Paterno Gets the Ax

By - Kris Fletcher

What needed to happen finally happened tonight.

Joe Paterno, the man who has known nothing but Nittany Lion football for the last sixty-two years, was fired by the board of trustees amid the growing outrage over how the school has handled child sex abuse allegations against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

Photo by: Gene Puskar

He was fired via telephone no less. A fitting way for his six+ decade tenure at the school to end, given the way they've damage controlled this entire ordeal.

"This university is much larger than its athletic teams," board vice chairman John Surma said following the press conference.

Oh, is it?

I'm sorry, but the only reason anyone knows about Penn State University is because of the football program. And let's face it, Joe Paterno is, or was, the face of said program.

The board didn't remove Paterno for the right reasons, because if that were the case, they would have done it days ago. No, they canned him in an attempt to put out the fire of bad publicity the school has gotten this past week. In doing so, they only made matters worse.

In essence, they've looked like a nittany lion (insert four-letter word +ing here) a football in regards to how they have dealt with this scandal. Still, it never should have come down to this in the first place. Paterno, the board, the university as a whole would have never looked asinine had JoePa just done the right thing back in 2002, and gone to the authorities with the eyewitness information he was given.

But for whatever reason, he didn't. Now, his 409 career wins, his forty-six years as head coach and his two national championships mean next to nothing. His legacy is forever tarnished, and fifty years from now he will be remembered primarily as the guy who allowed boys to be molested on campus during his watch.

I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying it's fact.

No, Paterno never actually saw anything go down, but he was the head honcho at the place it was going down at. He had an AD to answer to, but not really. There can come a time where a coach is bigger than his boss. Bigger than his school. Even bigger than the sport in which he presides over. This was definitely one of those cases.

Photo by: Getty Images

JoePa was the guy really calling the shots, and quite frankly, he earned that right. 75% of his life had been spent associated with the university, so the least they could do was give him some pull. That's why he should have known nearly a decade ago he was the person most obligated to look into the matter he was given knowledge of.

But he didn't.

Sure, he told his "boss," but he should have, and could have done so much more.

Every horror story has a bad guy, and in this case, Paterno's it. Make no mistake about it, what went on at that school right under his nose was nothing short of horrifying. Lives were forever destroyed, and the person who should have done the most to help stop it, did next to nothing.

So yeah. JoePa's the villain. Not for what he did, but for what he didn't do.

I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying it's fact.