There were two football games last weekend involving two programs who are going through two scandals of two different kinds, in two different states, and in two different conferences.
The first is Penn State, which has been in an ongoing controversy about Joe Paterno and the way the coach who won 409 football games for the Nittany Lions handled the fact that his longtime defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was molesting children on the Penn State campus, starting perhaps as early as 1976.
For some incredibly tone deaf and stupid reason, Penn State chose to honor the late Paterno at Saturday’s game against Temple. The presumed goal of this tribute was to remind everyone of the good things Joe Paterno did, like donating to the school library, making sure his athletes graduated and got degrees, and of course, the winning of all those football games.
At best, this is an incredibly poorly thought out tribute that is insensitive to Sandusky’s victims, and a showing that does nothing to help the greater community move on from what should be an incredibly shameful stain on the history of the program, and on their school more generally. At worst, this seems like an attempt to obfuscate and distract, to get people to try and conveniently forget what Paterno did, or perhaps to reduce his complacent behavior in the face of Sandusky’s monstrosity as a mere footnote.
A common refrain from those Paterno apologists in the cult of Penn State is that Paterno is not the real bad guy, that he reported it up the chain just like he was supposed to, and that it’s the administrations fault for not acting. This is basically just one step removed from a “good Germans” style argument, and it holds water only with those who refuse to see the truth and want to defend the objectively immoral actions of someone they have deified. Just because you’ve reported this abuse to your higher-ups and they failed to follow up on your report does not absolve you of the moral responsibility to act, especially when you occupy the platform Paterno did at Penn State. And especially when you knew for as long as he did.
After all, the first time a kid told Paterno that Sandusky had molested him, in 1976, Paterno told the kid he didn’t have time to hear about it because he had a football season to worry about. Paterno proved repeatedly that football was more important to him than almost anything, including the well-being of children attending camps on Penn State’s campus, and that should loom larger than anything else in his legacy.
All of these Penn State fans now attempting to defend Joe Paterno, and the legacy they want the world to remember rather than the true one, are simply the good Germans of the college football world today.
Pictured: Penn State students who care more about the legacy of a dead man than the fact that he failed to protect kids from being molested [Justin K. Aller/Getty Images]
Deposed Baylor Coach Art Briles
A little ways southwest of State College, Baylor traveled to Rice University for a Thursday night football game. Baylor, as you may recall, is in the midst of a massive Title IX scandal that broke over the summer, a scandal that justifiably cost head coach Art Briles his job. It was discovered that, among other things, coaches on the Baylor staff were conducting off the record interviews with victims of alleged sexual assaults perpetrated by members of the football team, which at best is a violation of Title IX sexual assault protocol and at worst is a willful attempt to intimidate the victims of sexual assault. Baylor’s staff doesn’t even have Paterno’s flimsy good Germans defense to go on. This is squarely on them.
On top of this, Briles showed a strange willingness to accept transfer players to Baylor who had been kicked out of their schools for varying levels of sexual misconduct. It is hardly surprising that these players, when shown they could simply get away with whatever conduct they so chose with little or no consequence, re-offended when they arrived on Baylor’s campus. In one instance, transfer player Sam Ukwuachu sexually assaulted a member of the women’s soccer team with whom he shared a few classes, and the university made her change her schedule to accommodate the player who had assaulted her. Ukwuachu had been dismissed from Boise State for allegations of sexual assault while he was a member of that team, and Briles let him transfer in anyway. When asked about whether he knew about Ukwuachu’s violent past, Briles pleaded with the media to just let him “stick to football.” Frankly speaking, Briles was more concerned with winning football games than with protecting the women on Baylor’s campus from abuse at the hands of his players.
You can read more about the scandal here, but suffice to say that Art Briles likely had knowledge of what was happening in his program and did nothing to stop it.
Now Briles is on an apology tour, trying to burnish his image in the hopes of landing a coaching job somewhere in the next few years. He had an interview on ESPN’s Outside the Lines, part of which was featured on College Gameday in Week 2. He has vaguely apologized, though for what he will not specify. He will undoubtedly get a call from someone to come be their offensive coordinator, and there’s even an outside chance that he will again be a head coach someday.
There’s no reason this should be allowed to happen, no reason every Baylor fan in America shouldn’t be sounding the siren, warning other programs of what this man allowed to go on at theirs. I believe wholeheartedly in forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be consequences for your actions, and the consequence for what Briles allowed to happen should be that he never works another day as a football coach.
And yet, there are some in the Baylor community who think Briles got railroaded by an administration eager to make the scandal into less of a PR crisis than it was already becoming. Briles was in the process of turning Baylor into a powerhouse on the football field, and it was the success he had engineered that had brought a new stadium and positive attention to the small Baptist school in Waco, TX. Now much of that goodwill and positive attention has been justifiably enveloped by the ongoing scandal.
Briles attended the first half of that Rice game last week, and sat in the stands with some Baylor fans. Briles’ son wrote his father’s initials on his hands as a gesture of solidarity in a move that is reminiscent of the way Jay Paterno acted in the wake of his own father’s scandal. And former Baylor defensive end Shawn Oakman, who was indicted for sexual assault this summer stemming from an incident that occurred while playing at Baylor, also decided he would attend the game.
The Rice Band mocks Baylor’s seating section. [John Royal]
They deserve to be reminded of the lives that were shattered because those in positions of authority refused to act.
I’m on record as saying Baylor should have gotten the death penalty for what happened on their campus, and I stand by that. That fan base and that administration need to prove that they are taking positive steps to move forward and own this for what it was before anyone should give them the benefit of the doubt again.
If they’d like an example of how not to move on constructively in the wake of a horrible, man-made tragedy, all the need to do is look to Happy Valley Pennsylvania.
[Addendum: I understand and acknowledge that there are many, many fans in both of these fanbases who agree with my positions and are as frustrated with their respective university and fanbase’s response to these two tragedies. I salute those folks, and you are probably not the intended audience for this piece]
[Briles Photo Cred: http://baptistmessage.com/baylor-fires-head-football-coach-strips-ken-starr-of-presidency-in-sexual-assault-scandal/%5D
[Header Photo Cred: AP]
Nathan Is Write 