Lehigh Football Nation

This weekend, HBO premiered the movie Paterno , a fictional representation of the two weeks covering the span of time between Joe Paterno ’s 409th career game and his lung cancer diagnosis. I watched the movie, curious to see how Barry Levinson would portray the events, and how Al Pacino and a litany of really great actors would put the whole thing together. The movie had a Shakespearean quality to it, trying to make an interesting case study of Joe Paterno and an examination of two fateful weeks.  Like many movies, it took actual events, and the writers formed a narrative around it - much like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar wasn't based on the actual conversations between Marcus Brutus and Cassius. Predictably, in their response to the movie , the Paterno family chose to attack the movie’s credibility. "The HBO movie regarding Joe Paterno is a fictionalized portrayal of the tragic events surrounding Jerry Sandusky's crimes. Numerous scenes, events and dialogue...

Spoiler Alert:  I don't know Barry Levinson . Also, I am not close personal friends with Al Pacino . But I have been fascinated by the recent announcement that Levinson will be directing, and Pacino will be starring, in an HBO movie  about Penn State, tentatively called "Happy Valley" . The official logline for the film reads: “After becoming the winningest coach in college football history, Joe Paterno is embroiled in Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal, challenging his legacy and forcing him to face questions of institutional failure on behalf of the victims.” I don't know Levinson, or Pacino, and I know there's already three pro writers on this project already whom I also don't know personally (for the record,  Debora Cahn ( Grey's Anatomy ) , John C. Richards ( Nurse Betty ), and David McKenna ( American History X )).  I also know that it's based on the book by Joe Posanski (called Paterno , released shortly after the S...

Finally, I hoped, some justice would prevail. It had been 19 years since the then-President of Penn State, Graham Spanier , had emails hit his inbox that Gerald Sandusky was being investigated about an incident involving Sandusky and a child in the showers in Penn State's Lasch building. Recently, Spanier had opted for a public trial in an effort to prove his innocence, but a former Penn State athletic director, Tim Curley , and former Penn State legal counsel, Gary Schultz , had pleaded guilty for the lesser charge against them - endangering the welfare of children - to avoid that spectacle. Spanier chose instead to fight his way in court that he was innocent - that the reams of information unearthed by Louis Freeh 's report were wrong about his involvement with Sandusky's crimes. Late on Friday afternoon, on a day of many other news events and distractions, the verdict was in: Spanier was found guilty of the same crimes for which Curley and Schultz pleaded guil...

In the news last week came, essentially, four new claims of abuse that happened at the hands of Gerald Sandusky while he employed as a linebackers coach at Penn State. All are, at a bare minimum, troubling, and they invite the question "who knew what, and when" in terms of these allegations. Three of the allegations, however, are worthy of further examination because they could demonstrate that the administrators at the time, which would include former athletic directors Ed Czekaj and Jim Tarman , violated the law. It also could eventually - though nothing has surfaced yet - implicate Joe Paterno . With the very important caveat being we don't know everything, we do seem to have enough to bring some context to the goings-on inside Penn State's athletic department during the last 40 years.  The only clear fact was that child sex allegations weren't handled with the respect they deserved.

The crimes committed by Gerald Sandusky continue to be a band-aid that is re-applied, and continuously ripped off, the arms of those of love Penn State. Already convicted by a court of law, Sandusky has what is effectively a life sentence, while others who were in power at Penn State during the 1998 period where sex crimes were reported internally, Graham Spanier, Gary Schulz and Tim Curley , have still not faced any sort of trial and are still at-large today . Last week, with an interesting sentence appearing deep in an insurance lawsuit involving a Sandusky victim settlement, the band-aid was once again ripped off. The details of the lawsuit claim that Joe Paterno  chose not to act in 1976 when one victim reported abuse by Sandusky, while Sarah Ganim , the hero reporter who broke the Sandusky story wide-open five years ago, added a second story of abuse in the 1970s where Paterno pressured one of Sandusky's victims over the phone in the 1971 to not press charges agai...

New Penn State President Eric Barron (Nabil K. Mark, AP)/Morning Call Penn State president Eric Barron certainly made an impression yesterday. A few months ago, Barron said  he would review the Freeh report, the one requested by Penn State's board of Trustees in the wake of the revelations against Gerald Sandusky and was used by the NCAA as a justification for unprecedented sanctions against the university. Evidently, his report is in . Today, he said that the Freeh report "very clearly paints a picture about every student, every faculty member, every staff member and every alum. And it's absurd. It's unwarranted. So from my viewpoint, the Freeh Report is not useful to make decisions." His tone deaf comments continued. "Unfortunately, there are a lot of shoes that have to drop. You could argue that public opinion has found us guilty before the criminal trials," he said. "There's no doubt in my mind what was completely and totall...

(Photo Credit: Michael Conroy/AP via the New York TImes) In the end, it stopped short of the "death penalty", but in ways, it was tougher than the penalties the NCAA delivered to SMU football back in the 1980s. In NCAA commissioner Mark Emmert 's 9AM press conference this morning, he stopped short of forcing the disbanding of the Nittany Lion football program for a period of years, thanks to the Freeh report which concluded that key people in the football program, at a bare minimum, covered up strong accusations of child rape. He instead imposed a web of different punishments on Penn State in order to make an example of their program, however, which was unquestionably the correct course of action for the NCAA.

(Photo respectfully taken from CrossingBroad and @jon_wertheim) To say Joe Paterno was a college football legend - the word "legend" just doesn't seem legendary enough to describe the man who had coached at Penn State for 46 years in Happy Valley. I have been to Happy Valley to see "big-time" college football at Beaver stadium. I have seen up close the near cult-like behavior Penn Staters had for the guy they called JoePa - a personality cult that seemed goofy and a little harmless. But I don't think it's goofy or harmless anymore. The resignation of a leading Penn State fundraiser, the athletic director, and even the president of Penn State evoked sadness, outrage, and a call for justice.  But when the Penn State board of trustees fired the coach that had been given God-like powers, it set forces in motion that are as frightening as they are sickening.