Is McQueary Reliable?

The (now award-winning) journalist Sara Ganim, who has been doing fantastic work on the Penn State sex ed scandal, has an interesting story about the reliability of Mike McQueary’s grand jury testimony. There is plausible evidence that the account he claims to have given his superiors before the grand jury differs from the account he gave them at the time.

If he changed his story before the grand jury, this doesn’t speak well of McQueary. But while some Paterno defenders (such as Bill James behind the paywall) have seized on this, I don’t see how this does much to exculpate Paterno, Schultz, and Curley. As Paul said, even if McQueary gave Paterno the vaguer version it should obviously have been reported to the authorities, particularly since I don’t think there’s the slightest chance that Paterno was unaware of the investigation of Sandusky in 1998 or that it was irrelevant to one of the best defensive coordinators in the country retiring suddenly and prematurely and never getting another football-related job.