Arvia: If Joe says it ain’t so, he’s lying

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Students react off campus late Wednesday in State College, Pa., after the firing of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. | AP photo

Updated: December 14, 2011 8:17AM

Pause, please, you shallow thinkers, you contrarians, you willfully ignorant who would leap to the defense of a rich and powerful man who would not leap to the defense of a 10-year-old rape victim.

Pause to consider Joe Paterno’s world on March 2, 2002, the date Mike McQueary visited him in the morning to reveal he’d seen Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s former defensive coordinator, the night before, molesting a 10-year-old boy in a Penn State locker room.

Paterno’s choices after that meeting led to his firing Wednesday after 48 years as Penn State’s football coach. They allowed, perhaps, a deviant to continue targeting children. This led, Wednesday evening, to some of the most misguided student unrest ever witnessed.

Consider Paterno is a devoutly Catholic man — at this writing, the Catholic Student Faith Center on Penn State’s campus is named for his wife. Consider that nine days before McQueary’s visit, a Boston priest had been sentenced to 10 years in prison on sexual abuse charges stemming from accusations involving 130 children over 30 years, and that the Boston Globe was well on its way to winning a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the scandal.

Consider that, hitting newsstands five days before McQueary knocked on Paterno’s door was a Newsweek cover story titled “Sex, Shame and the Catholic Church: 80 Priests Accused of Child Abuse in Boston.”

Now try to imagine, amid that especially heightened awareness of pedophiles and cover-ups, any conversation McQueary might have had about a man behaving inappropriately in a shower with a boy that wouldn’t have sent you to the police.

I can imagine none.

If McQueary were going to tell a sanitized version of what he told a grand jury years later, why ask to meet Paterno at all?

So, no, despite indications that Paterno is positioning himself to claim otherwise, I don’t find it believable that Paterno was told something significantly less complete than the sickening details in the grand jury report. I also don’t believe that Sandusky’s 1998 conversation with State College, Pa., police about a separate shower-room incident, and his 1999 retirement at age 55 — after Paterno told him he’d not succeed the old coach — are coincidental.

Former Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys coach Barry Switzer had an interesting first take on the scandal. Though later, after his initial comments created a buzz, he conceded he had no firsthand knowledge of the situation, he first told Oklahoma’s largest daily newspaper:

“Having been in this profession a long time and knowing how close coaching staffs are, I knew that this was a secret that was kept secret. Everyone on that staff had to have known, the ones that had been around a long time.”

How many years was Paterno at Penn State? I’m guessing “a long time” covers it.

Thus, it seems logical Paterno was faced, essentially, with three options:

1) Bring the full weight of his power to bear against Sandusky to ensure another child would not be harmed.

2) Pull the CYA move and kick responsibility up the chain of command.

3) Help the university keep things quiet, avoiding Catholic church-style public embarrassment for all, JoePa included.

Clearly, Paterno did not choose option 1. This alone suggests his firing was well within the scope of fitting punishments.

If he chose option 3, and it would be naive not to consider the possibility, Paterno should be grateful he’s not in a shower somewhere, hands against the wall, looking up as a witness walks in then turns silently away.