The Responsibility of Paterno
By With the statue coming down and the Penn State football program getting severe sanctions but not the “death penalty” (both acceptable outcomes to me for reasons it would take another post to get into), I had a couple more points I wanted to make about Paterno. As a springboard I’ll use Rob Neyer’s half-defense of Bill James, which takes the line that I’m regretfully betting that the Posnanski book will take — i.e. Paterno bears some responsibility for Sandusky remaining free for nearly a decade after his sexual assault of a boy in the Penn State locker room was known by several of the most powerful people on campus, but his responsibility has been unfairly exaggerated.
To start with one point I’ve already discussed with respect to James, it’s simply not correct to say that “there is scant evidence that Paterno pressured anyone to keep Sandusky out of jail.” The fact that Curley and Schultz suddenly decided to reverse a decision to report Sandusky after speaking with Paterno is in fact powerful evidence of that Paterno pressured them not to report Sandusky — circumstantial and not dispositive, but powerful. And there’s no reasonable interpretation of these events under which Paterno doesn’t bear very substantial moral responsibility for the failure to do the right thing. As I’ve said, the idea that Schultz and Curley changed their minds over the strong objections of the most powerful person on campus is implausible in the extreme. And there’s no remaining scenario under which Paterno’s actions can be defended. Whether he actively pressured Schultz and Curley or was merely passive and indifferent, his actions were immoral and had foreseeably disastrous consequences for Sandusky’s subsequent victims. And under any version of events, Paterno knew there were credible allegations against Sandusky, he knew his nominal superiors has decided to do nothing, and he remained silent. That’s sufficient to establish his moral culpability.
But despite being too charitable to Paterno on this point, Neyer doesn’t deny that Paterno is in some measure responsible, just that his responsibility has been exaggerated. Here’s the nub of the argument:
Bill’s point, I think, is that … Wait. I shouldn’t make Bill’s point for him. I would probably make the wrong one. So you can decide that for yourself. My point is that a great number of people bear some responsibility for Jerry Sandusky’s crimes, and it’s not clear that Joe Paterno’s at the top of the list.
A long time ago, Bill James wrote somewhere that losing teams tend to focus their frustrations on their best-known players. When you think Penn State, you think Joe Paterno. So it’s natural for everyone to focus their frustrations with Penn State on Paterno. That doesn’t mean it’s appropriate.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Paterno probably deserves some of it. If you take a poll of the public — or just of Our Nation’s Radio Hosts — you’ll probably find that Paterno deserves at least 50 percent of the blame that doesn’t go directly to Jerry Sandusky.
I think it’s lower than 50 percent. Maybe it’s 5 percent. Maybe it’s 45 percent. Either way, the attempts to turn Joe Paterno into some sort of uncaring monster seem to me unfair and misguided.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it. The better way to look at it is that Paterno is 100% responsible for Sandusky being permitted to continue raping boys after 2001 despite credible allegations against him. And Spanier is 100% responsible, and so is Schultz, and so is Curley, and so is McQueary. Any of the five of them could and should have picked up the phone and contacted the proper authorities, and the silence of all five was necessary for Sandusky to remain free. (I think it’s worth noting here that even if McQueary’s reporting of events to his superiors was more vague than it should have been, this doesn’t exonerate anybody else. Nobody was calling for Paterno or Spanier to organize a lynch mob; they should have altered the authorities who would have launched an investigation, not arrested Sandusky on the spot.) All five of these men bore special responsibility in some ways. Paterno was a uniquely powerful and influential figure on campus. Schultz and Curley were legally obligated to report Sandusky. McQueary had less power than the other four but witnessed Sandusky’s crime directly. I’ll grant that Spanier, who had power comparable to Paterno’s, the legal obligations of Schultz and Curley, and went beyond the university’s procedures to ensure Sandusky a generous payout and ongoing access to university facilities after he resigned, was the very worst actor here. But beyond that, I don’t see much point in making distinctions beyond saying they all failed badly.
As for the argument that it’s unfair that Paterno has gotten more attention than some of the others, I have the same reaction that I did when Posnanski first floated it: you can’t get only the good parts of being a celebrity. Paterno obtained a lot of power and wealth because of his fame as a football coach — of course he will get a disproportionate amount of attention when a scandal emerges, and I don’t think that’s unfair. There wasn’t a statue of Graham Spanier on campus. Nobody has been offered a six-figure advance to write a hagiography of Tim Curley. McQueary didn’t get a multi-million dollar payout and use of the Penn State jet when he resigned in disgrace. And Paterno was certainly never shy about promoting his own rectitude or criticizing other coaches for failings — i.e. failures to obey hypocritical and grossly exploitative NCAA rules — that don’t even rise to the level of “trivial” in comparison to what Paterno did. So if he gets more attention for failures he shared with others, boo hoo hoo hoo hoo. And because Paterno was responsible, the “losing teams tend to focus their frustrations on their best-known players” defense won’t wash. Tim Raines wasn’t responsible in any way for the failures of Doug Flynn and Angel Salazar and Pete Rose and Bill Virdon. LeBron James wasn’t responsible for a Cleveland team that wasn’t even competitive without him not winning a championship. Paterno, conversely, isn’t innocent. I’ll listen to arguments that he’s received disproportionate attention for his severe failures as soon as his family gives most of the tens of millions of dollars he made coaching football back.