There is a lot at stake here than football. That's why as a PSU alum, I can care less about the football program.
For a variety of reasons, I think this is more about CYA and lawyers and costs/benefits than it is about football.
Here are the first 2 reasons:
1. Sandusky was reported to police and child welfare in 1998 by a PSU Veep. This was while he was still coach.
2. When the Sandusky pedophile story first broke in February of 2011, the fact that he had committed rape at Clinton Cty HS, it never made the national news. I think the media is focusing on the PSU cover-up. If it were only about Sandusky's crimes, I don't think people would be that interested. After all, no one picked up the story of Sandusky's crimes in February of 2011, and the story of what he did in Clinton Cty is just as sick and deplorable as what he did in 2001.
Of course, there's no way to know how it would have gone in 2001. Just because the media took no interest in Sandusky's crimes in early 2011 does not mean it would not have taken interest in 2001.
Here are some other factors that haven't been reported much in the media.
Because of the Freeh leaks, everyone is pretty certain that Paterno overturned the planned strategy to turn Sandusky over to the authorities. Yet, if you read the exhibits at the end of the Freeh report, you will see that just two days after the rape, the President and VP wrote a handwritten memo in which the strategy was already in place. It even said, "Unless Sandusky confesses, they will report him." But first they would confront Sandusky. The leaks skew this timeline and put the onus on Paterno. The memo was written on 2/12/01 whereas the Curley/Paterno meeting happened on 2/26/01. The chief perpetrators, Paterno and Spanier, were already in agreement fully two weeks before. And this was after talking to university lawyers who also seem to have been in on the cover-up.
Why is this important?
First, Spanier covered up other child abuse cases against professors. This shows that the CYA mode he was in was more about liabilities (as he wrote in an email). This was his modus operandi even when it didn't involve football.
Second, if you get into BOT politics, it's even worse since there is a close group of people in the center that freeze out all other (elected) BOT members, and those at the center are political appointees. Sharp knives are out. Faculty are rightly concerned that there will be a new power play now putting decision-making in the hands of the BOT, and you will see scandals of the sort we recently saw at U. Illinois and U. Virginia, where political appointees try to take over the curriculum and end programs in favor of their own pet projects.
Not to mention the fact that the governor (Corbett) had been locking heads with Spanier in a power play over control of PSU before the Sandusky story broke.
I don't want to get into conspiracies but I do admit that in the back of my mind, the timing of Corbett ramping up the investigation into Sandusky (remember, Corbett was the prosecutorial bigwig in Centre County at the time of Sandusky's abuses, and he waited 2 full years after the Clinton County revelations in 2008 to put more than a single assistant--a newbie--on the case) coincided precisely with his battles with Spanier over control of both funding for PSU and the PSU branch campus system. Spanier has been totally emasculated. BUT, he still has his job. Corbett hasn't prosecuted him. The BOT, which now takes directions from Corbett, hasn't fired his former enemy Spanier. Sometimes it's better to keep your enemies close.
There's more to this story.
I know why most sports fans are focusing on the football side. I get it. I'm in favor of the death penalty for football too. But there is a much bigger side to this than football, and it's about the liabilities that administrations weigh when there are accusations, and it's also about educatin and state politics and business. Football is a sideshow. So yes, give it the DP, but the real game is being played elsewhere. There have been cover-ups of child abuse scandals recently at U. Michigan Medical school and cover-ups of murders at E. Michigan University, a child sex abuse scandal at Syracuse that also has elements of cover-up. These things are happening both inside and outside of sports, and the common thing is an interest in not being sued.
