Joe Paterno

How will he be remembered?

By: Emily Laurenzi

How will Joe Paterno be remembered, as one of the most successful college football coaches in history, or a man with a tarnished legacy?

After he had graduated from Brown University in 1950, he went to assist Rip Engle, who had previously been his coach at Brown and was now the new head coach of Penn State. He worked with Engle for fifteen years as the assistant coach, and together they led the Nittany Lions to win three out of four bowl games and had an overall record of 132-68-8.

Paterno running on the field with his team

Rip Engle decided to retire and Paterno was named head coach in 1966. His first season as head coach didn’t go as well as he had hoped. The team had a record of five wins and five losses, and he knew that he had to work harder for next season. The following season the Lions had eight wins, two losses, and advanced to the Gator Bowl where they ended up tying Florida State.

Throughout his 61 years as a coach at Penn Sate, Paterno led the team to five undefeated seasons. Said in an online report, “ he had more bowl wins than any coach in college football (including three national championships), and had risen to earn the title "the winningest active coach in college football." Paterno has also been voted coach of the year an amazing four times by the American Football Coaches Association.

While at Penn State he had been offered head coaching jobs for multiple NFL teams in which he chose to deny. He coached 78 first-team All-Americans, and "produced more than 350 players who went on to play in the NFL, 33 of whom were selected in the first round of the draft," said another online report.

Although he was an outstanding football coach, he stood for much more than that. “He [was] a tenured professor, too, and to his players he [was] like a father, more so than most coaches could even dream of being,” said one former player

Spanier and Paterno

On November 5, 2011, former assistant football coach, Jerry Sandusky, was charged with forty counts of sexual abuse on boys in a fifteen-year period. He had been arrested and released on $100,000 bail. It wasn’t long after, that on November 9^th, head coach Paterno had announced he would be retiring at the end of the season. Later in that same day the board of trustees decided to fire him with three games left in his 46^th season as a head coach.

"I am absolutely devastated by the developments in this case," Paterno said in a statement released hours before he was fired. "I grieve for the children and their families, and I pray for their comfort and relief."

Almost three months after he was dismissed from the campus and the school that he loved, he passed away from lung cancer. After he had passed away many people began to question what really killed Paterno. Was it the lung cancer or his broken heart?

Shortly after Paterno had been fired he had been diagnosed with lung cancer and about two months after being diagnosed he had passed away. However, in many minds, it was the sexual abuse scandal that led him to his death.

Toby Christie said in an online report that “stress and sadness can do a lot of mysterious things – and there was no shortage of either in the final months of the life of Joe Paterno. His life was turned upside down. His job was stripped from him, the media who had loved him for so long had crucified him, and people were unjustly turning him into a monster.”

Paterno celebrating with his team

I recently spoke with Kyle Rossi, a blogger for Penn State. I asked him what the general feeling at Penn State was about Joe Paterno. Whether they found him guilty, irresponsible, or completely set up. “This is the type of thing I'll still be arguing with people 20 years from now,” said Rossi. “I think most people in the public now feel like he was human. A human who was one of the best coaches ever, who graduated his players and won at the same time, who literally helped build the university from a small school to what it is today.”

Rossi personally doesn’t “have any issue whatsoever with how Paterno handled the situation when he was first notified in 2002.” Paterno did what he was supposed to do, he notified people in higher positions. “I've talked to several teachers about this whole thing, and every one of them has told me the same thing, that if they suspected sexual abuse involving a student and went straight to the police, they could be fired,” said Rossi. “They only had the ability to go to their boss, the school president, who would then call the police.” Which, according to Rossi, is exactly what Paterno did.