The Verdict is In: What to Make of the ‘Legendary’ Nittany Lion’s Legacy

Opinion, Team FYN Sports

The Penn State Nittany Lions’ football team received the news today that it had been dreading for months, as NCAA president Mark Emmert handed down several penalties to the program because of the sickening Jerry Sandusky scandal, penalties which include a $60 million fine (money which will go to help child abuse victims), a four year bowl ban, a reduction of 80 scholarships over the next four years, and the vacation of all of Penn State’s wins from the 1998 season all the way up to today.

The penalties greatly hinder a school that was once looked upon as the example of class and dignity in the world of college football and will more than likely mean it’s disappearance from being a power in the sport for at least the next five years, probably even the next decade. Although these sanctions don’t even come anywhere close to making up for the pain and suffering that Sandusky’s victims have endured over the past thirty years, I would like to take a closer look at what exactly they mean. While the situation is damaging to so many people associated with Penn State, including current players, who now have the option to transfer immediately to leave the messy situation, and new head coach Bill O’Brien, who left a cushy job running the offense for the New England Patriots to take over a team that was expected to be hurting but not at this magnitude, the person whose image this hurts the most is the man who meant the most to the university, the same man whose statue caused a bit of an uproar on Sunday when it was removed: the late Joe Paterno.
If there has ever been such a sudden 180 turn in regards to a person’s perception by the public as the one Paterno has had in the last year, I’ve never heard of it. Paterno was the essence of clean in his forty-six year run as Nittany Lions head coach, yet in the last six months of his life and the time since it has been made painfully clear that he was as dirty as they come in the world of sports. Penn State had for so long been the type of school that moms and dads everywhere hoped and prayed their sons would attend in order to get both a quality education and a chance to hit the field as a Nittany Lion, but the revelations made in the Freeh Report make it obvious that things were not as they seemed behind closed doors.

Paterno’s ouster as Penn State football coach back in November was compared to the Greek tragedies that Paterno loved so much by many different sportscasters across the country, but in hindsight everything we now know makes it look like he would have in fact been very well-suited to play a part on stage, just as he did with the media for so long.

“It’s unbelievable to think that kind of corruption came right from the top of the power structure,”

Paterno said concerning the SMU scandal that landed the Mustangs the “death penalty” back in the ‘80s. Back then, this quote looked sincere, a statement from a man that ran a team and ran it the right way. Fast-forward to today, and it looks more and more like what Paterno found to be ‘unbelievable’ wasn’t SMU’s wrongdoings, but the fact that they were foolish enough to not keep their transactions concealed.

In closing, I would like to make a comparison between Paterno and a line from the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy. In the second film The Dark Knight, Gotham district attorney Harvey Dent states that

“you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

While Joe Paterno may have died a hero to many of those who root for Nittany Lions back when he passed away in January, his legacy is still alive and well, and it has revealed itself to be one that would be better off forgotten.

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