Today was another horrible day on top of a horrible year for the Paterno family. Joe Paterno was damned by the Freeh Report, his name was taken off of the Nike Child Development Center, and the Internet has declared war on the Paterno statue.
As they usually do, the Paterno's were quick to respond this morning after the release of the Freeh Report. But that wasn't enough. A little over an hour ago, Jay Paterno went on Sports Center to discuss his opinions of the Freeh Report and uphold his family's honor... He probably shouldn't have done that.
The Board of Trustees has a regularly scheduled meeting in Scranton today and Friday, but they had a great deal more to talk about than at an ordinary meeting. With the Freeh report released this morning, having met and read through the details of the report, the Board addressed the media at 3:30 p.m. today.
Nike has made the decision to remove Joe Paterno's name from its Child Development Center in Beaverton, Oregon.
The key figures in the report are Graham Spanier, Joe Paterno, Gary Schultz, and Tim Curley. And it appears that they had a tremendous amount of confidence in themselves to effectively contain the situation. But what is clear is that their final motivations were not that something deeply wrong had occurred, but instead that they must save the image of Penn State football and preserve it as it was known before 2011.
The release of Thursday morning’s Freeh report further exposed the pathetic institutional failings of Penn State University in regards to the actions of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. Chapter 8 of the 267 page report offers in full detail Penn State’s failure to implement and properly train their staff on the inner workings of the Clery Act, a federal statute that requires Universities to collect crime statistics on University property.
Earlier this afternoon, Fight on State (@FightOnState) released a column written by Joe Paterno in "late December or early January" that addresses the Sandusky situation. The column was sent to former Penn State football players this morning, and touts Penn State's tradition of academic and athletic excellence, regardless of what may have occurred internally with the Sandusky scandal.