Legendary coach Joe Paterno to retire at end of season

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has decided to retire at the end of the season, according to a person familiar with the decision.

Paterno will announce his retirement later Wednesday. The Associated Press reported on Paterno's pending retirement, which has been confirmed by ESPN sources.

Sources have told ESPN that Paterno is planning to coach the 12th-ranked Nittany Lions in Saturday's home game -- their last home game of this season -- against No. 19 Nebraska.

Paterno has been besieged by criticism since former defensive coordinator and one-time heir apparent Jerry Sandusky was charged over the weekend with molesting eight young boys between 1994 and 2009. Athletic director Tim Curley and vice president Gary Schultz have been charged with failing to notify authorities after an eyewitness reported a 2002 assault.

Paterno decided to retire at age 84, in the middle of his 46th season with the Nittany Lions. He won 409 games, a record for major college football, but now, the grandfatherly coach known as "Joe Pa," who had painstakingly burnished a reputation for winning "the right way," leaves the only school he's ever coached in disgrace.

Paterno has not been accused of legal wrongdoing. But he has been assailed, in what the state police commissioner called a lapse of "moral responsibility," for not doing more to stop Sandusky.

He has been questioned over his apparent failure to follow up on a report of the 2002 incident, in which Sandusky allegedly sodomized a 10-year-old boy in the showers at the team's football complex. A witness, Mike McQueary, is currently receivers coach for the team but was a graduate assistant at the time.

Paterno told the athletic director, Tim Curley, who has since stepped down and is charged with lying to the state grand jury investigating the case. Gary Schultz, the Penn State vice president who also been charged with perjury, and the university president could follow.

But in the place known as Happy Valley, none held the same status as Paterno. And in the end, he could not withstand the backlash from a scandal that goes well beyond the everyday stories of corruption in college sports.

"If this is true we were all fooled, along with scores of professionals trained in such things, and we grieve for the victims and their families," Paterno said Sunday, after the news broke, in a prepared statement. "They are in our prayers."

The coach defended his decision to take the news to his athletic director. Paterno said it was obvious that the graduate student was "distraught," but said the graduate student did not tell him about the "very specific actions" in the grand jury report.

After Paterno reported the incident to Curley, Sandusky was told to stay away from the school, but critics say the coach should have done more -- tried to identify and help the alleged victim, for example, or alerted authorities.

"Here we are again," John Salveson, former president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said in an interview earlier this week. "When an institution discovers abuse of a kid, their first reaction was to protect the reputation of the institution and the perpetrator."

Paterno's requirement that his players not just achieve success but adhere to a moral code, that they win with honor, transcended his sport. Mike Krzyzewski, the Duke basketball coach, said in June for an ESPN special on Paterno: "Values are never compromised. That's the bottom line."

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nolafan33 said:

I find it ironic that people are criticizing Paterno for doing exactly what those same people said Jim Tressel should have done. Could Joe Pa have done more? Sure, but he did what he was required to do.

It seems like people are forgetting who the bad guy is. You don't ever here about Sandusky, it's always about Coach Paterno.

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Yankees2772 said:

It sucks he has to go out this way.

Ever since I started following Penn State, and ultimately when I enrolled here, I've wanted him to leave. He is too old to make an impact and it's been long overdue for someone to take over as head coach.

But I did not want him to go out this way.

He did not witness anything in the shower, he was told by a grad assistant that Sandusky and a kid were 'horsing around' in the bathroom.

If you are friends with a guy for 30 years, co-workers... Do you automatically call the police in this situation? He did not witness anything himself. Sandusky has been in Paterno's house countless times, and vice-versa. They were like family. Don't you think that he'd give him the benefit of the doubt especially since he had not seen anything himself? He told his superior exactly what he was told happened, because that was his obligation.

And ESPN, tmz, and every other fucking media source is asking for his head? He did not do anything wrong. In hindsight, should he have called the police? Perhaps. Of course everyone is going to go apeshit because you have to protect the kids in the community and I cannot agree more. There is no crime more heinous than what Sandusky is accused of doing in my book... But Paterno has had no affiliation with this beyond being told that Sandusky was horsing around with a kid.

Are you really going to throw this great man's reputation away because of this?

Paterno has done so much for the community, for the school, for the football program, and for every single student and student athlete who has come through Penn State... And that is all being thrown away over an awful crime... that he had no direct connection to.

It is a damn fucking shame that Paterno has to be associated with this for the rest of his life, and that his career is going to be tainted for something this stupid.

And I'm going to go out and say what everyone is thinking about but doesn't want to say;
'
I want to see how everyone approaches this subject when he inevitably dies.

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elcheato said:

But McQueary keeps his job as WR coach, which is a shame..

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