After interviews, the penalty the fans are maddest about is

[malthaussen]

60. Seems to me, taking away those wins acknowledges that football is super-important

I think it is a strange penalty to attach, but the man's dead, not much that can be done to him.

I think it would be a mistake, though, to bury him and his legacy like Stalin editing photographs of Kremlin meetings with guys he later liquidated. Mr Paterno should not be forgotten: he should be held up as a shining example of the failure of moral courage and the wrong way to deal with criminal assault.

Penn State should be forced to introduce a course in "Institutional Failure and the Moral Bankruptcy of the Cover-Your-Ass Strategy," and I'd be happy to teach it. In fact, I think all of our institutions of higher learning should be compelled to teach such a course.

There's a tendency in this disgrace to concentrate on the individuals, as though their conduct were aberrational and not a reflection of a systemic failure in our culture's glorification of the institution. I have no idea if Mr Paterno was a rotten megalomaniacal tyrant or not, and don't really much care, since I suspect that just about any person who was capable of reaching the position he did would have acted in the same way under the circumstances. If we push the idea that Mr Paterno and the gutless administrators of PSU were just an example of rotten apples in the barrel, then we can ignore the barrel and continue business as usual until the next scandal comes down the pike. Frankly, I'm quite certain that is exactly what is going to happen.

-- Mal