Around the Big Ten

[Dr. Strangelove]

No doubt. Only question is if they woulda charged him with 2nd or 1st degree murder

[THE_WIZARD_]

Jay was just saying what the PSU lawyers told him to say...so given that he should have just declined to be interviewed. Short of coming on and apologizing on Joe's behalf for the hurt that has been caused he had nothing to gain in the way of good PR. But of course with the plethora of impending lawsuits he couldn't say that.

[Tony G]

Pac-12/Big Ten model falls apart


Updated: July 13, 2012, 12:56 PM ET
By Adam Rittenberg | ESPN.com

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The scheduling partnership between the Pac-12 and Big Ten won't happen after all.
The conferences said Friday that their agreement, announced in December and set to begin in 2017, has been called off because of football scheduling issues involving several Pac-12 schools. A round-robin football schedule, featuring 12 games per year between Big Ten and Pac-12 teams, had been the cornerstone of the pact, although it also included elements involving other sports and the two leagues' television networks.
Rittenberg: Disappointing, Mostly For Fans

The Big Ten's scheduling partnership with the Pac-12 isn't happening after all, and the fans of both leagues will pay the price. Adam Rittenberg looks at the timeline of the failed plan. Blog
• Miller: Big letdown in Pac-12 country


"We are disappointed to announce today that the Big Ten/Pac-12 strategic collaboration announced jointly in December 2011 unfortunately will not be consummated," Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany said in a statement. "We recently learned from Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott that the complications associated with coordinating a nonconference football schedule for 24 teams across two conferences proved to be too difficult. Those complications, among other things, included the Pac-12's nine-game conference schedule and previous nonconference commitments.
"A great effort was made by both conference staffs to create football schedules that would address the variety of complexities, but in the end, we were just not able to do so. While everyone at the Big Ten is disappointed by the news, we look forward to continuing the historic partnership that we have with the Pac-12 and to working together on other matters in the future."
ESPN.com has learned that the Pac-12 approached the Big Ten in March and said several of its members had reservations about a mandatory scheduling agreement. The main problem: the Pac-12 currently plays nine league games per season, while the Big Ten plays only eight. Pac-12 members such as USC and Stanford, who both also have annual games against Notre Dame, would have added a Big Ten opponent to an already taxing slate. Other Pac-12 schools have regular scheduling agreements with opponents outside the league, such as Utah-BYU.
The leagues worked on several models, including an initial agreement featuring 10 or 11 games a year in 2017-20 with the idea to eventually reach 12. Another proposal called for six Big Ten/Pac-12 matchups annually, so each team would appear every other year. All Big Ten schools were on board with the collaboration, even though some, like Ohio State, could not begin participating until after 2017.
At least four Pac-12 schools ultimately decided they would not accept mandatory scheduling, ESPN.com has learned. One proposal called for eight matchups per year, featuring the willing Pac-12 schools, but the Big Ten wanted a complete collaboration or none at all.
With the Pac-12 agreement dead, the Big Ten will consider increasing its conference games per year from eight to nine, ESPN.com has learned. The league announced a move to nine league games in August but decided to remain at eight after the Pac-12 agreement surfaced. Several Big Ten/Pac-12 matchups already have been scheduled in advance of the 2017 start date, such as Michigan State vs. Oregon, Michigan vs. Utah and Northwestern vs. Stanford.
The Big Ten also could consider exploring a scheduling agreement

[Mackenzie]

I guess this is the first time I've actually seen the letter that I'm guessing has been alluded to in some of the news reports, commentaries, regarding the PSU situation.

http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/public/ncaa/pdfs/2012/ncaa+statement

[entropy]

This is from Dan Wetzel.

He wasn't taking illiterate Third World children and getting them to Harvard. Almost every person Paterno positively impacted through football would have fared similarly had Penn State not even fielded a team. They just would have played elsewhere. Bo Schembechler or Lou Holtz or Bobby Bowden would've coached them up in football and life, just like Paterno did.
Conversely, the kids that Jerry Sandusky tricked, molested and damaged wouldn't have lived the same life had Paterno done the right thing. They were attacked, out of nowhere. Without fault. Without provocation. Without the opportunity to create their own destiny.
The lives of these kids were profoundly and forever destroyed because of the actions of Sandusky, Spanier, Schultz, Curley and, yes, Joe Paterno.
There could never be enough victories, enough perfect graduation rates, enough national championships to justify that.
Joe Paterno was a great influence on men who were already likely to live great lives, men who could help him win football games.
He was a failure to those Second Mile boys who had no such talents, no such opportunity, no parade of recruiters looking to offer them scholarships. He turned his back on the very kids that were desperate for the kind of hero that Joe Paterno's former legacy claimed he was all about.

[hack]

Bo Schembechler or Lou Holtz or Bobby Bowden would've coached them up in football and life, just like Paterno did.


AND Jim Tressell.

[JRB]

Matt Millen is a world class idiot. He says he's not sure how big of an impact this scandal will have on JoePa's legacy? He simply is not an intelligent person.

It's entirely possible that Matt Millen is not intelligent, but I'm going to defend him a bit on this point. We can't know exactly how this matter will be perceived 20, 30 years from now, which is when Paterno's "legacy" will be all that we and Penn State have of him. Never underestimate people's ability to institutionalize nostalgia-- think of the numerous presidential administrations that ended mired in scandal but are now looked back on with fondness and admiration. Saying you don't know exactly how Paterno's entire tenure will be perceived by others in the future is an act of humility, not stupidity. This is not to defend or minimize the failures of Penn State's leaders in this matter. The Freeh report, if anything, makes those failures virtually impossible to accept or excuse. I don't think Millen was attempting to excuse anybody, though he did struggle to make his points, so I can see how somebody else would interpret his appearance differently.

If I have an issue with Matt Millen's appearance on ESPN yesterday, it's with ESPN's decision to put him on the air in that situation in the first place. He's simply too close to the institution and the people in question to render objective analysis. Put it this way: could you find out that someone you'd known for 30 years had committed the most heinous crimes imaginable, then learn that someone you considered a second father had helped to allow those crimes to continue, and then comment on the matter for a national TV audience-- an audience that would include people involved in the case that you've known for most of your life? I don't think I could.

[entropy]

*************************************************
JIM LITKE: Paterno loses the benefit of the doubt

By JIM LITKE AP Sports Columnist

There is no benefit of the doubt any longer because, well, because there should no longer be any doubt.

Joe Paterno called his failure to do more to stop Jerry Sandusky's serial child abuse "one of the great sorrows of my life." When he made that statement last November, there was an exemplary lifetime's worth of reasons to accept the man at his word, accomplishments piled one atop another that had nothing to do with football and everything to do with the values for which his former players revere Paterno to this day.

Up until Thursday, I believed it still.

JoePa's flaw seemed to be that in this case he did his job and no more.

Instead, Paterno's real sin turns out to be how much he had to do — avert his eyes, hold his nose, bite his lip over and over — while his once-trusted assistant and heir apparent continued victimizing kids in plain sight for a decade and more. Paterno's complicity, his leadership role, really, among the gang of four atop the Penn State administration, leaps off the page time and again in a report prepared for the board of trustees by former FBI director Louis Freeh and released Thursday.

Freeh acknowledged that in instances where investigators couldn't obtain witnesses or original materials, they looked at all the available evidence, applied their experience and judgment and arrived at "reasonable" conclusions. Some people, beginning with Paterno's family, have argued with conviction that such a standard sets the bar too low. Sad to say — especially from those of us who pleaded against a rush to judgment — but in a story from which the word "reasonable" has largely been absent, nearly every one of those conclusions rings true.

The most important of those arrives on page 48. It's the one that puts the lie to so much of what he would say after the scope of the scandal spilled into the public.

Contrary to Paterno's claims — including his testimony before a grand jury — it becomes clear that he was aware of a 1998 investigation of Sandusky by law-enforcement authorities that failed to result in charges. In an email titled "Joe Paterno," athletic director Tim Curley wrote the following to Gary Schultz, the university's vice president of business and finance, and Penn State president Graham Spanier:

"I have touched base with the coach," Curley informed his colleagues. "Keep us posted. Thanks."

The next three pages contain several more email requests from Curley for an update: "Coach is anxious to know where it stands," he wrote.

It takes another 120 pages or so to complete Paterno's transformation from interested observer to willful, out-of-touch tyrant. That moment, too, is revealed in another of Curley's emails, this one in 2001, after assistant coach Mike McQueary witnessed Sandusky and a boy naked in a shower at the football complex and told Paterno at his home the following morning.

The coach listens to the report and did as he was required, eventually notifying his superior. Paterno passed the immediate legal test, but not the ethical one. Worse, he would maintain until his death that his involvement ended there. In truth, it only deepened.

Soon after the incident, Curley, Schultz and Spanier decided to go ahead and report Sandusky to the state Department of Child Welfare, then abruptly abandoned the plan. Curley said in an email that his change of heart came about "after giving it more thought and talking it over with Joe."

Paterno could be as persuasive as he wanted whenever he wanted to be. Signs of Paterno's influence at Penn State well beyond the football program bubble up repeatedly in the rest of the report as well as all over the campus, and just as importantly, anytime you ask those who were around him for any length of time. They talk about learning lessons in accountability that were taught by example instead of slogans scribbled on a blackboard.

Remember both those things for as long the debate over his legacy rages, and that a halo, lowered just a foot or so, becomes a noose. Paterno had vices every bit as outsized as his virtues. He was capable of both great sacrifice and great selfishness, careful to nurture each and every individual who helped him build a great institution and protective, to the point of ruthlessness, about preserving it.

If Thursday's report succeeded in making him look a whole lot less admirable, the consolation is that it made him seem a whole lot more human.

[entropy]

The sins of the father
Rick Reilly [ARCHIVE]

ESPN.com | July 13, 2012
What a fool I was.

In 1986, I spent a week in State College, Pa., researching a 10-page Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year piece on Joe Paterno.

It was supposed to be a secret, but one night the phone in my hotel room rang. It was a Penn State professor, calling out of the blue.

"Are you here to take part in hagiography?" he said.

"What's hagiography?" I asked.

"The study of saints," he said. "You're going to be just like the rest, aren't you? You're going to make Paterno out to be a saint. You don't know him. He'll do anything to win. What you media are doing is dangerous."

Jealous egghead, I figured.

What an idiot I was. Twenty-five years later, when former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was accused of a 15-year reign of pedophilia on young boys, I thought Paterno was too old and too addled to understand, too grandfatherly and Catholic to get that Sandusky was committing grisly crimes using Paterno's own football program as bait.

But I was wrong. Paterno knew. He knew all about it. He'd known for years. He knew and he followed it vigilantly.

That's all clear now after Penn State's own investigator, former FBI director Louis Freeh, came out Thursday and hung the whole disgusting canvas on a wall for us. Showed us the emails, read us the interviews, shined a black light on all of the lies they left behind. It cost $6.5 million and took eight months and the truth it uncovered was 100 times uglier than the bills.

Paterno knew about a mother's cry that Sandusky had molested her son in 1998. Later, Paterno lied to a grand jury and said he didn't. Paterno and university president Graham Spanier and vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley all knew what kind of sick coach they had on the payroll in Sandusky. Schultz warned them. "Is this opening of pandora's box?" he wrote them in emails. "Other children?" "Sexual improprieties?"

It gets worse. According to Freeh, Spanier, Schultz and Curley were set to call child services on Sandusky in February 2001 until Paterno apparently talked them out of it. Curley wasn't "comfortable" going to child services after that talk with JoePa.

Yeah, that's the most important thing, your comfort.

What'd they do instead? Alerted nobody. Called nobody. And let Sandusky keep leading his horrific tours around campus. "Hey, want to see the showers?" That sentence alone ought to bring down the statue.

What a stooge I was.

I talked about Paterno's "true legacy" in all of this. Here's his true legacy: Paterno let a child molester go when he could've stopped him. He let him go and then lied to cover his sinister tracks. He let a rapist go to save his own recruiting successes and fundraising pitches and big-fish-small-pond hide.

Here's a legacy for you. Paterno's cowardice and ego and fears allowed Sandusky to molest at least eight more boys in the years after that 1998 incident -- Victims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10. Just to recap: By not acting, a grown man failed to protect eight boys from years of molestation, abuse and self-loathing, all to save his program the embarrassment. The mother of Victim 1 is "filled with hatred toward Joe Paterno," the victim's lawyer says. "She just hates him, and reviles him." Can you blame her?

What a sap I was.

I hope Penn State loses civil suits until the walls of the accounting office cave in. I hope that Spanier, Schultz and Curley go to prison for perjury. I hope the NCAA gives Penn State the death penalty it most richly deserves. The worst scandal in college football history deserves the worst penalty the NCAA can give. They gave it to SMU for winning without regard for morals. They should give it to Penn State for the same thing. The only difference is, at Penn State they didn't pay for it with Corvettes. They paid for it with lives.

What a chump I was.

I tweeted that, yes, Paterno should be fired, but that he was, overall, "a good and decent man." I was wrong. Good and decent men don't do what Paterno did. Good and decent men protect kids, not rapists. And to think Paterno comes from "father" in Italian.

This throws a can of black paint on anything anybody tells me about Paterno from here on in. "No NCAA violations in all those years." I believe it. He was great at hiding stuff. "He gave $4 million to the library." In exchange for what? "He cared about kids away from the football field." No, he didn't. Not all of them. Not when it really mattered.

What a tool I was.

As Joe Paterno lay dying, I actually felt sorry for him. Little did I know he was taking all of his dirty secrets to the grave. Nine days before he died, he had The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins in his kitchen. He could've admitted it then. Could've tried a simple "I'm sorry." But he didn't. Instead, he just lied deeper. Right to her face. Right to all of our faces.

That professor was right, all those years ago. I was engaging in hagiography. So was that school. So was that town. It was dangerous. Turns out it builds monsters.

Not all of them ended up in prison.

[Tony G]

If I have an issue with Matt Millen's appearance on ESPN yesterday, it's with ESPN's decision to put him on the air in that situation in the first place. He's simply too close to the institution and the people in question to render objective analysis. Put it this way: could you find out that someone you'd known for 30 years had committed the most heinous crimes imaginable, then learn that someone you considered a second father had helped to allow those crimes to continue, and then comment on the matter for a national TV audience-- an audience that would include people involved in the case that you've known for most of your life? I don't think I could.

I agree with JRB on this. Millen is too close to someone who has been central figure in his life. Millen is not an idiot for his feelings on this. He IS an idiot for not realizing he's so close to this he can't be objective.

Put it on the other side of the equation. If this had been Bo or Lloyd most of the U-M nation would be struggling to come to grips with how someone so beloved and revered could do this.

I'm willing to give his former players a pass right now while they process this mess.

[JRB]

Now that I've read most of the Freeh report, I'm even more sickened by this case than I was when it first came to light. I said for years on message boards and in private conversations that if I had a kid that had the desire and ability to play Division I college football, I'd want him to play for Joe Paterno. I would maintain that for much of my adult life, this would have been a defensible statement, but Paterno's actions in this case, as alleged in the Freeh report, render my earlier opinion completely wrongheaded. There is no way four adults charged to varying degrees with the protection and education of young people should have reached the conclusions they did when confronted with this evidence. It is particularly saddening to contemplate that Joe Paterno's death in January may have saved him from criminal charges(though it's certainly considerably less saddening than thinking about what happened to any of Jerry Sandusky's victims). Anyone working in a human services field knows to report this sort of allegation immediately, and that there are severe consequences for failing to do so. Those consequences don't end with the individual that fails to make the report, either. A physician can lose to license to practice, and thus his ability to employ a staff. An agency can lose contracts or the ability to contract with the state. This sort of failure, in short, can put you out of business permanently.

This is the situation now facing Penn State-- we're past the point of concern with individual legacies, and are looking at an existential threat to an institution. At the beginning of this awful story, I thought there was little chance of the NCAA stepping in, and part of me still thinks it's best left to the courts to mete out punishment here. But the NCAA has to look at the possibility of establishing a necessary precedent. Institutions, as a rule, love to protect their prerogatives to act. Let's say, five years from now, an assistant coach at a program is discovered to be a drug dealer, and it is further discovered that his superiors knew all about his conduct and looked the other way. In this scenario, does the NCAA want to be confronted with the precedent of not having acted in the Sandusky case? Isn't the Sandusky case about the most nightmarish case of lack of institutional control you can imagine? I think the NCAA has to address this in a substantive manner, and I think they will. It may not add up to a death penalty sanction, but as unfair as it would be to the players, fans, and current coaches at Penn State, I couldn't argue against an imposed suspension of Penn State football. The failures of institutional control here were so egregious, and the human cost so horrific, that you could argue any NCAA penalty is superfluous, but the NCAA may have to hand down severe penalties just to protect its credibility.

So there's the possibility of NCAA sanctions. Add to them a likely Department of Education investigation of Clery Act violations(which would seem to be an open-and-shut case) and a potential Title IX lawsuit that would jeopardize the school's federal funding, and it becomes clear that we are a long way from being able to discern the full impact of the Jerry Sandusky case on Penn State University. We are in uncharted waters here-- disaster has already struck, and the potential for further lasting damage remains very high.

[Tony G]

I read today PSU is facing up to 100 million dollars in settlements as well as loss of Federal funding.

BTW, I disagree with using Title IX to go after them here.

[entropy]

How about 14 years (1998 to 2012) of probation with scholarships reduced for each victim.

[Tony G]

Oh and just my two cents but this is a civil and criminal case. If a college coach gets drunk at work, takes a school vehicle and kills someone, then it's not an issue for the NCAA. That's what the courts are for. Even if the AD and Pres knew the coach had a drinking problem, it's still not an issue for the NCAA. The school bears the liability for the employee's actions, not the NCAA. (who knows though, the NCAA might get hit with a shotgun lawsuit out of this yet)

[JRB]

Here's a legal argument on behalf of Title IX action against Penn State:

http://verdict.justia.com/2011/11/14/the-penn-state-scandal-why-is-no-one-talking-about-title-ix

The professors make a pretty convincing case that Title IX is applicable here, based on existing case law. Penn State's long-term functional indifference to the allegations against Sandusky would be the key element against the university in such a case, according to this argument.