re: #195 erik_t

To me, in some senses the most depressing thing is that even that piece of shit Sandusky didn’t force it to be this way. Nothing would have done more to build Paterno’s reputation in my mind than if he: found out about his national-championship-facilitating defensive coordinator molesting children, threw him out on his ass and into jail, and opened the gates and laid bare everything that had happened and what he would do to prevent it in the future.

Evil people, in some number, hide all around us. Nobody is infallible or omniscient. It’s what you do when you stumble upon that evil that really matters.

And that really is one of the big questions, what was Paterno afraid of such that he’d cover for Sandusky to begin with? Once the cover-up had happened, there was plenty of reason to keep a lid on it, but why start it? Was Penn State up to something that, by turning Sandusky in to the police, would get the NCAA sniffing around? Or was he really so vain that he thought that anything that might tarnish his reputation simply couldn’t be allowed to see the light of day?