Paterno and the NCAA
The remarkable story Paul excerpts below really draws a line under Paul’s earlier point about the holier-than-thou sanctimony Paterno showed toward Barry Switzer et al. Switzer’s crimes involved playing fast and loose with NCAA recruiting rules. The exploitative purpose of these rules, of course, is to ensure that beyond a basic scholarship that can be revoked at the pleasure of the coach none of the great wealth generated by the NCAA can go to the players putting themselves at substantial physical risk and their families. And yet, oddly, the Sacred Principles of Amateurism are not violated by coaches stuffing as much money as they can with both hands into their pockets. (If a dime of those millions had gone to his players, of course, Paterno’s legacy would really be tarnished.) And, partly because it’s forbidden to compensate the players, the salaries of NCAA football coaches are disconnected from the free market even by the standards of powerful Americans. Paterno demanding enormous sums of money as a scandal involving actual violent crimes that Paterno actively helped cover up was beginning to engulf the campus, is both an illustration of our corrupt elites and as good an illustration of Taylor Branch’s point as you can find. When NCAA football coaches agree to salaries that don’t exceed the salary of the median associate professor, I’ll listen to arguments about how the Noble Principles of Amateurism demand that players be ruthlessly exploited. (And still reject them, but at least I’ll listen.)
And to follow up on my previous post, as much as I’d like to take credit for a unique insight, I must admit that my interpretation of the Freeh report is trite. Let us turn to the Paper of Record:
Indeed, Mr. Freeh’s investigation makes clear it was Mr. Paterno, long regarded as the single most powerful official at the university, who persuaded the university president and others not to report Mr. Sandusky to the authorities in 2001 after he had violently assaulted another boy in the football showers.
The same conclusion was drawn by Dan Wetzel, and Bruce Feldman, and…you get the idea. It’s what the Freeh report says, and the inferences drawn by the Freeh report are the only reasonable interpretation of the sequence of events established by the emails.
I think the Paterno story deserves to be complicated, just another touch. As Michael Berube pointed out, Joe Paterno did much more for the university (that is, for the actual education/service mission of the university) than the typical college football coach.
The Paterno story, to me, isn’t about a man who was always a worthless, sanctimonious hypocrite whose true self was finally revealed right before he died. I think it’s a much more interesting story than that, and a story that’s significantly more damning of big time college football as an institution.
I think Paterno really was dedicated to the service mission of the university. That’s by far the most elegant explanation of his work to raise money for the library and for endowed chairs.
Rather, Paterno’s story shows how a basically good man could be corrupted by the greed and hypocrisy that characterize big time college football. He bought into the lie that college football was a part of the service mission of the school, and then that college football was actually the most important part of the school’s service mission, and so when it came time to tarnish the name of the institution and the football program in the service of what was right, he couldn’t do it. He believed he was serving a righteous cause in “protecting” the football program because he bought into the big lie of NCAA football, and he had the power to “protect” the program because of the reality of college football as big business and a major generator of revenue.
Oops meant to put this here:
Thanks for this especially the quote from the Paterno Family Professor in Literature, unfortunately it looks like the LGM gang is going the easy route and make this story about how everyone associated with PSU is a member of the Boy Rape Gestapo.
I wouldn’t say that the LGM gang is tarring anybody at PSU who doesn’t thoroughly deserve to be tarred. I also note that the cited op-ed from the Paternal Family Professor in Literature was posted last November, long before the latest round of revelations came out.
I would say that this entire situation illustrates quite nicely what can happen when a coach is given the run of a university without real accountability, regardless of how outwardly virtuous the coach might seem.
My comment was too dickish – the posts here have been great and of course they can write about what they want. But it makes me sad for the 100th straight major scandal people will blame everything on such and such was a moral monster blah blah blah instead of trying to figure out why this shit constantly happens with big institutions.
I think we do know why it happens. And that has certainly been discussed at length on this site.
Start with a big pot of $$$, stir in some big egos and overweaning ambition, add a pinch of misplaced institutional or personal loyalty bordering on cult worship, and brown slowly over a flame of denial.
The only quibble I have is this:
I can’t call a person whose first instinct when confronted with an underling raping children was to cover it up “a basically good man.” At base, man is a lot more corruptible than good. Paterno did good things when doing good things both coincided with his interests (in the hobby sense) and, thanks to his position, was easy.
Sure. People are what they do.
I think that a narrative of Joe Paterno as always and already the man who was going to cover up child rape doesn’t best describe his life. In the end, he did that, and he will be significantly defined by it, but he did lots of other things.
What’s interesting is the story of how Paterno became the man who covered up child rape, and I think that’s a story about the corrupting force of big time college football.
I imagine the story is fairly simple. Paterno finds out about Sandusky, is disgusted, warns him, blah blah blah. But you know, it’s only 1 kid and loyalty and all that garbage. Then he finds out about it again. And again. And at this point he can’t turn Sandusky in without revealing that he knew about multiple cases and chose to cover them up. So really the best thing to do is to set things up so he can’t find out about it.
I don’t think it’s a really complex story. Or even a story about football in particular. It’s about a guy who took a step down the slippery slope and became a moral monster as a result. Of course this also shows that the rhetoric about being a “molder of men” and a “builder of character” is just sanctimonious bullshit. A true moral paragon would not have chosen the easy, selfish, immoral path that he did.
This. It’s fun to try to tie things back to football, but it seems much more plausible to see it as a matter of friendship and power. Paterno and company turned a blind eye to Sandusky once, and then after that they were stuck covering it up or they risked having the scandal blowback on them. They decided to protect their own asses, because they could and because they didn’t give a damn about the victims.
This, too. A good case can be made that football has too much power on campuses like Penn State. But this story is about a kind of corruption that has taken place in plenty of non-sports-related powerful institutions whose leaders are willing to do anything to defend them (see, e.g., the Catholic Church). The exploitation of football players–who put themselves at risk for no compensation–is a much more typical sin of college football. If we’re going to criticize college football, Taylor Branch’s indictment of the NCAA is the place to start.
Just FTR I don’t agree that football per se in any way encouraged Paterno’s behavior. I agree with Popeye, Brien and IB, I just didn’t express it as clearly as they did.
I agree with this. The NCAA has a problem, mostly because it operates a cartel continually violating a host of national labor laws.
But Paterno’s story is about power, egos and the people’s willingness to value their own status and wellfare over what they know to be right and good.
I think that your explanation is probably closer to the truth than the theory that he was always a jerk who was just really good at hiding it. The Penn State program did do things the right way for a long time when a lot of other big time programs weren’t. They did graduate more players, and he did emphasize doing the right things off the field for a long time. This was by no means unique to Penn State, but to do it for decades and still have a program that won a lot of games was worthy of praise.
These weren’t the benevolent good deeds of a saint, of course. There was some self interest involved, and it’s doubtful that Paterno would have been able to run the program the same way if the team had a decade of 2-9 seasons, but if it was so easy to do it, more teams would have followed the example.
There is definitely a corrupting influence of the big money and the focus on winning games by any means necessary. I think it can be simultaneously true that (a) Paterno was never as good of a person as the mythology suggested he was and (b) he did start out as a decent person who wanted to keep the system from becoming too corrupted, but was in fact corrupted by the system, and had bought into his own mythology so much that he thought only he could save the system.
“Rather, Paterno’s story shows how a basically good man could be corrupted by the greed and hypocrisy that characterize big time college football. ”
Sure, that works if you really want to find a way to tie the cause to football specifically. You could just as easily say that he was corrupted by a desire not to see his name and legacy tarnished, and perhaps avoid criminal consequences as well.
Thanks for this especially the quote from the Paterno Family Professor in Literature, unfortunately it looks like the LGM gang is going the easy route and make this story about how everyone associated with PSU is a member of the Boy Rape Gestapo.
I guess there is no way to delete your own comments?
There isn’t, but good on you for asking, and I’ve wished for the same thing myself.
…although Boy Rape Gestapo will be my next band.
I noticed this in the earlier post:
How silly and meaningless. A favorite wingnut fact as it was becoming increasingly clear that no WMDs would be found: George W. Bush never said the words “Iraq is an imminent threat.”
This kind of thing is why I hate big time college athletics. I was at Oklahoma during the Switzer era and saw it first hand.
I was at Nebraska in the Saint Thomas of Osborne Era. I knew people, including the guy I worked for, who claimed they were giving money and gifts to players, but somehow UN never got caught.
What bothers me more than this stuff (who cares other than the NCAA?) is the degree to which Osborne was worshipped.
A typical case of someone who is very good at Exactly One Thing of No Great Importance is put on a pedestal, which is then surrounded by cult members who will die for their messiah rather than admit he’s mortal.
Switzer’s offenses went far beyond recruitung violations. The athletes had a miserable graduation rate (even after 5-6 years) and there was a major scandal after I left when it came to light that many of those who had actually graduated were in fact functionally illiterate. It was also widely rumored, though never proven, that he had a slush fund to pay off victims of sexual and other assaults (a number of the football players were notorious for getting drunk and beating the shit out of people on the weekend).
Wasn’t there also a drug ring that involved one of the QBs? I think Thompson or Cunningham was the name.
Also, TCU (my brother’s alma mater and it has Christian right in the name) recently had a drug ring busted as did the Kansas basketball team.
I know Utah’s football team had a drug ring busted when Jim Fassell coached the team in the 80s
Charles Thompson was the QB/cocaine dealer
I think big-time college football is ancillary at best to the moral corruption at the heart of this story. It could happen, indeed has happened, within many other kinds of institutions. The fact that Joe Paterno was Bernard Law with horn-rimmed glasses speaks only to the corrupting, corroding, and insulating effects that power, money, influence, and intimidation can have on the men and women within a given institution.
The comparison to Law is interesting. I think Law’s brave stand in favor of civil rights while he was in Mississippi in the 60s is far more impressive than anything Paterno has done. On the other hand, Law also covered up for pedophiles to a much greater extent than Paterno did. But that seems like a difference only in degree, whereas Law’s moral courage in Mississippi seems different in kind from any good things Paterno has done.
So, Paterno: worse than Cardinal Law?
It could be the other way around. It could be that big-time athletics attracts people who are corruptible because of their egos and competitiveness.
I tend to think it works both ways.
Rather than reiterate it, I’ll just link to a comment I made some time ago about the execrable NCAA President Mark Emmert, and about how his prioritizing of sports and sports revenue over academics as President of the University Of Washington clearly was an important qualification for his current job.
Dear Robert Caro,
Please stop with LBJ and write a biography of Paterno.
Yours sincerely,
me
He could make, say, Lou Holtz the hero of the first volume!
[...] anyone should know better it’s me, because I just plain don’t trust Power, but I thought Joe Paterno was a good, decent man. And maybe he was overall, but hiding a pedophile makes me want to smack people [...]
I wish he was still alive so he could stand trial.
The financial story is only less appalling than the leadership-failure story only bc the latter is off the Richter scale… I will diasagree though that the NYT is anything to emulate these days, and:
What part of the Freeh report rules out that the initiative to back off came from Curley? Paterno was–as you guys have enumerated so clearly several times-guilty either way, but I wouldn’t want to let Curley off too easily for his own part.
Especially bc he is still around to take to court!
Or are 8 or 9 times the entire budget of the university press which is then closed down to “save money” (see https://www.facebook.com/SaveTheUniversityOfMissouriPress)
Here the Charleston newspaper cites Penn State as a model to follow for the Citadel: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20120714/PC16/120719516