Last week, as the new college football season was getting close to truly starting, the usual stories of renewal and looking forward to the coming season were coming being published. This AP story on Penn State trying to go forward, for instance.

“I think that is the ultimate challenge here,” Penn State coach James Franklin told The Associated Press. “How do you balance the history, the traditions, all the wonderful things that are deep rooted here and have been here forever, (while) also making moves that you need to be progressive and to be moving towards a healthy present and a healthy future.”

Oh, how Franklin wants to move on. So many do at Penn State.

But…

“I think Penn State needs to embrace Joe Paterno for who he was, for what he did at Penn State, unequivocally and without hesitation,” said Anthony Lubrano, a Penn State alum and elected member of the board of trustees.

Lubrano said the university at minimum needs to apologize to Paterno’s wife, Sue, display the statue again and rename the stadium Paterno Field at Beaver Stadium.

I love that this is the minimum that should be done, per the JoeBot faction. Not simply complete and utter whiteout whitewashing of what happened, but re-elevating Paterno to godhead status. I wonder if this is how the South came to be so filled with all those statues and monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders that left out the whole slavery part.

The article even notes this.

The 50th anniversary of Paterno’s first game as Penn State coach is Sept. 17, when the Nittany Lions host Temple. There is a celebration in the works and a dinner being planned for family members, friends and former players in the State College area the night before the game. No event is scheduled yet to acknowledge the anniversary at Beaver Stadium.

Two days later…

Penn State didn’t exactly flaunt the decision to honor the 50th anniversary. In fact, they tried to casually slip it into an updated press release on events for all the games. In between having a stripe out for Temple and honoring THON.

Still, there was no avoiding it.

https://t.co/rVET9Oe8Sz pic.twitter.com/Q5kdQ2PQQe

— Jamie (@mmmmsnouts) September 1, 2016

Penn State couldn’t let Paterno stay in the past. Whether it is because the wingnut faction was just too loud or otherwise.

Who is to blame is probably a multi-faceted answer. It certainly isn’t James Franklin who not 24 hours prior to the announcement talked to the media about not looking into the past and focusing on the future and the present. If anyone wants to get out from underneath the shadow of the entire scandal, it’s the man tasked with moving away from it.

Really though this comes back to the loud and the restless. It’s how Donald Trump has made it this far — it’s an angry fringe holding common sense hostage for the sake of some slice of an unimportant pie. It’s otherwise intelligent people caving to the demands of the most passionate because peace is better than war even at the cost of logic.

Penn State almost undoubtedly was never going to honor Paterno on its own, let alone randomly in the dead of a season years after the fact without some motivation. That niche has never faltered and to their credit they’re finally getting what they wanted. They’ve burned down the house in the process, but they’re finally getting it.

Which leaves Penn State in a lose/lose situation. The next two weeks will have more headlines about Paterno than you can count. There will be debates online and off. There will be all the angry arguments that have come and gone time and time again for the past several years. All for the sake of making a subset happy.

So Penn State can go ahead with things, take the PR hit, take the self-punch and finally (maybe) silence a group of fans that have short-circuited an otherwise well-functioning town for the sake of a man whose legacy is dubious at best. Especially true if some statue gets carted out on to the field, however unlikely.

Or Penn State can back off its plans. Releasing limited details means that you can’t see the retreat as it happens, and it means that whatever happens will have always been the plan. But too small of an act and it will look like Penn State faltered under the “media pressure” and in turn the unhappy will remain that way.

It’s amazing that at least on this matter, I feel some measure of sympathy for PSU Coach Franklin who has to tread lightly on something you know he didn’t want to deal.

“That’s something that I think is a decision that our administration makes.”

It does say something that the students now at PSU are about sick of all things Paterno.

But in light of these past years — even these past few weeks — this is in no way the right time or manner to “commemorate” him, if he even deserves to be so.

Currently, the undergraduate students at Penn State do not know what it is like to see the “legendary” coach jog onto the field with our boys in blue and white. We do not have the opportunity to bump into him in Pattee Library and exchange a few kind words.

Currently, the only associations these classes of students have with Paterno is reading and hearing his name tied with Jerry Sandusky’s and lawsuits or coming from the mouths of Penn State alumni who can’t accept that their time here is no longer.

This is our Penn State. It is a Penn State without Joe Paterno. It is a Penn State that is still trying to rebuild, make amends and propel forward.

Those of us here now are beyond ready to move on.

Oh, as you can imagine, that did not go over well with the alumni.

2016 has been the worst year for the Paterno faction since 2011. They had been getting their way with a lot of stuff. Insulated and inoculated from all other sane viewpoints, they were winning their skirmishes.

Then came all the release of information from Penn State’s lawsuit with their insurer over insurance money from the child molestation settlements. And, oh my god. It went back to the 70s and with a fair amount of awareness from the university.

But they also covered:

• Improper sexual contact between Sandusky and a minor in 1987 that was witnessed by then-assistant coach Joe Sarra. Sarra died in July 2012.
• Improper sexual contact between Sandusky and a child in 1988 that was witnessed by then-assistant coach Kevin O’Dea. O’Dea last coached as the special team coach for the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Williams also identified three cases where significant reports were made, including:

• A 1976 incident where an alleged victim made a report to then-head football coach Joe Paterno.

• A report by an alleged victim that was referred to then-Penn State Athletic Director Jim Tarman in 1988.

• The 1998 report that the mother of a boy filed with Penn State’s university police department, was investigated, and later dropped with no charges filed by the Centre County district attorney’s office. Like the 2001 incident, Sandusky’s criminal case had previously established that this incident was known to several of Penn State’s highest-ranking administrators.

So, so much evil and so little done.

The insurance trial also implicated former assistants like Greg Schiano and Tom Bradley with knowledge of Sandusky’s actions — though both of them, like everyone else around Penn State denies such knowledge.

When the damning news came out, PSU’s president Eric Barron issues statements bemoaning how this “serves to drive a wedge within the Penn State community.”  Because that is the important thing from all of this horrid, sordid and disgusting information.

And nothing has really changed at PSU. Their gymnastics and hockey program has been roiled by accusations of abuse and bullying by the coaches. While claiming to take these charges seriously, their AD actually had the temerity to complain that the students should not have gone public with their issues.

But Barbour wishes the concerns were handled internally, and said public conversation will not impact how the athletic department handles the situations “one iota.”

“That we have concerns in two programs, and that we have student-athletes who feel their experience has been less than satisfying to say the least is very concerning to me,” Barbour noted. “But playing it out in public is frankly unfortunate.”

Even as she was forced to acknowledge that the students went public because they didn’t have any faith in the internal processes (i.e., they would be ignored or swept under the rug) and the very recent history. It’s just…  Wow.

Far more important things for the AD to be concerned over, like t-shirts that say “Joe Knew.”

In the end, Penn State will remain in their fevered, delusional state regarding Paterno. As much because the most insane and fanatical JoeBots will keep fanning the flames of Paterno as Penn State.  Forcing even those who would like to move on from it, or are perhaps capable of acknowledging (quietly, and mostly to themselves) that Paterno probably knew more than he ever admitted, to side with them rather than publicly fight them and finish the matter.