suddenly, all those wins mean nothing. The 2005 and 2008 championships are vacated and oh, to make it better, Ohio State University is now the sole champion for the respective year.

One just cannot lose a conference championship just like that and much less two.

You might as well remove all, statues, of, lion, at Penn State. Let us pretend that Penn State does not exist.

But people were there and they saw it. All the Big Ten school alums who watch football know what they saw. I remember Paterno. The wins did happen.

As somebody mentioned it on Twitter earlier, the stripping is a case of NCAA pretending that the wins did not happen.

Official NCAA record does a shit job at recording history. And right now, the unofficial history is the truth.

[2492] The unfairness of it all; goodbye JoePa

Saturday football was always fun during college days. Every morning I would listen to the radio, watched television in the common room, visited a friend’s room to watch football (sometimes, I would take the bus all the way to North Compus or even sleepover the night before) or during my senior year, watched the game at the stadium in full school colors. Michigan was at the top of the world and it was easy for my friends and I to laugh at other god-awful teams. One of the teams was Penn State and Joe Paterno was the coach there, as he was for the longest time until recently. Paterno was Penn State.

The Littany Lions were doing so bad that fans were calling for his head. I remember this so clearly. On TV, a fan held up a poster, urging the Penn State to fire him. At that time, I stopped cracking jokes about Paterno, and starting to feel pity for him. For all he had done for Penn State, I felt it was unfair to ask so, so unceremoniously. He survived the tough time, unlike Michigan’s Rich Rodriguez, and went on to reinstate some respectability in the football program at Happy Valley.

For that and more, he deserved respect. This was the winningest coach in college football history. That fact alone demands respect.

It is obvious that not everybody agrees with that. Amid a sex abuse scandal involving his staff (not Paterno himself), Penn State fired Paterno. The administration fired him because the university thought he had not done enough.

Maybe there was an ethical error on his behalf. He should have reported it to the police, instead of informing what he knew of merely to his superiors.

Regardless, I thought it was unfair the way he was fired. Somehow, I thought he was the scapegoat.

It must have been hard on him. When you coach at the same place for 40 uninterrupted years, the place just stops being the place where you work. It will be your life. Imagine how Paterno felt when he was fired. Already suffering from cancer, the firing must have made it all worse.

Paterno died today. The knife that drove through his heart was not cancer. It could not have been. It must have been unfairness.