Yes It Gets Worse

He's absolutely devastated, but hey, we've got a game Saturday and we need to finish the season with dignity. Apparently dignity is a concept Joe Paterno can only apply to football, since he doesn't understand the meaning of the word in terms of responsibility to other people, especially young children who are unlucky enough to meet his pal here.

These comments reveal a man totally focused on HIMSELF, without any regard for anyone else who might not be completely consumed by Penn State football. It's great that he doesn't want the trustees to focus on his status, and he is graciously going to bow out when he's good and ready at the end of this season.

Maybe he doesn't want the trustees to spend a minute discussing his status because if they do, they will fire his ass. I'm not sure why any discussion of Paterno's status would even require a full minute. How does he still have a job? The trustees should fire themselves right after they fire Paterno, and then they should throw themselves under a train. If he gets to walk out on that field and coach Saturday, it will be yet another sign that the end is near, and as we move towards our inevitable apocalyptic destruction we will all be witness to the evaporation of even the pretense of morality as the human race proves it is fit only to serve as food for the walking dead.

Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach who preached success with honor for half a century but whose legend was shattered by a child sex abuse scandal, said Wednesday he will retire at the end of this season.

Paterno said he was “absolutely devastated” by the case, in which his onetime heir apparent, Jerry Sandusky, has been charged with molesting eight boys in 15 years, including at the Penn State football complex.

He said he hoped the team could finish its season with “dignity and determination.”

The school’s board of trustees could still force Paterno to leave immediately. It also could take action against the university president, Graham Spanier.

Paterno said the trustees, who had been considering his fate, should “not spend a single minute discussing my status” and have more important matters to address.

The 84-year-old Paterno has been engulfed by outrage that he did not take more action after a graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, came to him in 2002 and reported seeing Sandusky in the Penn State showers with a 10-year-old boy. Paterno notified the athletic director, Tim Curley, and a vice president, Gary Schultz.

Curley and Schultz have since been charged with failing to report the incident to the authorities. Paterno hasn’t been accused of legal wrongdoing. But he has been assailed, in what the state police commissioner called a lapse of “moral responsibility,” for not doing more to stop Sandusky.

“This is a tragedy,” Paterno said in a statement. “It is one of the great sorrows of my life. With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”

[Associated Press]