Sorry to have to do this on a Friday morning when you are looking forward to the weekend but it never ends with these guys, does it?

Like the non-believers in the OJ Simpson case and Holocaust deniers,  the only people who believe in Paterno’s innocence is a constricting circle whose members may be less in number every year but become more crazy at every issuance of more damning evidence. Sadly today that might not be the most troubling news out of Happy Valley.

The Penn Live newspaper’s website has a ‘bombshell’ (!!) story on the fact that newly released court papers show that Joe Paterno was told, by a young boy in a face to face conversation, that the boy had been abused by Jerry Sandusky…  back in 1976.  This came to light of day because of an ongoing court battle between the insurance company that covered PSU’s liability issues (We ain’t paying you jack shit!”) and PSU.

“The civil case is, initially filed in November 2013, is still grinding toward trial in Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas.

And in preliminary work on that case, Judge Gary Glazer this week filed a ruling that attempted to clear the decks of some of the issues that could be resolved based on the pleadings to date.

What was unexpected Thursday, was Glazer’s reference to four cases between 1976 and 1988 in which PMA Insurance attorneys have presented allegations that “PSU agents allegedly learned of Sandusky’s abusive acts.”

One of the PMA allegations was that “in 1976, a child allegedly reported to PSU’s Head Football Coach Joseph Paterno that he (the child) was sexually molested by Sandusky.”

Well, in Paterno’s defense he was completely  occupied in figuring out how to keep Pitt from winning the first national championship between the two schools that year.  Too bad!  It isn’t like we hadn’t heard these allegations before.  I wrote on here back in 2011 that there were running jokes around State College for years was about Sandusky’s proclivities.  It was the worst kept secret possible.

The last sentence of the article reads… “Paterno, who died in January 2012, was never charged by state prosecutors.” Of course it does, as if that lessens any of Paterno’s moral, ethical and human sickness in pursuit of his “Grand Experiment”.  The only thing that separates him from that German  guy back in the day is that Paterno never wrote his memoirs from prison – which by any measure of human decency he should have.

Actually and more troubling to me beat it doesn’t beat a dead horse is this story out of PSU that details the crap the school and the athletic department still visits onto the innocent.  Eight female gymnasts just quit the team at PSU because the coaches took a page out of the “The Paterno Approach to Coaching Student/Athletes and How To Win At All Costs” playbook.

Get a load of this:

“Kristin Blades said she’d never thought about suicide, so she couldn’t fathom the question.

Three years ago in a one-on-one meeting with a coach, the Penn State gymnast said she was pressed for details about her boyfriend. According to Blades, associate head coach Rachelle Thompson threatened to pull her scholarship if she didn’t end the relationship.

“Then she looked at me and asked, ‘If you weren’t with him, would you think about killing yourself?'” Blades said in a phone interview with PennLive this week. The question, Blades said, sent a chill through her spine.

The gymnast said she rushed out of Thompson’s office to call her boyfriend and parents. She said Thompson continued to pressure her for weeks. Blades said she began to lose touch with friends, stopped eating regularly and told teammates she felt helpless.

She wasn’t alone.”

This spung from two April 18th articles in the PSU Student Newspaper The Daily Collegian.  I have to say that I give all the respect in the world to the authors of those pieces, students Morganne Mallon and Erin McCarthy, for producing something that you just know other students are going to drag them through the wringer for writing.

“Today, there are no seniors listed on the Penn State women’s gymnastics roster. All eight women in the 2012 freshman class, including Farley, quit or were released before their senior year, said Alyssa DiFrancesco. She was a member of that class too, and walked away from the team as a sophomore.

“We were always told, ‘You guys are just pieces in a business deal, you’re replaceable,’ ” DiFrancesco said. “ ‘We can replace you any minute if you don’t give us what we need or what your team needs.’ If you hear that enough, you’re going to think, ‘They don’t need me.’ 

Farley, now a senior, said she was thrilled to be on the gymnastics team at Penn State, which had been her dream school for 18 years. “I came here with crazy high expectations and hopes, wanting to work hard, be happy and healthy,” Farley said. “I left that gym in December broken and absolutely destroyed.”

Before anyone thinks these are just a bunch of hormonal and entitled wussie girls doing this take a look at this and re-evaluate that thought. The assistant women’s coach, with a full and sterling resume’ of her own, came to PSU, took a good look at the reality of the situation and said this:

Samantha Brown, who was hired as an assistant women’s gymnastics coach in July, was terminated on Jan. 11 for failure to return to work, according to her statement.

“Sadly, this brings an unexpected end to my coaching duties at Penn State University. The reason behind all of this is that the Head and Associate Head Coaches created an environment that made it impossible for me to continue to work, and the university failed to properly address my concerns and the concerns I had for the student athletes,” she wrote in a statement on Jan. 16. “I explained that I was very uncomfortable with returning to the gym, but I was not going to quit.”

Brown has more than 30 years of gymnastics experience, competing, coaching and judging at high levels. Brown competed as a member of the USA National Team as a teenager and became an NCAA All-American and a two-time NCAA national champion at the University of Georgia.”

PSU fanatics can try to rationalize this away, as they do with everything that touches negatively on PSU’s reputation, but really – big and systematically bad things happen with the school’s administration there and both of these stories just proves it more and more.

I can’t remember anything or the sort happening at Pitt in my 60 years of life nor hearing of something like this from my parents and grandparents who were Pitt Alumni.  It just doesn’t happen at 99.9% of the universities in the United States.

I’m throwing my personal two cents in again with this as I tend to do.  What the girls had to succumb to, complained about and eventually protested in the most stringent manner against is not political correctness run amok or ‘the kids these days need to toughen up’ or that ‘It was better in the old days when coaches could abuse at will to make sure they win during the games’, blah, blah, blah….  That doesn’t fly now and shouldn’t have then.

You can’t look at the Paterno/Sandusky situation and the actions they, and the university’s administration, took and say that it was dead wrong and then turn around and look at these gymnasts’ situation and feel a different way about it.   They are both wrong and went over the distinct line of coaches pushing for excellence by the student athletes to demanding that things happen 100% the supposed role model’s way to satisfy the coaches’ outsized and dangerous egos.

It just doesn’t have to be done in that manner to get results… unless the only results the coaches care about are wins and losses. In that case the university administration’s mandate is to insure there is balance in the setting of goals and the striving to meet them that includes the student/athlete’s best interests also.

There is never a situation where the student needs to be told “You guys are just pieces in a business deal, you’re replaceable… We can replace you any minute if you don’t give us what we need or what your team needs.”

There are 100 different ways a good leader gets that same point across – less the totally unneeded reference to being ‘pieces in a business deal‘ – to get the best result and have it come from, and make a lasting positive change to, the student themselves.  These coaches, Paterno and the Thompsons, decided to take the easy way out and it came back to bite them in the ass.

Had they really wanted to succeed and do it the right way they would have done the hard things in life. The first of which is looking in the mirror and asking yourself in a truthful as possible manner “Am I doing this for them or for myself?“.

If the answer is the latter and you can live with that then God help you, you are in exactly the wrong business.  Being a teacher, counselor, coach and role model isn’t an simple or easy task.  It demands subjugating your own ego to do your best to build your charges into being the best they can be – not that you fantasize you can be.

I learned this in a hard and fast way early on in my adulthood and, even though I resented it at first, soon took that hard look at myself and turned my attitude around  to do the right thing for the other guy as my first and foremost task as a leader… as long as it served the mission (in this case the team’s competitions) at hand.

It served me well but more importantly I had a chance to watch those others grow into the best they could be also.

Something that the Thompsons and Paterno never really considered in the long run.  They got stars in their eyes and, especially in Paterno’s case, in doing so ruined some lives of those around them.

It also seems to me like nothing good ever comes from having husband and wife coaching teams.  Maybe it is the close proximity of the two people 24 hours and day living in total immersion in what should be a fun and rewarding exercise for all involved.  But it seems to throw a third personality into the mix – that of ‘Mr. and Mrs. Headcoach‘ that just expands the need to satisfy that now triple ego at all costs.

It begins to define who they are in tandem rather than when only one of the pair – who many times would act as a neutral sounding board and realism advisor – would remain removed and act as a counterbalance.

The sad thing about all this is that it will be rationalized, justified falsely and forgotten as soon as a PSU football team wins another game.  Ironically, or purposefully actually, the next article in line after the court paper release news was “After Sandusky: Penn State’s Comeback after November 2011″.

Of course…